Interview: Steve Hullfish, ACE
Steve has worked in the industry for decades as an editor for both fiction and non-fiction films. He hosts of the insightful podcast, The Art of Cut and also has published a book by the same name.
He was gracious enough to answer a few questions via email about his approach to documentaries. (Edited slightly for clarity.)
What is your first step when you start working on a new documentary?
Organization. And by that, I’m talking about organizing in a NUMBER of ways. The first is HOW should I organize? Should I organize chronologically? By topic? By character?
Then, I want to think of all of the aspects of the story and figure out POSSIBLY how the entire story should be organized. This is usually done with cards on a wall. Each beat or scene on a different card, possibly color coded.
Then, you just have to START someplace in the actual edit. This usually means picking a scene and cutting a scene, whether this is a verite moment or a story beat told in interviews by multiple people, then “covered” in b-roll. Then you just have to keep editing “story beats” or “scenes” together until you have enough that you can start piecing those together, back-to-back into a documentary.
Then the REAL work begins. Swapping the order, trimming the whole thing down, killing your babies. Finding a GREAT starting scene or image and another great ending scene or image.
How do you find the backbone, or the through line, of a documentary?
Usually I spend long enough on a project that I tell the story of the documentary VERBALLY to many people while I’m working. It’s almost like a comedian auditioning material for standup routines.
You begin to see what people respond to and what YOU are leaning into as WHICH story beats to tell and in WHAT ORDER. How would I tell this story around a campfire? How would I tell this story in an elevator ride? How would I tell this story to my Uber driver in a ten minute car ride?
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?
I’m working on a documentary now that I started with my father - who has since passed away. The story is interesting - about a dog put on trial for murder - but the documentary evidence is minimal.
Then my father told me that Paramount News had supposedly covered the event but nobody had ever seen the footage since it was first shown in newsreels in the 1930s. That got my detective antennae up and I started doing some research.
Within a few hours I had tracked down the footage to a fireproof vault in LA. It completely changed the documentary.
The biggest twist I’ve ever personally talked to anyone about was on the Navalny documentary. In that one, they recorded this long-shot phone call of Navalny calling a Russian spy pretending to be ANOTHER Russian spy or spy boss and getting an actual CONFESSION that the Russian government had ACTUALLY poisoned him!
How do you create emotional connection with the audience in a documentary?
Storytelling skills, I think… people are affected emotionally by good storytelling. You can have a great “topic” but it’s how you tell the story that creates the connection.
Choosing the right moments. Showing truth. Building the story in the most effective way. Telling it quickly enough that the audience isn’t bored.
What was the most recent thing you learned and added your tool kit?
Probably Google docs/Sheets and other web-based organizational and collaboration tools like Miro and Trello. Even FinalDraft now has ways to share collaboratively with things like research and story cards.
What do you wish other filmmakers knew about the editing/shooting/etc process?
Hold the damn shot. When you want to press the “STOP RECORD” button, breathe, count to three slowly… is anything else happening? No? Count to three again THEN hit stop.
For DPs, get different SHOT SIZES. Get different angles. Get “pickup” shots. Get “color” shots. Pixels are cheap. Possibly mic the camera operator… if they see something cool or that they loved, whisper a quiet.”COOL!"
What project in your filmography are you the most proud, and why?
Probably The Oprah Winfrey Show. We did some very good work (we, the editors) and I worked very hard. It’s a high profile show known for excellence.
What documentary has impacted or inspired you the most?
I have three favorite documentaries: Tim’s Vermeer, The Battered Bastards of Baseball, and Dealt. I also LOVE the editing of the Beckham TV doc series. Of all of them, Tim’s Vermeer is my favorite for the storytelling. It’s a crazy story of a guy painting a copy of a Vermeer, but it’s told as a detective story - directed by Penn and Teller!
How do you decide what projects to work on?
Lately, whatever pays the damn bills! With my documentary about the dog on trial for murder, it was a way to honor my father, who I knew was dying and had worked very hard to write a book about the case. So I wanted to create a documentary as a kind of monument to my father. He died within a few weeks of the book being published.
What’s up next for you, and how can people see your work?
I’m hoping that the next project for me will be a new movie based on the character of LarryBoy from VeggieTales. That is a Universal Studios project. It’s currently in the development stage.
I’m also proud of the documentary short that I did almost two decades ago that I created JUST for my family about our Guinness World Record Breaking cross country bicycle trip. I shot it back in the standard-def 4:3 days myself (I am NOT a great DP). But I love the writing and the story. You can see it here.
I made a sizzle reel trying to pitch it as a feature film that can be seen here.
And I produced, directed, wrote and edited this story that later became a studio feature film (The Senior).
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