Angus Wall is an Oscar-winning editor of films such as “The Social Network” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” which he won in back-to-back years. He was also nominated for another Oscar for his work on “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” If you’re paying attention, you realize that Wall seems to be the go-to editor for acclaimed filmmaker David Fincher. And If you’re wondering what it’s like to edit a film for someone like Fincher, then according to Wall, it’s quite an ordeal, completely different (and much longer) than working for anyone else.
Speaking to The Ringer, in a new profile of Fincher, Wall discussed the process of editing a film from the director. And if you’re a big fan of Fincher’s work, especially films like “The Social Network,” “Zodiac,” and “Se7en,” then you have heard stories of how demanding the director is with his dozens of takes and perfectionist sensibilities. But when you have those 65 takes (sometimes a lot more) from a dialogue scene in “The Social Network,” it’s up to Wall to somehow devise a way to figure out which is the best, while also not turning his brain into mush.
Thankfully, for the Oscar winner, he actually did come up with a special process to edit David Fincher films. And unsurprisingly, it’s about as complicated and precise as the finished products he cuts together. Unfortunately, Wall doesn’t just grab take #65 and call it a day. (By the way, 65 takes is triple what most directors do.) It’s more complicated than that.
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Here’s a brief synopsis of what goes into it (again, via The Ringer):
Editors typically look at all the takes of a scene in chronological order from first to last before selecting the best one. Wall would instead look at the starred take, Fincher’s favorite from the day of shooting, and then use that as the gauge against all the other takes. Next he would look at all of Fincher’s circled takes in descending chronological order, then all the other takes from last to first. But not only does Fincher shoot many takes, he shoots long ones, so Wall would often have to break up a scene into separate beats and order them with his system, then pick the best one from each subsection.
“You may take a line from take 38, you may take a line from take 13, you may take a line from take 17, and you put the scene together with the best performances and camera work from the body of media you’re pulling from,” explained the editor.
When everything is all said and done, a scene has been expertly crafted. The editor gave an example from “The Social Network,” where the opening scene of the Oscar-winning feature took Wall three weeks to edit. Ultimately, Wall said that his process, however complicated, allows him “to sleep at night knowing that I had a mechanism in place so I knew I was getting all the best stuff.”
Basically, if you were to pull one thing from this detailed explanation of the behind-the-scenes struggle that goes into a David Fincher scene, it’s that nothing in those films is easy, no matter how effortless it may appear. And while Fincher is definitely a virtuoso filmmaker that deserves all the credit in the world, Wall is an unsung hero in his own right and probably deserves a special trophy just for finishing a Fincher film.
You can watch that opening scene of “The Social Network” below: