Angela M. Catanzaro, ACE, has been an assistant editor and an editor for 20 years. Her work as an editor includes the TV series Friday Night Lights, Parenthood, Suits, The Man in the High Castle and the pilot for Code Black. Her previous feature work includes editing The Foreigner.

Our discussion here centers around her editing of the fantastic film Five Feet Apart, which just opened in theaters around the country. I hope you’ll go see it. I loved it.

(This interview was transcribed with SpeedScriber. Thanks to Martin Baker at Digital Heaven)

HULLFISH: Where are you in the process of cutting Five Feet Apart? (We recorded this interview mid-January of 2019.)

CATANZARO: We just finished our final mix, but we still have a lot of outstanding VFX. I say “a lot” but it’s probably in the neighborhood of 15. Then we have to finish our color and generate the other versions required for delivery. I imagine this will be wrapped up in the next couple of weeks. Then I am taking a break to travel and will be cutting a TV pilot in March.

HULLFISH: That’s awesome. Tell me a little bit about this director. You haven’t worked with him before right?

CATANZARO: No. This was the first time, and it is Justin’s first feature. When you hear that you’re working with a new director, you’re always a little nervous. But it’s been fantastic. I got hooked up with him through Cathy Schulman who was a producer on The Foreigner. We had a great time working on that film, and she’s executive producing this film as well. She called me one day, and I oddly remember that I was in my car on the way to a tax appointment. She told me about the project, and I thought it would be perfect for me because I’ve done a lot of — “touchie-feelie” is the wrong word — but a lot of television that requires an emotional investment.

The only other theatrical feature I’ve cut was The Foreigner, and while there were very character-driven scenes and delicate moments, it was an action-thriller rather than a tug-at-your-heartstrings film. I’ve cut two other non-theatrical features: one was a horror movie and the other was another action movie. I do love those. In fact, action is probably my favorite thing to cut day-to-day, though overall I don’t find it quite as fulfilling as something like this film.

Five Feet Apart was an amazing opportunity for me to take all that I’ve learned working with Jason Katims on very raw and intimate shows like Friday Night Lights and Parenthood and apply it to a film. And as with those shows, music is a huge part of this film, too. That’s very exciting for me. If a producer says they want music to be a big part of the production, immediate bonus points! Just after I talked to Justin the first time, he sent me a playlist. I thought that was pretty cool. And in speaking to him, I realized that he is the real deal. He’s very creative and very driven, but he’s really kind. He has a huge heart, and he’s all about giving back. This project is very special to him.

The main character of this film was inspired by a young woman named Claire Wineland. She had cystic fibrosis and was awaiting a double lung transplant. She finally made it off the transplant list, but tragically she passed in September shortly after the surgery due to complications. Justin has a company called Wayfarer Entertainment, and they produced a documentary series called My Last Days. In each episode, you meet a person who is dying and they talk not only about their disease and their struggles, but also what inspires them and what keeps them going. It’s a really beautiful series. One of those episodes was devoted to Claire. Justin met her, fell in love with her, and decided he wanted to tell a story with a character based on her. So Justin brought on two writers, and they turned out this beautiful script. CBS Films decided they wanted to produce it, Justin was on board to direct, and here we are. It’s obviously very special to him because of Claire. She was a consultant on the film, and it’s really a shame that she’s not here to see it. We all feel like, in some way, Claire’s just been guiding us.

HULLFISH: Do you feel like you have to steward that story more because it’s based on a real person? Did that influence your editing or your thought process?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI4u2tTvjgU

CATANZARO: Yes, very much so. Claire Wineland is a YouTube celebrity and has a huge following. She was very open about her illness, and I would say one of her primary missions was to educate people about cystic fibrosis. But she also very much encouraged people to truly live life and find joy despite challenges. She gave an incredible TED talk, too. So because of her presence on social media, I was able to see and hear how she speaks and reacts and just observe her general attitude. In this movie, there is a fair amount of ad-libbing, so I always tried to look for the performances that I felt were most Claire-like. While the movie wasn’t about Claire specifically, we felt like the closer we could keep the main character to Claire, the better off we would be. Haley Lu Richardson did an incredible job, so she made it easy for me. And yes, we also had to be very mindful of technical things related to CF protocol and treatment. Justin wanted to be very sure that at all times we were being accurate and respectful to the CF community. And already we’ve had many CFers say they’ve never seen their story told so accurately. We hope this really shines a light on cystic fibrosis for the general public.

