Trevor Hogg chats with Academy Award winner William Goldenberg about the nervousness and excitement he experienced while collaborating with Michael Mann for the first time...
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“Michael [Mann] is the most meticulous director I have ever worked with to the point of obsession,” states William Goldenberg who has collaborated with Ben Affleck (Gone Baby Gone, Argo), Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty), Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, Pleasantville) and Michael Bay (Transformers: Dark of the Moon). “When we did The Insider [1999] we shot in almost every location where the actual event happened. He would want to make sure down to what tie, ring or watch the actors had on; it is complete authenticity at any price.” Goldberg is impressed by the ability of Mann to have the stamina and wherewithal to write and director while still having the energy to pay attention to detail. “When Michael watches dailies he sits with a tape or digital recorder and talks into it his first impressions of every take of the film.” The audio comments are transcribed and along with additional notes are given to the group of film editors who are working on the project. “You have to learn how to decipher all of it and put the scenes together with those notes. He may have six takes of a performance and think everyone of them is good so you have to read between the lines to figure out what is better for each emotional version of the scene. The freedom comes with him with the first cuts. In Ali [2001], for instance, the scene where Muhammad Ali [Will Smith] says to the press, ‘I have nothing against the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong called me the ‘N’ word.’ I sent him seven or eight versions of the scene of different styles of performance and editing; he loved all of that. You get to do anything you want as long as one of those versions are the one he asked for so you can show him anything. But then Michael will lock in on a version he likes and you’re often whittling it down to the end [just before the release date of the movie].”
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“Michael is great with music,” notes William Goldenberg. “I worked on Heat [1995], Ali, The Insider and Miami Vice [2006]. He has a unique ability to do something new musically every time. Michael is not a musician; he’s a musical guy. He is always looking at it a bit differently. There were times I would say, ‘We could go from here to here.’ And he’d say, ‘That would be the easy way.’ Michael would want to do it in a way that no one had seen before or in this case the music. He wants to push the envelope every time and doesn’t want to fall back on doing it the typical or easy way. Michael wants to do something different andspecial every single time. The drive to be able to do that is unrelenting and can also be exhausting.” As for dealing with filmmakers like Michael Mann who compose their own scripts compared to those who do not, Goldberg remarks, “In a general statement I would say I prefer working with writer-directors because they seem to know the screenplay in a way that no one else could; they’re so inside them and know why every line exists in that screenplay and the history of that line and how many different versions of that line until they got to the right version. You feel like there’s a depth of knowledge between the director and the screenplay that you don’t have when the director doesn’t write the screenplay. That being said Kathryn [Bigelow] and Ben [Affleck] didn’t write those two scripts [Zero Dark Thirty, Argo] but they seem to understand the story they were telling.”
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“I got involved with Heat by a few lucky pieces of coincidence,” reveals William Goldenberg. “I had edited a movie called Citizen X [1995] for HBO that my friend Chris Gerolmo, who is the guy who wrote Mississippi Burning [1988], had directed and written; Michael in the middle of making Heat happened to turn on the television, watched and loved it. Michael was looking for another editor to go onto Heat and called Chris. Chris said great things about me and Michael hired me.” Four film editors were involved with assembling the big screen version of the TV movie L.A. Takedown (1989). “Tom Rolf [The Right Stuff] who was one of the three had to leave due to prior commitment so I was brought on to take his spot, not that I could ever replace Tom Rolf, he’s a phenomenal editor.” In regards to how the work was divided editorially among him, Rolf, Pasquale Buba (Day of the Living Dead), and Dov Hoenig (Dark City), Goldenberg remarks, “Everybody is working on a scene and when that particular area is done they’re ready for a new one. Some of it is as simple as that. Some it is that Michael will think that one editor is better suited for a particular scene for whatever reason and will say, ‘Why don’t you take that?’ As the first cut is completed he’ll divide it up into larger sections which makes sense because you don’t want one editor to have a scene and another editor has the next scene. You want larger stretches of narrative for it to become cohesive.” Multiple storylines had to be told. “We did as much as we can. We all watched the movie together and can comment. ‘We’re having problems in this area.’ You rely on Michael at that point to be a supervising editor to hold it all together and fortunately for us, he has the capacity for that.”
