In the Netflix feature Frankenstein, Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro adapts Mary Shelley’s classic tale of Victor Frankenstein, the brilliant but egotistical scientist who brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment.
Oscar Isaac plays the scientist, who creates ‘The Creature’ (played by Jacob Elordi), whose very existence provokes questions about what it means to be a human or a monster. This sprawling epic takes viewers from the remote reaches of the Arctic to the bloody battlefields of 19th-century Europe. In addition to Isaac and Elordi, the film also stars Mia Goth as the beautiful and intellectual Elizabeth, who is passionate about the natural world, and Christoph Waltz as Heinrich Harlander, the financier of Victor's work.
Editor Evan Schiff (Pan’s Labyrinth,
Hellboy II: The Golden Army,
Nobody) has worked with the filmmaker in the past and actively expressed interest in collaborating with him on this project. Here, Schiff (pictured) shares details about his meeting with del Toro, his editing set up and some of the film's most challenging scenes.
Evan, how did you come to work on this feature?
“I was an assistant editor on Pan's Labyrinth and
Hellboy II, but then there was a big gap between the end of
Hellboy II and the beginning of
Frankenstein, where I never actually saw Guillermo in person in that time. We kept in touch - very infrequently - every few years. He followed me on Twitter, and we had some DMs now and then when we were in the same city. On this one, I heard that he was looking for an editor and I went through the usual channels with my agents, talking to his producer J. Miles Dale. But at as soon as that contact was made, I DM'd him on Twitter and I was like, ‘Hey, I just want you to know I'm in your I'm in your stack of resumes, but like I would love to go back and work with you again, and this time be able to edit for you.’ And he got back to me instantly and said, ‘Oh yeah. I see your name, just send me your contact info.’
“Very shortly after that I had a script, I had a meeting on the books and I showed up for the meeting. I had done all the prep that I could. I waited for him to finish another meeting and he stepped out in the hallway and his assistant was like, ‘You have an editor to interview.’ He looked down and he was like, ‘Oh, hey Evan! Yeah, you're hired!' And then he grabbed his stuff and he left. The whole interaction was like a minute, maybe, tops.”
Tell us about how you prepare for a meeting? Is it a matter of reading the script, or is there more to it?
“It's a variety of things. Obviously, I keep up on everything Guillermo does, so that's not part of my prep because I've already done it. But I read the scripts multiple times. Try to get the characters and events and plot points and themes and everything memorized so that I am not fumbling if in a conversation to refer to a specific thing that he's written in the script. But also, it's reading Mary Shelley's ‘Frankenstein’ and getting a copy of the book that has the Bernie Wrightson imagery in it so that I can see maybe what his visual inspiration is going to be. Of course there's plenty of Frankensteins that have come before this one. And so I picked a few. The Universal ones, obviously, and the 1956 Curse of Frankenstein and
Young Frankenstein. It's useful. I mean, his research goes decades back and is very detailed, so you try to in every instance be able to like hang with him. It's really familiarizing yourself with both what he wants to do and what may have inspired him, and what things he might just like cherry pick from along the way as he's creating his own version of it.”
When did you start seeing footage? Were you working alongside production?
“Editing is very, very important to Guillermo, so much so that he shows up in my office every day before the shoot day starts and we work for two hours. So on this one, I started as I usually do - I started on day one of principal photography. And then we're cutting every day, making sure that we're caught up to camera. Where this movie changed a little bit from a normal process is that he wants to be able to walk on-set on Tuesday morning with a copy on his laptop of what he shot on Monday.
“Normally, they would shoot Monday, Tuesday. We would come in and we'd have the whole day to put together the scenes and put temp sound and music, and then send it to him at the end of the day. In this case, if call was 8am, then I was getting to the office at like 4am to get a head start. And then he would come in at 6am and we would cut for two hours. That way, by the time that the next shoot day started, if there was anything that needed to change, any modification he wanted to make or a shot he wanted to go back and get, he knew that. That was a very efficient use of time for him, to be able to just have this immediate feedback loop of, ‘I shot this Monday, and by Tuesday morning at 8am, I've got it already edited and put into the reels.’”
Where was the shoot taking place and where was editorial set up?
“So this movie, there were kind of two-and-a-half parts of the shoot. There was the part in Toronto, which was about four months, and that was all of our stage work, and a tiny little bit of exterior location work for the forests. Then, after that, we had a month-long shoot just outside of London for our miniatures. And we got a lot of editing time done during that actually, because a miniature shoot, as I've now learned…is very slow.”
“They'll take all day to set up a :15 shot. But that means that we've got all day to edit together. And then after that month-long miniature shoot, we went to Scotland and had a six-week road trip, where every week we were in a different part of Scotland, shooting in an estate house or a mansion or in the city of Edinburgh.
“For Toronto, I had just a regular office in the production office. And then for the Scotland shoot, I had a trailer, and my assistant editor and I would drive around, and they tow the trailer from location to location, literally park it as close to Guillermo – as close to the set - as possible. 'Cause he would come in before set. If he had a free 30 minutes while they were like setting up the next shot, he would come in…so he just always wanted us very close.”