HULLFISH: You mentioned how much of the film was ad-libbed. What kind of difficulties does that pose for you as an editor to deal with ad-libbed lines?

CATANZARO: Well, fortunately (or unfortunately) for me, I have a ton of experience with that kind of content because I worked on Friday Night Lights. So I learned early on how to deal with that type of footage. This project was actually very similar to Friday Night Lights in that a lot of times they wouldn’t cut camera. There would be six, seven, eight, nine, ten resets within a take and sometimes multiple setups within a take, and you just kind of roll with it. It’s infuriating, initially, when you get those kinds of dailies. I don’t think any editor enjoys getting footage delivered that way, but it is manageable, and it seems to be the norm now.

When I’m watching dailies, I pull selects — little bits and pieces that stand out to me the very first time I watch everything — and then I work from that. I really try to rely on my first instinct that these bits are the strongest performances, and then I only go back into the footage when we’re doing notes or if I need a connecting piece. Maybe I’ve pulled two of this line or built a section of a scene two ways, but I don’t have THIS one particular line of dialogue. So I’ll have to go back and look for that. If you’ve got a scene with six or seven hours of footage, I really don’t know any other way to do it.

In truth, we didn’t have many scenes that were that length, but there’s one very long scene in particular. It started out a seven-minute scene, and it’s probably a four and a half to five-minute scene now. They shot that scene for an entire day, and it’s a dialogue scene that is relatively static until the very end.

HULLFISH: Two camera?

CATANZARO: About 50/50, single and two camera. Initially, Justin was a little resistant to shoot two cameras. But I think because the schedule was so tight, and maybe because I kept bugging him about needing more coverage, they finally did start to shoot that way more frequently. I think there was some difficulty because they shot in an actual hospital, so it was hard logistically to figure out how to put two cameras in sometimes very confined spaces.

HULLFISH: When you were asking for that — different directors have different ways to shoot two camera — do you have a preference for whether it’s a wide and a tight or whether it’s cross shooting of both actors?

CATANZARO: The reason I like cross shooting is that — especially with ad-libs — you often have this amazing hilarious thing or a really poignant exchange, but if you only have one side of it, it’s really difficult to make it land in the cut. Once I saw that they were going to be a little looser with the dialogue, I realized how important having the two cameras would be. But I’ll take it any way I can get it. Complain as I might about hours upon hours of dailies, I’d rather have too much than not enough.

HULLFISH: You said you’ve done a bunch of touchie-feelie TV shows: Parenthood, and Friday Night Lights — God, I love Friday Night Lights…. You know, I just saw kind of a homesick expression pass across your face (we did this interview via Skype) — great nostalgia — when I mentioned Friday Night Lights.

CATANZARO: That was a phenomenal experience and also the hardest I’ve ever worked. There were times when I wasn’t sure if I could do it— sitting in the cutting room at 2:30 am for the third night in a row and just being overwhelmed by the amount of footage. I was relatively green when I started on that show, which was probably good because I didn’t really know any better.

That story and those characters, and the people that I was working with in post, we became a family. And I loved every minute of it. It truly was a labor of love.

What was especially great about it was that Jason Katims, as a showrunner, really gave the editors a lot of freedom and a voice and he really encouraged us to experiment. Those scenes — because they had so much ad-libbing — a lot of times they ended up twice as long as they needed to be. And if you have an entire episode of television where every scene is twice as long as it needs to be, you’ve got a problem. Jason would suggest things like, “Well, let’s take this scene from the beginning and this scene from the middle and this scene from the end and see if we can put them all together without any dialogue.” So that’s how a lot of those amazing montages came to be. It was really practical in some cases. We had no other way to really get through the story in 42 minutes. That show was the first time I experienced the power of score and music, and I found out how much I love working with those elements.

By the end of the show, I was such a fan. I went to the last few days of shooting in Texas and visited all the locations. I cried my way through editing the finale. It was a tremendous experience.

HULLFISH: You mentioned the desire to work on this as a feature film because you had all this experience doing these touchie-feelie dramatic things. Did you feel like you were going to get pigeonholed as an action-horror person?

CATANZARO: I don’t think I necessarily worried about being pigeonholed, but it has crossed my mind. There are a lot of editors who have only done one thing, and I do often wonder if that’s because another path never presented itself. I really enjoyed the horror movie I cut, but I will admit I turned down the next movie I was offered because it was also a horror film. I was ready for something else.