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“The first day of that movie I only had three screen credits,” recalls William Goldenberg. “I had cut Citizen X, The Puppet Masters [1994] and had done co-editing with Michael Kahn on Alive [1993]. Then I got hired to be on Heat and it was one of those things where I remember seeing [Robert] De Niro [Goodfellas] and Al Pacino [Dog Day Afternoon] at the Oscars that year to give award together because they were working on Heat. I thought to myself that maybe in 10 years I’ll have enough experience to work on a movie like that and a couple of months later I was on the movie. I sat there in the editing room looking at footage with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Val Kilmer [Tombstone] and Jon Voight [Midnight Cowboy]. I thought I was having heart palpitations. For the first couple of hours I couldn’t even work because I was so overwhelmingly nervous but then I settled in. I remember thinking, ‘This is like a dream.’” The initial assignment was to piece together the dramatic finale that begins with a fateful phone conversation and ends with L.A. Robbery Homicide Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Pacino) having a deadly confrontation with professional thief Neil McCauley (De Niro). “The first thing I cut on Heat was when Robert De Niro has Amy Brenneman [Daylight] in the car and they’re driving to go the plane that is waiting for them. De Niro finds out where Waingro [Kevin Gage] is and can’t help himself; he goes back to the hotel to kill Waingro and everything falls apart. Pacino spots and chases him through the airport, and kills De Niro.”
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“The biggest challenge for that was the moment when De Niro runs into this area with little cement structures and ends up hiding behind one of them for a final showdown with Pacino,” explains William Goldenberg. “The moment from when he runs and hides behind one of the structures to when the planes are going over you see him get the idea of using the distraction of the plane going over and the lights coming on to make his move to jump out from behind the buildings to try to kill Pacino was difficult. You’re getting across a lot of story where there is no dialogue. Choosing what cement structure to hide behind, getting the idea of the lights going on, having Pacino seeing his shadow and kill De Niro before De Niro kills him. Getting all of that across with no words was difficult and was also a mind-fuck because you go, ‘I get it. But will anyone else get it?’ We worked hard on that right up to the end.”
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“I worked a lot on the armour truck heist in the beginning when the tow truck smashes into the armour car and flips it, and the whole robbery I worked a great deal on that,” states William Goldenberg who laughs when reminded that the opening heist sequence influenced Christopher Nolan when making The Dark Knight (2008). “All great directors borrow from great directors. I know from a lot of directors if they’re going to make movie they’re going to look at every movie in the similar genre, take notes and ideas, and make them their own.” A lot of cameras were deployed to film the cinematic event. “There were 26 cameras on the moment of the tow truck hitting the armour car. There was a camera a mile away on a freeway overpass. There was a camera in a sewer.” Oddly enough not all the desired footage was captured. “It was at a time where removing a camera digitally was not as common. Now it’s, ‘Oh, yeah. Take out all of those cameras.’ That was 1995. Unless there were some we missed they did not shoot each other. There was a lipstick camera mounted on the hood of the tow truck which was the straight on POV from the tow truck to the armour car and of course, that was the one camera that malfunctioned and was the angle we wanted the most. We got close to that but not exactly. We were constantly changing it to get the right feeling and impact.” Handling all the footage was both a blessing and a curse. “It’s what not to put in. There is a temptation when you have a lot of cameras to try to squeeze them all in and that often loses the power of what you’re trying to do.”
