Q&A: Steve Audette, ACE
Steve Audette, ACE is an award-winning editor and worked with Frontline for over three decades, in addition to many other documentaries series and films.
He now enjoys retired life aboard his sailboat with his wife. He was gracious enough to answer a few questions via email. (Edited slightly for clarity.)
What is your first step when you start working on a new film?
Well, in the old days, I used to watch tapes as they became digital media on hard drives. It was a real-time process, and I felt like I could watch and get a sense of a person as the interview was digitizing. I could watch the B-Roll as it was being sub-clipped and digitized.
In modern times with assistant editors I miss that part of the process, so for the first day of a film, I will kind of hopscotch around and look at various characters and try to get a sense of their demeanor, their personality their position in the documentary; a kind of gut-feeling of what it is they are in the film. I’ll do the same with B-Roll, looking for sequences of shots, things I can put together that tell a story just visually and that’ll take a day or so on a big documentary.
I then sit down with the producers and the director to get a sense of what they are looking for from the film, what it is they think the story is. I then discuss the various scenes I’ve watched and the various interview pieces that piqued my interest.
Together we discussed the overall broad strokes of the narrative structure of the film as they see it; beginning, middle end, kind of stuff. this of course will all change once we get into the meat of the narrative - into the meat of the footage that has been captured. The truth is always in the footage.
How do you find the backbone, or the through line, of a documentary?
Chronology is your best friend when cutting a documentary my first pass is always to assemble the chronology of the events that make up the story. Once I have that established, I can see how to maximize the drama of that narrative and make the film as compelling as is journalistically possible.
Specifically, once I’m intimately familiar with the chronology, I can rearrange the narrative and push certain scenes into a “backstory“ the goal is to always start a documentary as late into the story as possible. No lingering. Get to it and get on with it.
Documentaries can throw curveballs at you at any time. What is an unexpected twist that stands out to you in your career, and how did you respond?
There are two big kinds of curveballs when cutting a documentary. The first is something you think you know about a film that isn’t true and you have to modify your understanding of the film to accommodate the truth that is obviously portrayed in the footage. Sometimes that can be very hard for the crew, but it is essential to do so in the documentary form.
An example of this is the school shooter film about Kip Kinkle that I did with Frontline , we were sure that the film was about how this young man was all alone in his dementia, or schizophrenia that pushed him to shoot up a high school gym. In reality, it was a much more complicated story that included a tricky relationship with both his mother and his father. It was the combination of these relationships that drove Kip to madness. It was his own illness, plus the way his mother treated it, and the way his father reacted to it all that all contributed to the sadness. A good film that can be watched online.
The second curve ball that can happen in a documentary is when a scene blows up the film. An example of this is when I was cutting the 2015 Clinton/Trump choice film for Frontline. About 2/3 of the way into the film, there was a scene where Trump is being roasted by Barack Obama at the Washington Press Core Dinner. The scene was so full of meaning and purpose for Trump that it basically blew the film apart and you really didn’t care what came after it. Added to the problem, was that at this point in the historical timeline of the two candidates, there was no equivalent scene for Hillary Clinton. It felt VERY unbalanced.
We solved this problem by moving the Trump scene up to the front of the film and used it as part of a prologue where you could see the motivations of Trump to become president. To keep the balance, we cut to a scene that showed the motivations of Clinton to become president. The two scenes were not of the same chronological timeline, but they serve the same purpose of intent, so we could keep the balance of the film and move on to the historical documentary after the prologue.
How do you create an emotional connection with the audience in a documentary?
This is actually pretty easy, the secret is to love your characters. Love both your good characters and your bad characters. Treat them with respect and show them in the best light.
A specific technique is to let the person speaking finish a sentence with a full stop and pause don’t jump and cut away to whatever is the next scene or next shot or next interview bite. Let the person finish their bite and sit there for a moment. That physical silence speaks gobs of emotion to the audience. The audience is a sophisticated viewer and they will see the personality, the honesty, and the character of the speaker in those quiet moments.
Another technique is to not overcut a soundbite down between two cameras. It is jarring for the audience to have shots cutting back-and-forth on an interview just so that his/her sentence makes sense. The audience will understand a more elongated soundbite where they can perceive the person speaking, and by watching, get a sense of the person as they are speaking.
What project in your filmography are you the most proud, and why?
I think one of my favorite films that I ever worked on was early in my career. It is called “The Man Who Knew“ in that film the director, and I developed a kind of style that we later called “documentary noir.” A sort of “looking through the keyhole,” perspective of scenes that appeared behind closed doors leading to a deeper understanding of the motivations of people to do sometimes what was for the best, and sometimes for the worst. It’s a 90-minute film that I think can also be watched online. Its not a perfect film, but damn close.
What documentary has impacted or inspired you the most?
Lord, there have been so many. I like films that demonstrate deep access to the subject and the people involved. The Frontline film on Waco, which I did not cut, is a really good example of how having access to all the data, all the media, then sifting through all that, leads to the most compelling of documentary stories.
I also thought the series “The Staircase” by the French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade was also spectacular. Again because they had such tremendous access to the individuals, the protagonist in the story.
In the years just before I retired, I made two short documentaries, “Nico’s Challenge” and “The Nike Chariot Earring” with my wife. They were both inspired by a very short documentary. I once saw it while teaching at Boston University in the early 90s. The student made a very short film about an illegal moonshine proprietor way up in the mountains of Appalachia. The film couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes long, but it sticks with me to this day.
Looking back on your career, how have you seen documentary storytelling change?
YouTube and the use of the jump cuts in interviews. They work, it isn't filmic but I never care. It is its own form. I generally get physically disturbed when I watch bad cutting or storytelling in film, but somehow on YouTube, all is forgiven.
The same for the small screen, I always had a big-screen TV in my house and thought it was a prerequisite for watching films in general. Not anymore. I watch mostly on my iPhone or iPad. I don't even miss the 5.1 surround sound. Sick I know.
I also don't have the patience anymore to watch long films in one go. I pause and come back to them. I blame social media for that. All our attention spans are too short. I do miss that, but it is what it is. Who reads long books these days?
Finally, I'm reminded again back to my days teaching, all the film students wanted to shoot their thesis film on 35 stock. The cost was astronomical for these kids. I tried to tell them that “story” was the key, not the medium. I would point to Michael Moore’s documentary which was all shot on VHS, the weakest of all mediums. Yet many went in debt anyway.
I do very much like the democratization of documentaries whether that be podcasts or live streams, reels or ticktocks, the truth is always in the footage. Not in the presenting medium. I believe this will lead to a burgeoning collection of films that are important and will stand the test of time. I also completely trust viewers to be able to discern the wheat from the shaft in that morass.
Cutting film is an art that's only 100 years old. We have no idea what this art form can do yet. How good was painting or sculpture at a century? I'm very excited about the future.
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