I welcome the opportunity to do a variety of things, whether it be in television or in features. I want to have as broad an experience as possible because I find joy in all of it. I absolutely love action, and I hope that I do get to do more of those. But a project like this is a palate cleanser in a way, and now I am ready to be challenged by something else. I do feel like this kind of project is home for me, this type of deeply emotional, impactful drama. I still cry when I watch this film. It’s pretty incredible to have the opportunity to be a part of something like that.

HULLFISH: I was just talking to Hank Corwin, who had cut Natural Born Killers and The Big Short and VICE. But he also did Snow Falling On Cedars and The Horse Whisperer and he said, “Nobody’s ever gonna offer me a beautiful romantic drama. I’m not going to get those kinds of movies handed to me. People think of me for these other movies.” I talk to so many editors who feel like they either ARE pigeonholed or they’re GOING TO GET pigeonholed.

CATANZARO: I feel like the biggest challenge for me really has just been getting my foot in the door on features. Ideally, in my career, I’d like to go back and forth between film and television. But it’s really hard to get features when you’ve only cut television. It’s the same skillset. It’s really baffling to me that there is still such a divide. You’ve cut 60 or 80 hours of good television, but a studio will question whether you are up to the task of cutting their feature. My worry was always whether or not I would be able to have a career doing both.

HULLFISH: There’s so much better feeling about what TV is. There’s no way that you say that the quality of Game of Thrones is less than something on the big screen — or even Friday Night Lights as a TV show. What’s the difference really?

CATANZARO: There is so much amazing television content with big name actors and directors! Everybody is sort of migrating over to television, maybe because it’s easier for them to produce and get in front of an audience. We’re sort of getting inundated. There’s SO much content, you can’t possibly keep up with it all. But it’s not the TV of 20 years ago.

HULLFISH: What is the difference in editing film versus TV? For me, I think it’s a question of how you interact with the director on TV versus film. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between your relationship with a director on film versus television?

CATANZARO: In both cases, the director is always your ally and you always want to protect the director, but much more so in film. In television, you’re lucky if you get the full four days with the director, and ultimately, you really work for the producer. This is especially true if you’ve been on a series for two or more seasons and you have a director who is really “just visiting” for a few weeks. Hopefully, they’ve watched all the episodes and read all the scripts, but they’re probably not going to understand the complete library of aesthetics for the show or know what the showrunner really likes. I feel like on a TV show I really have to work with an eye for what I know the producer wants. That doesn’t mean not indulging the director and trying whatever it is that they want to do, but encouraging them to really embrace the style of the show as established. You can break a few rules here and there, but let’s not reinvent the wheel. I really like working with directors in television because you get to meet so many.

A lot of directors really use their time, but some don’t and are more hands-off. Some will just give broad stroke notes and leave you alone. It’s usually the newer directors, the greener directors, that want to spend the most time in the room. At least in my limited experience working with a feature director, you’re in it together for the long haul. So I feel like my first loyalty is 100% percent, absolutely and without question, to the director.

That said, I’ll always be truthful to the producers and the studio. But everything I do needs to be in lockstep with the director. On this film, Justin and I have been crazy in sync. We have a lot of the same notes and a shorthand which you naturally develop over time. There’s more depth to a relationship when you’re working with a director on a feature. On TV, it’s a limited engagement, unless you’re working with a director-producer who you’ll see multiple times over multiple episodes.

HULLFISH: It’s interesting that you were really brought on by the producer, not the director. Did that cause any friction or doubt? I once got hired by the producer instead of the director and it didn’t go so well.

CATANZARO: There will always be politics. There will always a little bit of drama. But Justin and Cathy were both on board in this case, so that was nice. They often had differing opinions and notes, but there was always a compromise.

HULLFISH: With a new director, how do you develop a sense of trust with that person?

CATANZARO: A lot of communication, and with Justin, more than I’m used to. He loves technology which is great, but he likes to text a lot. They’d be shooting at crazy hours of the day and through the night, so I’d get a text message at 2 am that would turn into an hour-long conversation. I’m not used to having that level or frequency of communication, but I felt like it was really important for me to be there whenever I was needed. Since this was his first film, he didn’t really have anyone to lean on during the process.

There was a lot of doubt and questioning on set. And the post process on a feature was very new to him, so I tried to answer his questions about everything from visual effects workflow to the mix. We’d talk about the schedule, which was never accurate on paper. It was also very important for me to assure him when something was working and when there were things that needed a little bit of assistance. We did reshoot a few things, grab more coverage, an insert here and there. It was a very complicated shoot so it was easy for things to be overlooked. This movie has 236 scenes in it.

