Recruited: William Goldenberg talks about Zero Dark Thirty

Trevor Hogg chats with William Goldenberg about his film editing work on Zero Dark Thirty with colleague Dylan Tichenor which has captured them international awards recognition...


“We finished Argo [2012] in June and the movie didn’t come out until October,” recalls William Goldenberg who immediately went from the historical thriller detailing the CIA rescue of six American embassy workers in Iran to the true life tale chronicling the decade long hunt for Osama bin Laden which fatally concludes in Pakistan.  “I was able to jump onto Zero Dark Thirty [2012] in the middle [of the production] but it meant having no time off.  I think I had a weekend.”  The film editor did feel the weight of history when assembling the pictures.  “Of the two movies I did this year there was more pressure on Zero Dark Thirty because of the recentness of the events.”  Goldenberg notes, “You feel responsibility to doing justice to their stories and representing them in an appropriate way because they are real people and in both movies they are real people who are alive.”  The opportunity was too good to pass up.  “As an editor you want to work with the top directors and Kathryn [Bigelow] is right now one of the top few directors in Hollywood.  I’ve never worked with a woman director and thought that would be exciting.  I thought that The Hurt Locker [2008] was great so when I heard about the possibility I was excited about it.  When it all came together I couldn’t be happier with prospect of working on it; that said the movie was pretty much shot when I came on it.  I came on in the middle of June and worked from June to December.  I didn’t meet Kathryn because she was Jordan shooting the raid when I first spoke to her about working on the movie.  We had one 40 minute conversation because she was busy and I spoke to Mark Boal for a brief time; they hired me based on that.  I didn’t even meet her until my first day for the movie; Kathryn had just come back from Jordan or London when they finished shooting.  It’s like, ‘Hi!  How are you? Glad that you’re on the movie.’  That was my first day at work.”


“Dylan Tichenor [Lawless] was on the movie at the time and Kathryn was shooting a tremendous amount of film,” states William Goldenberg who co-edited the digital production with Tichenor.  “Argo was a lot.  It was a million feet.  But Zero Dark Thirty it would have been 1,800,000 – 170 hours or something around there.  It was clear as they got through to the end of the shooting that it was going to be impossible for one person to finish the movie by themselves.  It wasn’t humanly possible.  They had a schedule and a need so they were looking for someone to come on and help. They went out to a few different people.  I showed a lot of enthusiasm and had a relationship with Colin Wilson who was the line producer on the movie and had worked together as assistant editors a long time ago which helped.”  Having to collaborate in the editing suite is nothing new to Goldenberg.  “I’ve done multiple editors with Michael Mann [Ali] and one with Michael Bay [Transformers: Dark of the Moon] and now with Kathryn. For the most part what happens is that you have your section of the movie and work on it.  In my case on Zero Dark Thirty, the first thing I cut was the raid on the Abbottabad compound.  It hadn’t been touched when I got there. They had just finished shooting it and I don’t think I got all of the dailies until after two or three weeks after I got there.  There was 40 hours of material and I sat down for almost a month cutting that.  I had that section until the end of the movie as the first hunk of the movie I cut.  Dylan had first cut most of the rest of it because he had been on the movie for all of that time. Slowly there were sequences that needed to be reworked and I would cut those.  It is interesting.   The director will say, ‘I think you would be great for this sequence.  Give it a try.’  Sometimes you need a sequence to cut and somebody else was working on one thing.  You take the next one that’s up which is the best way to do it. For The Insider [1999], I had the second half of the movie and Paul Rubell [Collateral] had the first half with a few exceptions; that way you have a continuity of what you’re doing. It’s not like you cut a scene and you have to run into somebody else’s room and say, ‘How does this transition work?’  You have big long section you can work as a whole film.”

Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow

“I wouldn’t call it looming,” states William Goldenberg when discussing the impact The Hurt Locker had on the $40 million production.  “There was an expectation created by the fact that Kathryn had won an Oscar [for Best Director] and the movie won Best Picture.  I have to tell you that with every movie there’s something looming and that’s the fear of failure.  I find with every movie there is an unbelievable amount of pressure to have the movie be good and the studio wants its money; there’s a lot on the line.  I feel a unique pressure on every movie.  There’s an added pressure with Zero Dark Thirty because of the subject and the responsibility of such a big subject in the recent past; between the 9/11 part of it and all of the politics going on right now. That part was looming over it more than The Hurt Locker.”  As for 9/11 and Iraq War movies being cursed at the box office, Goldenberg remarks, “They’ll say, ‘Oh, sports movies don’t make money.’  We did Seabiscuit [2003] and made $125 million.  Sometimes the movies aren’t good or maybe they’re not quite commercial enough.  Who knows what makes a movie a hit.”  Controversy has sparked a US Senate Intelligence Committee investigation as to whether the CIA had given Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow "inappropriate" access to classified material.  “I know that Mark was operating with the information that he was given at the time.  They brought me on to edit this screenplay which I thought was amazing and didn’t ask a lot of questions.”


“They’re both masterful,” states William Goldenberg when comparing the directorial styles of Ben Affleck [Argo] with Kathryn Bigelow.  “She doesn’t say much but the few things Kathryn will say about a sequence is so right on the point on what the problem is or what is not working for her. She has varying degrees of how important it is to her.” Whether you are the film editor or the cinematographer, the expectations of the woman behind the camera remains the same.  “She’s relying on you to cut that movie and show her the way editorially which is not to say that she isn’t brilliant in the editing room but she is relying on you as an editor.  Kathryn is not someone who’d say, ‘I can do this myself.  You’re my hands.’  She’s relying on your interpretation of it and your abilities as an editor.  It’s phenomenal for an editor because you feel like this freedom to do stuff.  If you are connecting with her with what you’re going after creatively it’s really freeing and great.  You can feel like you’re allowed to try anything.  Kathryn is relying on you and that’s what you want.  You want to be a part of the process.”  Bigelow is not the habit of handing off notes when watching the dailies.  “She relies on your performance picks and if she doesn’t like it she’ll say, ‘Try something else.’  Rarely you would sit there and they’d run every take of a performance. For them, they’re not worried about that.  You’ll go and try something else, and show it to her.  Kathryn will hope you’ll get it right by the second or third time.”


“In the film the time is marked by terrorist attacks that happened or attempted attacks that happened, not every single one but through the decade,” explains William Goldenberg.  “The London Bombings [2005], I believe there were seven CIA agents killed in Khost, Afghanistan [2009] by a suicide bomber, and there’s the bombing of the Islamabad Marriott Hotel [2008] in Pakistan. Every time in the movie what happens is that you see the date come up and the location.   When you see the date by the time the fourth one happens you realize this isn’t going to be good because these mark the terrorist attacks.  You see the date before you see the attack.  Often times after these attacks we would go into newsreel footage. We were able to shoot a bus not blowing up but going to the exact spot one of the buses blew up in London.”   The opening of the film does not rely on images but voices to set the tone for the entire movie.   “In the beginning of Zero Dark Thirty there’s an audio collage of 9/11 phone calls, some from the planes, towers, and emergency operators.  Basically, it’s sound over black.  There are no visual and that’s the way the script was [written].”  Goldenberg approved of the creative decision.  “It’s a daring move.  It’s incredibly emotional.  You’ll see when you see the movie.  It’s devastating to hear the voices of these people and they’re real and not here now.  We were careful about it and it is haunting but what it does is sets up the rest of the movie and creates the mindset that the country was in after that happened.  Everything that happened through the 10 years is setup by that one event.  The whole hunt for bin Laden is setup by that one event.  It was important to Mark and Kathryn to get the audience in that mindset and that’s why he chose to do it that way.”


