Jabez Olssen on Editing “Rogue One”
By Jim Bask
ART OF THE CUT WITH JABEZ OLSSEN ON EDITING “ROGUE ONE”
Jabez Olssen has had a career any editor would be envious of, from his first assistant editor gig on Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. He also edited The Lovely Bones, all three Hobbit movies and, most recently, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. And as an additional editor got to work with the legendary editor, Michael Kahn, for director Steven Spielberg, editing The Adventures of Tintin.
Jabez Olssen is one of the editors of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story; along with John Gilroy and Colin Goudie.
Hullfish: Tell me a little bit about the schedule for Rogue One.
Olssen: I started on the film about a week before the shoot began, which was in July of 2015. We shot at Pinewood Studios in London. The shoot went to the end of 2015 and during that time editorial was also based at Pinewood, and then once we moved into post production we moved into central London, SoHo, for the cut.
Hullfish: Did you cut at a post house?
Olssen: Yeah, dry hire cutting rooms that were owned by Hireworks, the Avid rental company we used. There were other projects also editing on the same floor so, you know, we got to intermingle with other films and TV show, which is quite unusual and it meant we had to be extra careful with our security.
Hullfish: I bet. I’m surprised they had you in that environment, and not some place totally locked down.
Olssen: Of course we had many locked doors and swipe card access into every layer of the corridors.
Hullfish: So, on a film of this scale were you trying to keep up with camera or did you have so much stuff as production was happening that that was really not possible?
Olssen: Keeping up with camera was very difficult, but we were able to do it within a week or two. I worked a couple of extra weeks over the Christmas break just to get the editor’s assembly pulled together. One of the interesting things, for me, was that our director Gareth operated the camera for most of the shoot. And that gave him a lot of freedom to find the shots in the moment. So the footage was a lot more like a documentary shoot; in that Take 1 might be a wide shot looking in one direction and Take 2 could be a close up looking in the other direction, which gave the script continuity person a hell of a job, and was an interesting adventure for us in editorial too because the coverage was not the standard set-ups you normally get. We might find a beautiful little moment, towards the end of Take 8 which was not covered anywhere else. It was really exciting, but meant that the cutting was not quick. It was a lot of work.
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