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2016 Movie News Archives

April 12, 2016: Interview with "Batman v Superman" Editor David Brenner

Filming David Brenner, who has worked on films such as "Independence Day," "300: Rise of an Empire", and of course "Man of Steel", sat down for an interview with ProvideCoalition.com to discuss his work editing "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice", having so much material to work with, and having to cut down the movie from a four hour cut. Here's part of the interview...

    Q: About half of the editors I've talked to like to create selects reels... maybe a bit more than half. Everybody's got their process. One of the things that struck me about this story - and many stories - but this one in particular - was the intercutting of stories back and forth between one place and another or one person's perspective and another. Was that something that you had to tweak a lot from what was delivered with the script? Or in creating the story you found you needed to either break those up more or consolidate them more from the way they were in the script?

    BRENNER: In the script there were more story lines than you see in the movie today. That was probably our biggest editorial issue in trying to get the cut down to a reasonable length. For us, the trickiest section was the beginning of the film, until the point where Bruce Wayne tells Alfred the truth about what is on the "White Portugese" ship... the truth about his plan. This moment set into motion everything until the end of the film really. Until that point the movie was always tracking many solo paths, some intersecting, some not. Finally in this scene, the paths fork into one road. In the script there are more subplots than you see in the movie right now. Also in terms of building this beginning we had to move things around. In the script, Lex was introduced much later, but we found that in watching the movie - because he's such an important player, it was best to set him up sooner. Plus, his presence has so much energy, a twisted comic energy that boosted the film. Generally, BvS was a unique challenge in that we had not one but two protagonists, each with an alter-ego. So there was Clark Kent, Superman, Bruce Wayne and Batman. And then surrounding them are Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, Wallace Keefe (the guy who loses his legs when Wayne Tower falls), Perry White, Martha Kent, Holly Hunter's character (Senator Finch), and still more characters orbiting them.

    Q: That's a LOT to juggle.

    BRENNER: It was a lot to juggle. So the plot lines of a couple characters had to go. These people are currently in the movie but we don't track them, and it's okay. What's kind of fun is that we went back and did an extended cut where we put a lot of this stuff back, and we refined it into the same rhythm as the theatrical release. So what was once a nearly four hour cut with absolutely everything was ridiculous - ended up being about a three hour cut, once all these added storylines were refined with the fat was cut out.

    Q: Wow. Four hours.

    BRENNER: I remember being a little worried. Three and a half hours, okay, that's fine for a movie of this size, the way Zack likes to work. This was more daunting. But we cut down "Man of Steel" from about 3 and half hours, I knew we'd get this done.

Read the complete interview at ProvideCoalition.com


2016 Movie News

Listed below are all the Movie News items archived for 2016 organized into various categories:

“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” Movie News: “Justice League” Movie News: “Justice League vs. Teen Titans” Animated Movie News: LEGO Animated Movie News: Christopher Reeve Movie News: Other Movie News:

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