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The bank robbery that erupts into a gun battle on the streets of Los Angeles is a signature scene which was ironically mirrored later during a real life heist. “The shootout was interesting because Michael shot it several different ways,” says William Goldenberg. “He shot it one way where he did it with a lot of static cameras. Michael also shot it all steadicam and handheld. All of those things are used together. It was a process of elimination. ‘Let’s look at the whole steadicam version of the scene. Let’s look at the handheld version of the scene.’ We went around and around with it to try to find what felt the most real and had the most impact. Dov Hoenig did the first cut then somewhere down the line during the post-production I inherited it. Michael and I worked on that for so many hours in a small room where Michael was smoking at the time. I don’t believe he smokes now. No windows. Until 6 o’clock in the morning sometimes going over and over it again.” The visuals are accompanied by a deafening sound design. “It’s spectacular and 90 per cent of it is the production sound. It was such an amazing sound that Michael got. Lee Orloff [Terminator 2: Judgment Day] was the sound recorder. The slap of those guns off the buildings downtown was so unbelievable, and real and scary there was no way that wouldn’t be in the final mix. There was one point where we were dubbing the movie and the sound editors replaced all of the guns with Uzis. They were the right weapons but didn’t have that same feel. They played it to Michael and he lost it and made them redo the entire thing overnight.” Goldberg chuckles, “My ears are probably twenty per cent the worse for it!”
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A lot of the hype surrounding around Heat was generated by Al Pacino and Robert De Niro performing with each other for the first time; rather than have the two actors duel with guns, Michael Mann decided that a restaurant table discussion was the best setting. “We were excited by all of it but that scene we felt really special because we were the first ones to see it,” remembers William Goldenberg. “The interesting thing about that scene is Michael’s original idea was that he didn’t want to play any of the dialogue off-camera. He wanted every line to be on camera, nothing overlaps. The first version I saw of the scene was like that. Michael said, ‘I like this take for this one and this take for this one.’ There was a lot of cutting back and forth and went around to another performance. There would be short cutaways in order not to play anything off-camera and it was not great. It was a great assembly of these amazing performances that didn’t go together into a scene. Tom Rolf, came in, I’ll never forget. We were the only two editors in on a Saturday with a small crew with us and in five or six hours Tom took the scene, reworked it, and it was like magic from where it was to what it ended up.” Goldberg states, “There were 12 or 14 takes of the overs using two cameras with one on De Niro and one on Pacino. Just over the shoulders that slowly push in. I believe the bulk of the scene is from take 12. There are some other takes in there but mostly take 12. Tom did such a beautiful job. 95 per cent of what Tom did in that afternoon is what’s in the movie.”
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When it comes to Al Pacino, he is the most varied actor William Goldenberg has encountered. “More in Heat than in The Insider. Pacino would do scenes like where he comes home and his wife has got this guy there who she has picked up. He comes, takes his television and leaves. There are takes where he has a slow-burn controlled anger and there are takes where spit is flying out of his mouth onto the other actors. Pacino gives you so many choices that you have to decide which way to go and obviously Michael decided with him. Once you figure this is the point of view we’re taking then it’s a matter of making that work. Sometimes it’s not matching itself which makes some problems.” There is a moment where an outrageous Pacino recruits the wide-eyed character played by Hank Azaria (The Bird Cage). “When he said, ‘You’ve got your head all the way up it.’ I think that is ad-libbed. In fact our first preview of that movie we had the whole film mounted on a platter ready to screen. We had a run through and it was all ready. Michael decided it was too much and big; he wanted to put in another cutaway. We had to drive all the way back to Santa Monica to find the right cutaway, take the film out, drive all the way to Pasadena, take out the platter, insert the reaction shot and load it backup again. We were barely ready for the preview.”
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A bone-chilling scene transition which is aided by the sound effects centres on the psychotic Waingro who goes from killing a hooker in a hotel room to having a drink in a bar. “There is a cut where it goes from him grabbing her neck and the bottle cap coming off. I have never been more freaked out by a bottle opening. When I made that cut it was like, ‘Whoa!’ It worked as a metaphor for what just happened. That was pre-designed.” Timing the length of the two shots was critical. “You want to get the right out frames and in point. It is amazing in a spot like that how a frame or two one way or the other can make it better or worse.” As the project wore on the newest member of the editorial team became responsible for sequences originally handled by his colleagues. “I ended inheriting a lot of the movie because Tom left and then the hours were so unbelievable. I worked so many 24 hours days in that movie I couldn’t even count them. Because of me being fresher I was enabled to inherit more of the movie because we were all dying and maybe I was dying a little less.”
