The feature Mercy is set in the near future, where a detective (Chris Pratt) is on trial for the murder of his wife. His case is being judged by an AI-powered judicial system that will determine his guilt or innocence based on the proof he assembles using a combination of digital information taken from cameras, cell phones and databases. Rebecca Ferguson plays the AI judge overseeing the timed trial, which will reach a verdict after just 90 minutes.
Lam T. Nguyen, ACE, and Austin Keeling served as editors on the project and recently shared insight into their work.
Photo (L-R): Austin Keeling, Chris Pratt and Lam T. Nguyen
How did you come to work on Mercy?
Lam T. Nguyen, ACE: "I worked on a previous project called R#J, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and won the Adobe Best Editing Award at the 2021 SXSW Festival. Timur Bekmambetov and Majd Nassif were the producers of that film. They both reached out to me to get me involved in Mercy, which was my first project working with Timur as a director.”
Austin Keeling: “I had worked on the screenlife thriller Searching (2018) during the localization process, and from that experience I was hired to edit the sequel film, Missing (2023). Both films were produced by Timur Bekmambetov’s company Bazalevs, which is how my name came up when they were looking for editors for Mercy.”
Tell us a bit about your editing setup and workflow.
Lam T. Nguyen, ACE: “Austin and I were brought onto the project very early on. During pre-production, we created a previs of the film within three weeks. Timur and the production team used this previs as a guide during production, and we were heavily involved in the process while we did rolling edits during filming.
“We used Adobe Premiere Pro and established a workflow that allowed us to seamlessly switch between each other’s sequences. We created a digital camera effect in Premiere Pro using the adjustment layer. This allowed us to manipulate multiple screens at once, creating the visual elements and movements you see in the film. We also want to give a shoutout to Dody Dorn, who joined the project late in the process. All three of us learned each other’s techniques and worked seamlessly between our timelines. It was an awesome and memorable experience.”
Austin Keeling: “Lam and I joined the team very early on, and were immediately tasked with creating a previs of the film using temp graphics, stock footage, storyboards and a recorded table read of Chris Pratt performing the script. We worked with Timur to experiment and test out new ideas, constantly tweaking the previs all the way up until principal photography began, at which point we started to replace the temp elements with dailies.
“Lam and I had never worked together before, but we were thrilled to discover that our organizational preferences, workflow techniques, and overall editing mindsets were completely in sync with one another. We used Adobe Premiere Pro so that we could make complex changes quickly in the editing room with Timur. For every POV shot looking at Judge Maddox, we created a wide master that layered all the elements together — the background, blue-screen footage of Rebecca Ferguson, the timer and guilt meter — and the various screens and documents floating around in the courtroom. Once this wide was complete, we used an adjustment layer to create a ‘digital camera’ that allowed us to zoom in and focus on specific details, and use animated keyframes to ‘look around’ the room. On top of this, we manually added a blur effect to the elements to create a rack focus as Chris looks from one thing to another. These framing, animation and depth of focus decisions were all meticulously dialed in during the editing process, and ultimately turned over to the incredible VFX team to recreate in final form.”
What scenes would you point to as highlights?
Lam T. Nguyen: “One of my favorite scenes is the house investigation scene. We worked closely with the VFX team at every stage of the edit. Timur shot some extreme macro footage of the house, capturing all the evidence. He wanted to blend digital technology with practical footage, so he envisioned going in and out of what the AI is doing to interpret the footage. Austin and I did a lot of that in the edit using stock visual effects, and animated these effects in the edit to express the visual experience. Axel Bonami, our amazing VFX supervisor, and the entire VFX team elevated the entire scene to be interactive and cinematic. It was so awesome to see that sequence come together from beginning to end. A truly immersive moment for the audience.”
Austin Keeling: “The truck chase sequence was a wild challenge. The scene had to track a speeding truck on a complex route through downtown Los Angeles, while also interspersing an investigation sequence as Chris’s character looks for clues. Trying to juggle a detective sequence with an action sequence was a lot of work, and the scene went through countless iterations before finally ending up in its locked state. At one point the sequence was approximately 27-minutes long, whereas the final sequence lands somewhere between 11 and 12 minutes. This was one of the most technically-complex scenes in the edit, with screens showing footage from body cams, dash cams, news broadcasts, helicopters and drones, all interspersed with documents, photographs, filing systems and archival footage as Chris digs through the available evidence. There were a lot of layers to keep track of in our timelines!”