HULLFISH: Wow. The movie I just did had 146. A quick Google search shows an average of about 60 — 80.

CATANZARO: And they were moving really fast. It was a lot of little scenes. There were days when they had eleven scenes to shoot and a lot of set-ups, a lot of moving parts. So just being in touch with him as often as possible, I think, was key to making it work. But he really did trust me. And I have to thank him for that because, considering it was our first collaboration, he did put a lot of faith in me.

HULLFISH: That’s great. You mentioned that the schedule didn’t quite turn out as expected. What was that schedule?

CATANZARO: We were supposed to wrap in October 2018. We got through our director’s cut very quickly. The producers got it to the studio very quickly, and they were very happy. What really slowed us down was visual effects, which is probably surprising to hear because it doesn’t seem like a big VFX movie. But I think we had over 350 visual effects.

HULLFISH: Wow.

CATANZARO: Yeah. There’s an entire reel of the film that’s meant to be a winterscape, but they shot it inside of a warehouse in New Orleans… in the middle of summer. The other thing is there are a lot of screens, a lot of Facetimes, laptops, and iPads. So there was a lot of cleaning up of those things. At least two hundred of the visual effects were matte paintings or blue screen, which is significant.

HULLFISH: When was principal photography?

CATANZARO: We shot mid-May and then wrapped towards the end of June. It was apparently sweltering in these warehouses and the actors were wearing their heavy winter coats and scarves.

HULLFISH: You were editing in L.A. the whole time I’m assuming.

CATANZARO: Yes, thankfully with my own thermostat.

HULLFISH: You mentioned music. Let’s talk about temping and what’s your attitude about when you do it? And where are you getting cues from?

CATANZARO: Sometimes, if I know I have a big montage, I’ll try to find a few tracks that have the right tempo and the right tone. While I’m cutting the scenes, I’m not necessarily cutting to the music, but I’ll have it playing while I’m going through the dailies just so I can sort of sense if tempo or tone is going to work the way I think it will.

I waited a little bit longer to temp this than I normally do. It was probably the last seven days before I saw Justin that I really started getting into music. I have a pretty big score library, but I really love Spotify. It’s like the best tool ever. So I always start with my library, and and then I poke around on Spotify and iTunes. This movie has about 50 minutes of score, and I think we have twelve songs. So it’s quite a bit of music, but I really enjoy that process. I’ll go through my playlists and pull maybe 50 songs that I like for the film. As I’m going through looking to lay in music on those final days, I just kind of keep that playlist going in my head. Then maybe I’ll land on a scene and remember a song I think is right. There’s a lot of trial and error. Probably 75 percent of the songs that I temped in are still in the final mix, which I never thought would happen.

HULLFISH: Music artists really need to make friends with editors and give us free music, because when we stick their music in a movie they’re set!

CATANZARO: Yes! I worked on a TV series called Rise, and I used the same band in that series finale and then twice in this film!

HULLFISH: I’ve cut several pieces into movies and there’s no way those pieces would have ever made it into a film if it wasn’t for them being in my personal playlist.

CATANZARO: Yeah, it is very much like that. Editors get screeners. Why don’t we get new albums?

HULLFISH: Labels better start thinking about that.

I want to get back to your approach on editing of a brand new scene. You said you like selects reels. Can you describe your dailies-watching process and how do you just start going about building a scene from scratch?

CATANZARO: I don’t always watch all the takes in order. I oftentimes just watch one of every setup first, so I get a sense of what I’ve got in terms of shots. I’ll start watching a take, and then I pick the bits I like and put those into a selects sequence, which is in script order. I hop around and look at all the different setups and all the different performances, not necessarily in order, and I put a mark in the bin next to a take once I’ve watched it to avoid confusion. I watch everything, b-neg included. I try to watch both cameras separately. If the cameras are moving, absolutely I watch them individually. If they are completely static shots and they’re just different sizes, I will watch them together. But I’m very afraid of missing nuance when I don’t watch them separately, and I tend to feel very guilty.