“You want to make situations real and I’ve done a lot of movies where the situations are real whether it was The Insider or even Seabiscuit,” states William Goldenberg when addressing the torture scenes.  “If a scene is suppose to make you cry works if it makes me cry.  I’m like the audience at that moment.  I’m trying to make myself feel a certain way so the audience will feel a certain way.”  The monumental task was constructing the raid sequence.  “Everything was shot with four or five cameras and everything was shot with an incredible amount of detail in terms of each moment, how it happened.  My understanding is based on the book [No Easy Day by Mark Owen] that the Navy SEAL who was there wrote we were incredibly accurate about the raid.  The fun part was using that night vision footage.   The footage is shot in low light conditions because it was a moonless night.  Greig Fraser [Snow White and the Huntsman] and Kathryn wanted to be real feeling and not to feel like movie light so there is very little light and shadow.  It’s gritty, grey and dark and feels incredibly real; juxtaposed with that was the night vision where you see what it looks like through those night vision goggles and how much the SEALs can see.   It’s as if you’re there.”


“One of the tougher sections of the movie is there’s a point where they are looking for the courier,” reveals William Goldenberg.  “Maya [Jessica Chastain] feels that he’s key to finding bin Laden.  They bribe a Kuwaiti oil baron and get that guy’s mother’s phone number in Kuwait. They were able to do what’s called a trap and trace which is a tap into her phone and try to get him calling home to his mother so to find his whereabouts.  The courier buys a cellphone and by tracking that cellphone they eventually, after probably 30 minutes of the movie, find the guy. They see him on the street, take his picture and find him after 10 years of looking for him.  The first cut of that section was probably an hour long and completely a mess.” The difficulty was to hone the hours of principle photography footage into an exciting sequence.   “It took a long time to make sense of it. There’s a phenomenal section at the end where they finally find him and there’s this jubilation but in the relation of the context of this movie.  It’s not Hollywood movie jubilation but what real CIA agents feel like.” The solution was in the creative process.  “The thing about editing is you can’t know in week one what you’ll know in week ten.  It was a constant evolution, thinning out and refocusing. I don’t think there was a key one moment or one key thing. It was hard work.”


When it comes to Jessica Chastain (The Help) portraying Maya, William Goldenberg has nothing but praise.  “Jessica is the centre piece of the film and she’s spectacular.  In the movie you don’t really know a lot about her but you do because of her performance.”  Goldenberg adds, “It was more of a trust thing.  We knew Jessica had so much depth and intelligence and was giving us so much in her performance that we trusted that was going to work for the audience.  You try to use the takes and the pieces of performance, and cut for the subtext [what was happening internally with her] instead of the text.”  A creative partnership was formed between Chastain and the screenwriting.  “That’s one of those moments where you trust Mark Boal’s screenplay and a great actress and you have complete faith in it and run with it.”  Goldenberg was impressed by the other cast members.  “They’re all pretty fantastic.  I could go down the line.  Jason Clarke [Public Enemies] who plays Daniel the interrogator in the beginning of the film, Stephen Dillane [King Arthur] and Mark Strong [Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy] who has one of the most spectacular scene in any recent movie where he’s telling everyone in the room that they’re failing and there’s no one else.  ‘You guys are it.’  I was lucky enough to have Kyle Chandler [Broken City] in both Argo and Zero Dark Thirty; he’s wonderful in both movies.  I don’t think there’s a weak performance in either movie.  That’s what is required for a great movie.”


