Editing took nine weeks.
We worked in a suite in Burbank packed floor to ceiling with computers. Keyboards and control faces with spherical scrubbing controls (that's what's used to rewind and fast forward in a high-end editing environment). I started out in a chair beside the editor. I calibrated the monitors at the beginning of each session because apparently a barista from Portland has a better sense of color than an experienced Hollywood editor—I just have an eye for these things.
They'd make fun of me for my precision but I'm not about to edit when the monitors aren't even calibrated. You know how ambient light affects how colors look? Well, it goes even deeper than that, and if the colors aren't calibrated to the room you're editing in, then when they show them on a movie screen or an HD TV in someone's living room, it's not going to look right. Calibrating those monitors was absolutely necessary.
I'd start out in the chair. Pull a bottle of Jack Daniel's out of my messenger bag with the reflective strip on it, and soon I'd be lying on the floor underneath the editing bay, giving directions based only on the sound of the clips we were cutting together.
Then I'd be incoherent and Kristi would take over. By the end of the day, I'd go out for tacos and bring everyone back food, then Kristi and Kyler would show me what we had cut together that day. I could trust Kristi. Kyler was good technically but he didn't have the eye, you know, the emotional center required to make a cut. They say the best reason to make a cut is because of the emotional impact it creates. Kristi had that. I had it. We had to tell Kyler every cut to make.
After nine weeks, though, everything was done but the sound. They call that picture lock, which means after that point you won't make any changes to the shots, the color, the visual editing. Only then does the work on the sound begin.
Sound is little understood, a black art in Hollywood. It is under-appreciated. Only now are there starting to be specialty schools that teach it. The mixer on my set told me that if you're in a scary movie and you need a break, don't close your eyes—cover your ears, as it's the sound which creates the feeling that you're there, more than the picture.
I'm not going to go into the whole post-production process for my film.
I'm just going to tell you that every day we worked on it, it got better and better, and I got to a point where I was so proud of what I had done at Warner Bros that I didn't care if we sold a single ticket. It was that good. I know you're not supposed to brag about your own stuff but it was that good.
What I am going to tell you about is a day Kristi and I spent by her pool. We swam and drank Jameson even though you're not supposed to mix alcohol and swimming we found they mixed quite well.
There was this one snapshot I remember, of Kristi lying next to me and she was wearing these huge black sunglasses with white rims and she was talking but I couldn't hear her words, just saw her young lips and thought about the script she had let me read and I also thought how this person was going to have a long life ahead of her possibly making movies and I imagined her skin aging oh so slowly and someday Kristi turning into an old woman. I wished that for her.
And then her volume gradually came up and I heard the words she was saying and what she was saying was:
"..and I had this vision of us at your premier in complimentary—not matching, but complimentary—dresses and you finally got to talk to Marty Scorsese and you were joking with him about eating your pussy and I was cracking up but of course Marty didn't get it because he hadn't been privy to the joke's inception and we'll have champagne—"
"I hate champagne."
"Well drink some anyway, sourpuss. You're just mad 'cause you got ripped off on your first film but let me tell you something, old woman: everyone gets ripped off on their first film. You have to pay your dues."
"Stop calling me old woman."
"Ok, 40 years young woman, how's that?"
"It's better, but not much. Respect your director."
"I respect the wisdom and veneration that can only be attained with age—"
"Kristi I'm gonna toss you in that pool. In the shallow end so you scrape your back and need steel pins."
"Who's a grumpy director?"
"I'm not a director anymore. Movie's over. Not a director."
"No. Movies never go away. Your name's attached to it forever."
"That's what scares me."
Kristi sits up.
"Your movie is one of the best first movies I've ever seen."
"I don't even take that as a backhanded compliment."
"You shouldn't. Look at anyone's first movie. You'll get a real sense of genius, if there's genius there. And you'll get rough edges—you'll get raw—and that's something that's very hard not to lose as you make more product. Look at any artist. When they stop making mistakes is when their art is dead. When it gets too flashy, when it gets too perfect. Keep it guttah, keep it grimy—that's what Busta Rhymes says. You did that, L, you did it big time. Have you ever heard of the mistake doctrine?"
"No."
"It says that it's not possible not to make mistakes. They key is making the right ones."
"How did you become a philosopher of art so early?"
"I pay attention."
"No shit."
"Lauren, have another Jameson. This is a pool party, not a bitch session. You did it right. Now relax."