Prakshi, our valiant editor, finished the Assembly Cut in mid-May. This was the cut that Lowell said only Prakshi, Lowell, and I would ever see - the very first, baby deer legs version of the movie, with options laid out and each scene getting a first pass at a cut.
But, I did sneak in one extra person to see this cut. For my birthday in April, I invited a few friends to get on Netflix Party, which allows you to sync up Netflix and chat in a chat bar with people in different homes. It’s the perfect quarantine friendship activity! We watched Circus of Books, a queer documentary I had seen at the All Genders, Lifestyles, and Identities Film Festival. But Laura Gonzalez (our Hair & Makeup Artist and Assistant Costume Designer on Hal) and I loved it so much, we started watching weekly movies on Netflix party.
So when a new cut of Hal came in, I couldn’t help but ask Laura if she’d like to watch it with me. We didn’t have Netflix Party (because we’re not on Netflix……. yet), so we used an app called Discord to communicate while we watched Prakshi’s Google Drive upload of the very first version of the movie.
I have a very practiced rough cut speech, both for myself and for others who aren’t used to seeing rough drafts of films. I remember the very first time I saw a rough cut. It was for my first short film, “Welcome Baby Anderson.” My friend Paul had shot, lit, and edited the short for me (I have been extremely lucky in my filmmaking friends and mentors).
When Paul showed me the first cut, I couldn’t believe how horrible it was. It was just a bunch of random footage - it wasn’t a movie. I had to hide my obvious despair from Paul, who had worked hard on the cut.
But with each cut Paul turned over, it looked more like a movie. Finally, I figured out that it wasn’t that Paul had put together a singularly horrible rough cut of a film. My despair came about because I had never seen a rough draft of a film before.
I am absolutely used to the fact that my first draft of a script is always complete garbage and should never be shown to anyone. But I hadn’t learned this about rough cuts yet.
I had another lesson to learn the first time I had a film go through sound mixing and color correction. This time it was the short film version of “Addict Named Hal.” These finishing artists, so easy to forget to budget for, really turned our story into a film.
I reminded myself of all of this before viewing the Hal assembly in its entirety. I had seen it all in chunks - I was following along as Prakshi worked and keeping meticulous notes. But sitting down to view it was another story.
I gave a similar speech to Laura. Even though Laura’s worked on plenty of film sets, she rarely sees rough cuts, since her job is all in production and pre-production. I (maybe obsessively, maybe defensively) made sure she knew there would be shots that didn’t match, scenes that weren’t shaped, performances that we would sculpt, and bad sound (including a couple scenes where you can hear me call “action”).
My favorite line in my rough cuts speech is always: “You know how people say ‘we’ll fix it in post’? Well, this isn’t the part of post where we fix it.”
Maybe it was because of all the rough cut speeches, maybe it was because I’ve now seen plenty of rough cuts, or maybe it was because we have lovely camerawork with strong performances and an editor with great instincts. But one way or another, I enjoyed watching the assembly. It had a long way to go, of course - but the movie was there. The story was there. The characters were there.
And back into the editing room we went.