What were you using for an editing system and storage? Were you using cloud storage at all, or was it all local?
“No. We didn't have any cloud storage. We're cutting on Avid Media Composer. When we were in Toronto, we had a NEXIS that was on-site. And then it got a little bit more complicated when we went to the UK, because the visual effect vendor and the visual effects editor that worked at that vendor was still in Toronto, and we had to make sure that he could get the shots that we were turning over. So we had a little NAS box - a Synology or a QNAP - that we would drag along with us in Scotland. And then at the end of the night in the hotel, we would sync that back to the NEXIS in Toronto so that our turnovers and everything would all match up.”
The film is well over two hours and there are a number of chapters. Were you working across sections?
“I remember…it was definitely like a little bit here, a little bit there. I think one of the most interesting things for me is when we have a cut that goes from like a location - a real house in Scotland - to a set in Toronto, that are supposed to be the same place. Or we go from the batteries falling down the shaft. That's a miniature shot when you're up top and you're seeing the batteries falling. And then it goes to a live-action shot in Toronto, which is the shot that Jacob is actually in when the battery crashes. It was not linear in any means. I just had a bunch of title cards that were placeholders until we got those scenes in. And by the time that we finished Toronto, we did have a good chunk of the ‘Victor’ section, and a good chunk of the ‘Creature’ section. We had enough to work on, but we were plugging holes right up until the last week of the shoot.”
You mention the ‘Victor’ and ‘Creature’ sections, which play as different chapters. Was there a lot of back and forth?
“Day to day and week to week, we were bouncing from chapter to chapter. But the way that I had myself organized was, I had a sequence for the Victor section and I had a sequence for the Creature section. And only when we got into post did I divide that back up into the usual reels. I just found it easier ,mentally, to like be like, ‘Okay, we've got Victor footage today, so let me open up the Victor section.’”
You mentioned using placeholders. When did you start seeing visual effects?
“So Dennis Berardi is a visual effect supervisor, also is the owner of Herne Hill, which was our primary vendor, so they had a bunch of assets they had already created before the shoot started. We actually got temps back within 24 or 48 hours of shots that we had just turned over.”
Previs-type stuff?
“Yeah, previs-type stuff, but very high quality previs-type stuff. I mean, they built these environments for doing the extensions at the top of the tower, and the creation scene, or adding the mountains in the back and the blind-man section. All of that stuff, they had assets ready to go. So then it was just a matter of how quickly can they do the roto or the keying? But they did it. The benefit to having the actual vendor that's going to be doing the shots working on doing the temps is that it's there, ready to go, and they've got a team of people, so all those shots got turned around much faster than if we were just doing it in editorial.”
What resolution were you working at?
“I mean we still work in HD. I've done one show where I did UHD, but I didn't feel like that it was worth some of the extra processing time that comes down the line. We still work with just Avid DNx115 HD dailies. Company 3 was our dailies vendor, so they would take the camera masters and they would transcode for us. And then in the morning in Toronto, they would just automatically download onto our server. And then when we were in Scotland, we had somebody from Company 3 that was driving around Scotland with us. I actually never met this person because we were on such opposite hours that while they were working, we were sleeping, and when we were working, they were sleeping. We would just like silently pass off a hard drive through the like hotel reception sometimes or the unit drivers.”
Editorially, what are some of the scenes that you see as highlights?
“I have a few that I'm proud of for different reasons. The one for me is the ‘forgiveness’ scene at the very end, which is the culmination of the whole movie that you've just watched. The whole history behind these characters and their relationship to each other. For me, seeing people's reaction to watching that scene. Oftentimes their reaction is to start to tear up. That's very satisfying. I feel like that's how we know that we nailed the emotion in that scene. Obviously, Oscar and Jacob did stellar work and we just put it together. But it really is a sign of the movie functioning as it's designed to.”
You’re right about that being such an important scene and them coming face to face.
“That's about Guillermo putting his own spin on Frankenstein and making this really his version. Having the creature forgive Victor is a Guillermo del Toro addition to the story. I think that feeling is so cathartic when it happens. These guys have been pursuing each other. They've been at odds with each other, and now they get to reconcile in a very bittersweet way, but it’s also a very heartfelt and emotional way.”
Which scenes were some of the more complicated to assemble?
“The wolf attack scene. That's fairly challenging simply because we don't have the wolves. We did actually shoot with real wolves, but never within the same shot as an actor. We had wolves come in and they took them through all the motions to provide lighting and texture reference and things like that, but you're not going to put Jacob Elordi in a house with six wolves. So there are just guys with like puppet heads, and guys in blue spandex suits running around. More so than any of the dialog scenes, that requires imagination, coordination and committing early to what that scene is going to be, because it takes so long to get the visual effects back. Editorially, we have to put it together with confidence that this is how we want the scene to go, so that we can then get ILM to start working on it.”
What's next for you?
“I'm on a small little project right now, but I'm looking for the next full film.”