When I’ve gone through all the takes and I have my selects reel, I sit back and just watch it. Obviously, it’s a mess because it’s just stuff pulled from everywhere and slapped together, but I can still see where there is gold and where there might be deficiencies, where I’m going to really have to mine for something else in the footage. Sometimes I will not start cutting a scene from the beginning. If I’m a hundred percent sure of how the middle of the scene’s going to go or the end of the scene’s going to go, I’ll start there. You can get into trouble rhythmically working that way. So you have to make sure that if you’re not working from front to back, that you always watch everything you’ve got multiple times to make sure that rhythm is working. The rhythm comes more naturally when you work chronologically, but I don’t always work that way. I like to work from the point in the scene which I’m most confident and go from there.

I’ll also cut alternate versions of things. Maybe 25 percent of the scenes in this movie have an alternate ending or section I’ve cut— sort of like Choose Your Own Adventure. We could go here with this scene, or we could go there. It’s just faster for me to cut it than it is for me to stress about whether or not I’ve made the right choice. Usually, if the scene sits for a few days or a week and I go back and look at it, the right version is 100% obvious. It’s amazing the clarity a little space and distance can provide.

HULLFISH: And then once you start assembling those individual scenes together and they start affecting each other, tell me a little bit about what the process. Do you build the entire span of the movie? Do you start working in sequences? Do you start working in reels?

CATANZARO: I don’t put things into reels right away. I probably waited until four weeks in, when I had chunks of scenes that could go together. I don’t like to slug missing scenes. I do often need to alter ins and outs of scenes when I’m building sections of the film, so the transitions play nicely together. A lot of times, that’s when I start thinking about music— not necessarily tracking it or placing it, but just thinking about music. It’s much closer to my editor’s cut that I’m actually building the reels.

When I watched the editor’s cut with the director, it was really the first time I’d seen it all together. I watched all the reels individually but hadn’t watched the long play. Luckily it went well, but if I had a few more days I’d have watched it several times through and done a pass on the whole movie, looking at the macro.

HULLFISH: Talk to me a little bit about kind of sublimating your ego. Everybody talks about how horrible that assembly is for the director. How that’s just like pulling teeth for them. But you’ve got to cut to the script — or no?

CATANZARO: I did take license with some of the script, so I was nervous about a couple of scenes where I’d presented my own take. I do always cut the script version and have that ready to show, but if I feel like there’s a better version of the scene, I say let’s do it. Maybe I leave out some dialogue or swap dialogue at the end of the scene with dialogue at the beginning. I might change the order of scenes, but I usually will run that by the director first.

The editor’s cut is the time for your voice to be heard clearly. Of course, you’re participating throughout the whole process and what you have to say is always valuable, but I really believe in asserting yourself right out of the gate. Don’t just use 32A-6 because the director said it was great. Well, it was probably great on the day, and may still be great now, but maybe there was a gem hiding in take 1.

The first time the director watched the film, I knew it was going to be really hard for him. He told me so. He walked in with his wife and said he was going to watch it and not say anything, and then he would probably leave. I was prepared for that. Well, after the film ended, he and his wife and I were all crying, and he didn’t leave. He was relieved to see that what he had done worked and that it was all going to be OK. That’s all a director really wants to know when they walk into the room for the first time, that it’s going to be OK.

Not related to this film, but Martin Campbell’s very different to work with because he doesn’t ever want to see the film in one go. He can’t stomach it. When I was working with him, we just started from the first reel and worked in 20 minutes increments. That’s the most we ever watched strung together for at least the first 4 weeks.

HULLFISH: There are definitely different schools of thought about how much an editor should assert themselves through the editor’s cut. There are those that say that they do it like you and there are those who feel it’s their obligation to present the editor’s cut completely true to the script and the director’s original intent.

CATANZARO: I do understand and appreciate that approach, and so maybe the way I operate is disrespectful in some ways. But I have to imagine that people hire an editor because they’re a creative and they want to hear what that person has to say. The jobs I don’t care to do are the jobs where somebody just wants me to say yes and push a button. I have done some jobs that were pretty close to that, but it’s soul-crushing and not gratifying to me in the least.

It’s a little bit of a dance sometimes too. It’s the same way a director works with an actor. If you can make it seem like it is the director’s idea to do something, that’s always the best. I remember a time when there was something the director was insistent upon, but that I absolutely hated and thought it ruined the film. It ended up the way that I hoped it would be, but it was really a circuitous route to get there.

Justin was willing to try anything, so that’s wonderful. He also pitched a lot of crazy things that even I didn’t think could work. But one thing I have learned over the years is that even if it sounds like a really stupid idea, try it. It’s amazing how many stupid ideas turn out to be pure genius.