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“We had a short post and were up against a Christmas release,” states William Goldenberg. “The incredible amount of hours we worked on that movie, between 25 to 30 assistants, four then three editors, and an unbelievably quick turnaround with the screening schedules. It was logistically so exhausting. My first day on that movie was the last day of shooting.” Contemplating his contributions on Heat, Goldenberg remarks, “I’m proud of all of it – the shootout of course and the ending. The scene where De Niro is with Amy Brenneman and he is driving and going through all these tunnels and the light is so beautiful. You see in his face he can’t let it go. He has to go back and get this guy. I love that moment. It is more about De Niro’s phenomenal acting at that moment. It was probably because it was the first scene I did. I always remember there was one point where I showed Michael the first cut, he gave me notes and said, ‘Okay.’ Fairly positive. I recut it. I added or changed the music. It goes all the way from when De Niro enters the hotel [with all of these great points of views that Michael shot and the way he shot them it was special] to the point where he shoots Waingro in the head. I remember running it through with Michael and at the end of it we stopped. It was a Lightworks. It wasn’t even an Avid. He banged his hand on the desk and went, ‘That’s just what I want.’ Then he walked out of the room. I remember like it was yesterday. I felt somehow I had made him that happy. I knew I would remember that for the rest of my life.”
Many thanks to William Goldenberg for taking the time for this interview.
Michael Mann Retrospective
Stranger Than Fiction: William Goldenberg talks about Argo
Recruited: William Goldenberg talks about Zero Dark Thirty
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.
“Michael is great with music,” notes William Goldenberg. “I worked on Heat [1995], Ali, The Insider and Miami Vice [2006]. He has a unique ability to do something new musically every time. Michael is not a musician; he’s a musical guy. He is always looking at it a bit differently. There were times I would say, ‘We could go from here to here.’ And he’d say, ‘That would be the easy way.’ Michael would want to do it in a way that no one had seen before or in this case the music. He wants to push the envelope every time and doesn’t want to fall back on doing it the typical or easy way. Michael wants to do something different andspecial every single time. The drive to be able to do that is unrelenting and can also be exhausting.” As for dealing with filmmakers like Michael Mann who compose their own scripts compared to those who do not, Goldberg remarks, “In a general statement I would say I prefer working with writer-directors because they seem to know the screenplay in a way that no one else could; they’re so inside them and know why every line exists in that screenplay and the history of that line and how many different versions of that line until they got to the right version. You feel like there’s a depth of knowledge between the director and the screenplay that you don’t have when the director doesn’t write the screenplay. That being said Kathryn [Bigelow] and Ben [Affleck] didn’t write those two scripts [Zero Dark Thirty, Argo] but they seem to understand the story they were telling.”
“I got involved with Heat by a few lucky pieces of coincidence,” reveals William Goldenberg. “I had edited a movie called Citizen X [1995] for HBO that my friend Chris Gerolmo, who is the guy who wrote Mississippi Burning [1988], had directed and written; Michael in the middle of making Heat happened to turn on the television, watched and loved it. Michael was looking for another editor to go onto Heat and called Chris. Chris said great things about me and Michael hired me.” Four film editors were involved with assembling the big screen version of the TV movie L.A. Takedown (1989). “Tom Rolf [The Right Stuff] who was one of the three had to leave due to prior commitment so I was brought on to take his spot, not that I could ever replace Tom Rolf, he’s a phenomenal editor.” In regards to how the work was divided editorially among him, Rolf, Pasquale Buba (Day of the Living Dead), and Dov Hoenig (Dark City), Goldenberg remarks, “Everybody is working on a scene and when that particular area is done they’re ready for a new one. Some of it is as simple as that. Some it is that Michael will think that one editor is better suited for a particular scene for whatever reason and will say, ‘Why don’t you take that?’ As the first cut is completed he’ll divide it up into larger sections which makes sense because you don’t want one editor to have a scene and another editor has the next scene. You want larger stretches of narrative for it to become cohesive.” Multiple storylines had to be told. “We did as much as we can. We all watched the movie together and can comment. ‘We’re having problems in this area.’ You rely on Michael at that point to be a supervising editor to hold it all together and fortunately for us, he has the capacity for that.”