Unlike Argo which had elements of satire to provide comic relief, the humour in Zero Dark Thirty is much less overt.  “People act in strange and funny ways in real situations and it gives you a feeling of reality,’ observes William Goldenberg.  “There are scenes within those intense moments that are funny or are unusual that make you laugh; that’s what real life is like.  There’s a moment that gets a laugh, not a belly laugh, when Jessica Chastain is telling off Joseph Bradley played by Kyle Chandler; she’s screaming at him to get more help and saying, ‘You don’t know al-Qaeda.  You’re going to be the first station chief to be brought up on charges.’  Kyle looks at her and goes, ‘You’re out of your fucking mind.’  It gets a laugh in a great way because she is pretty much bordering on being right out of her mind with being obsessed about this. It’s a great observation.  Kyle delivered it so beautifully so that does get a laugh.  There’s stuff with the SEALs, Chris Pratt [Wanted] supplies some relief.   When asked what he’s listening to in the helicopter on the way to the compound, Chris starts talking about Tony Robbins.”  Pratt has a memorable scene which appears in the trailer where his character is asked as to why he believes in Maya.  “A lot was ad-libbed on Chris Pratt’s part. They would add dialogue; there were lots of different versions and variables. That was the only take where he put his arms out and went, ‘Her confidence.’  For us we get great moments from great actors and all we have to do is be smart enough to use them.”

                                   
“I don’t edit with music when I’m first cutting,” says William Goldenberg.  “As a rule I try not to do that because I don’t want to be influenced by the music.  The music has a rhythm and you don’t want the rhythm of the cuts to be dictated by the rhythm of that music.  I like to have the edits have their own rhythm. To have a rhythm that the scene needs and then afterwards when I’m happy with the cut then I will put temporary music in where I feel it’s appropriate.  It’s a great tool for people seeing the movie and it’s a great tool for finding out what works and doesn’t work.”  The digital footage used with Zero Dark Thirty shares a lot of similarities with film.   “Whether it’s digital material or 16mm film or 35mm film once it gets into the Avid it’s all the same to me.  I’m trying to use what’s in front of me to tell a great story.  It creates a different workflow but for me it’s not that different.  You get a lot more material. There are a lot more takes that they don’t do a restart.  They restart within a take and don’t re-slate so you get these long sometimes 30 to 40 minutes takes because instead being limited to a 10 minute magazine you can keep going with the high definition.”  A production that shoots a lot of footage or one that storyboards every shot is equally valid.  “That’s the great thing about all of this.  Some films have a tiny bit of footage and all of these composed masters, and everything is predetermined how it's been shot and turns into a great movie.   Or it’s a film where there’s two million feet of film and a million ways to cut it and it also turns into a great movie.  To me it’s the end result is the thing not the journey.   It can be different as long as the end result is something special.”

William Goldenberg

William Goldenberg has become an awards darling on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as he has been lauded with Best Editing nominations from the BAFTAs and Oscars for Zero Dark Thirty and Argo.  “In my wildest imaginations at the beginning of these two I never expected anything like this would ever happen,” The film editor who previously received Academy Award nominations for The Insider and Seabiscuit is quick to share the spotlight with Brett Reed.  “He is a phenomenal guy and partner.  Brett was with me as a production assistant then became an apprentice then became an assistant editor and then became my first assistant.”  For the past 13 years Reed has enabled Goldenberg to focus entirely on the editing.  “He’s the face of the editing room.  I don’t have to worry about the logistics.  I don’t have to worry about things being turned over to sound or visual effects.”  Both Kathryn Bigelow and Ben Affleck missed out on contending for Best Director at the Oscars. “Obviously, based on what everyone’s predictions were we were surprised.  It’s not an exact science.  It’s not the same people voting for the same branches so it makes it a little more complicated.  I owe Ben and Kathryn my nominations.”  He believes, “The movie is the star of the show.  It’s the director’s vision and I’m trying to help them.”  When asked as to what makes Zero Dark Thirty special, the film industry veteran answers, “It’s a movie that’s entertaining and informative.”  Goldenberg enthusiastically concludes, “I had a great time with both movies.”


Many thanks for William Goldenberg for taking the time for this interview.

Make sure to visit the official website for Zero Dark Thirty and read our filmmaker profile on Kathryn Bigelow titled Action Artist.

Stranger Than Fiction: William Goldenberg talks about Argo

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.