HULLFISH: Exactly. You’ve got to have a positive attitude about those notes because you never know when something you do not think is gonna work is gonna work. And if you state that it’s not going to work and then you get forced to do it and it works? That’s not good.

CATANZARO: I always say, “Let’s give it a shot.” That’s why we’re here. Even if we spent four days tweaking a scene and we end up pretty close to where we were on day one, that’s the process. You have to explore all the avenues. You have to be confident that what you have there in the cut is the very best version of the scene.

HULLFISH: When you had that first editor’s cut or assembly, what were some of the things that happened and how did you come to those decisions about where it went from there to become what you ended up with?

CATANZARO: Well our first pass we started with some broad strokes and some line cuts, but nothing major. Right out of the gate, we may have cut a few scenes, but it wasn’t really until our second pass through that we started getting ruthless with the scene lifts. I think we had something like 30 deleted scenes.

My editor’s cut was almost three hours long, and now we’re just under two hours. That’s a lot to leave on the cutting room floor, including a huge section of the story which I probably can’t say much about. We had the classic question: in or out. There was this big pivotal thing and an even bigger discussion about it, with a camp that says “Yes, we need it,” and a camp that says “No, we don’t.” So it’s in for a week and then it’s out for a few days. We went back and forth like this for a while.

This sequence happened to involve a lot of bluescreen VFX, so the studio’s standpoint was that they’d save a lot of money if we cut that. But since the sequence worked, it never occurred to Justin or to me, to make that change. It was only considered after he invited a couple of director friends of his in, and both of them independently suggested omitting that entire section of the film. One of those people was Martin Campbell, actually. I have to admit I felt a little betrayed by his suggestion. But sure enough, when we tried it and watched the thing all the way through, it was absolutely right for the film.

HULLFISH: Did you see Vice?

CATANZARO: I did. I loved it!

HULLFISH: I just interviewed Hank Corwin. He said the movie originally had a 15-minute musical number at the beginning.

CATANZARO: WHAT!?

HULLFISH: Like a full-on musical. Singing and dancing. He said it will be on a DVD.

CATANZARO: So like when did they cut it out? That’s what I’m curious about.

HULLFISH: Almost at the end. Shortly before they locked.

CATANZARO: Wow.

HULLFISH: I helped with a film where I suggested that they throw out the entire first 30 minutes of the film.

CATANZARO: We basically cut out the first 12 minutes of this film, so that’s probably good advice to start at the beginning. It was the main character’s backstory and her family life in this case. It’s perfectly good film, but you just don’t need to see everything unfold from the time she’s six. Now that’s something that I did NOT excise from the editor’s cut because it was such a big omission. That lived in the film for probably two weeks before it was jettisoned.

HULLFISH: You’ve done a lot of TV. Are those things happening on TV shows? Or is it much tighter to how it’s scripted?

CATANZARO: I think so. Part of that is probably just because of time constraints. When you have six months or more to fine tune a movie, you can try every iteration possible. But you don’t have that luxury in TV. I do find the scripts are generally more inflexible because they have to fit in a certain sized box. Sometimes there’s just one storyline too many, and that’s usually the biggest cut we’ll have on a TV show when we decide an entire storyline has got to go. It’s usually because of time. In a film, you can sometimes take out that entire first reel as we both discovered, but you can’t usually excise the teaser of a TV show. That’s where you get hooked. In film, sometimes the beginning tends to be a little more languid because we’re setting up more than we need to do in an episode of television.

HULLFISH: It’s really interesting to talk to you and you’ve given us great insights. I really appreciate your time.

CATANZARO: Thank you for being so kind and for making me feel comfortable. It’s been a pleasure. Before we go, I want to mention my incredible first assistant editor who has been the rock of this whole thing.

HULLFISH: And his name is?

CATANZARO: Warren Hickman.

HULLFISH: And he will be promptly stolen by some other editor because you mentioned him.

CATANZARO: It’s already happened.

To read more interviews in the Art of the Cut series, check out THIS LINK and follow me on Twitter @stevehullfish

The first 50 interviews in the series provided the material for the book, “Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV Editors.” This is a unique book that breaks down interviews with many of the world’s best editors and organizes it into a virtual roundtable discussion centering on the topics editors care about. It is a powerful tool for experienced and aspiring editors alike. Cinemontage and CinemaEditor magazine both gave it rave reviews. No other book provides the breadth of opinion and experience. Combined, the editors featured in the book have edited for over 1,000 years on many of the most iconic, critically acclaimed and biggest box office hits in the history of cinema.