“The first day of that movie I only had three screen credits,” recalls William Goldenberg. “I had cut Citizen X, The Puppet Masters [1994] and had done co-editing with Michael Kahn on Alive [1993]. Then I got hired to be on Heat and it was one of those things where I remember seeing [Robert] De Niro [Goodfellas] and Al Pacino [Dog Day Afternoon] at the Oscars that year to give award together because they were working on Heat. I thought to myself that maybe in 10 years I’ll have enough experience to work on a movie like that and a couple of months later I was on the movie. I sat there in the editing room looking at footage with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Val Kilmer [Tombstone] and Jon Voight [Midnight Cowboy]. I thought I was having heart palpitations. For the first couple of hours I couldn’t even work because I was so overwhelmingly nervous but then I settled in. I remember thinking, ‘This is like a dream.’” The initial assignment was to piece together the dramatic finale that begins with a fateful phone conversation and ends with L.A. Robbery Homicide Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Pacino) having a deadly confrontation with professional thief Neil McCauley (De Niro). “The first thing I cut on Heat was when Robert De Niro has Amy Brenneman [Daylight] in the car and they’re driving to go the plane that is waiting for them. De Niro finds out where Waingro [Kevin Gage] is and can’t help himself; he goes back to the hotel to kill Waingro and everything falls apart. Pacino spots and chases him through the airport, and kills De Niro.”
“The biggest challenge for that was the moment when De Niro runs into this area with little cement structures and ends up hiding behind one of them for a final showdown with Pacino,” explains William Goldenberg. “The moment from when he runs and hides behind one of the structures to when the planes are going over you see him get the idea of using the distraction of the plane going over and the lights coming on to make his move to jump out from behind the buildings to try to kill Pacino was difficult. You’re getting across a lot of story where there is no dialogue. Choosing what cement structure to hide behind, getting the idea of the lights going on, having Pacino seeing his shadow and kill De Niro before De Niro kills him. Getting all of that across with no words was difficult and was also a mind-fuck because you go, ‘I get it. But will anyone else get it?’ We worked hard on that right up to the end.”
A lot of the hype surrounding around Heat was generated by Al Pacino and Robert De Niro performing with each other for the first time; rather than have the two actors duel with guns, Michael Mann decided that a restaurant table discussion was the best setting. “We were excited by all of it but that scene we felt really special because we were the first ones to see it,” remembers William Goldenberg. “The interesting thing about that scene is Michael’s original idea was that he didn’t want to play any of the dialogue off-camera. He wanted every line to be on camera, nothing overlaps. The first version I saw of the scene was like that. Michael said, ‘I like this take for this one and this take for this one.’ There was a lot of cutting back and forth and went around to another performance. There would be short cutaways in order not to play anything off-camera and it was not great. It was a great assembly of these amazing performances that didn’t go together into a scene. Tom Rolf, came in, I’ll never forget. We were the only two editors in on a Saturday with a small crew with us and in five or six hours Tom took the scene, reworked it, and it was like magic from where it was to what it ended up.” Goldberg states, “There were 12 or 14 takes of the overs using two cameras with one on De Niro and one on Pacino. Just over the shoulders that slowly push in. I believe the bulk of the scene is from take 12. There are some other takes in there but mostly take 12. Tom did such a beautiful job. 95 per cent of what Tom did in that afternoon is what’s in the movie.”
Michael Mann Retrospective
Stranger Than Fiction: William Goldenberg talks about Argo
Recruited: William Goldenberg talks about Zero Dark Thirty
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada.