Behind the Cut: Ronald Sanders (Part I)

[Editor’s Note: Today we launch a new feature here on IONCINEMA.com called ‘Behind the Cut’ – an exclusive Q&A series with prominent feature film editors who more often than not are involved in the projects we promote here on the site. Adam Azimov will shed light into the often overlooked art of film editing. This is the first part of a two part Q&A with Ronald Sanders. It focuses on general editing and work anecdotes, while the second part will take an intimate look at specific editing techniques in some of Ron’s films. Enjoy!]

Ronald Sanders is one of Canadian cinema’s best kept secrets.  He, along with others like Susan Shipton and Reginald Harkema, remains hidden in the dark backrooms of the film industry. He works ceaselessly from early in the production to long after the camera has stopped rolling and the sets have been dismantled. So who is Ronald Sanders? He’s a film editor, and chances are you’ve never heard of the man behind the cut in every David Cronenberg film since 1979, save “The Brood.”  Ron has won 3 Genies for his editing in Dead Ringers, Crash and eXistenZ. He won the Directors Guild of Canada Craft Award for ‘Outstanding Picture Editing’ on A History of Violence and has been nominated for a slew of other awards. Not only has Ronald Sanders cut most of Cronenberg’s masterpieces, he has also worked with other great Canadian and international filmmakers, including Norman Jewison, Daniel Petrie Jr., Sturla Gunnarsson, and Anais Granofsky. Ron has cut over 40 films and television shows in his 30 years in the business. His most recent cut, and masterpiece (in my opinion) is Eastern Promises.

Born in rural Manitoba, Ron Sanders grew up watching films from the booth in the theater where his father worked as projectionist.  He used to play with the splicer, but in his own words, “it still didn’t occur to me that people made movies.” The first moment he remembers being introduced to editing was through an obscure television show he stumbled upon while still in school, “I saw some guy talking about editing on television. I had no idea what it was, but I thought… that’s kind of cool.”  Despite this early introduction Ron did not develop a fascination with film editing. While in University in Winnipeg, he met some aspiring filmmakers who were going to make a movie. This turned him onto the idea of filmmaking, and he followed them to Toronto, where, “with no money… I just sort of hung out for the best part of a year.” Like most everybody else, he originally began with lofty dreams of becoming a director, but it was during his early time in Toronto that he fell into editing. “I thought the editing room would be a good place to learn everybody’s mistakes because they all go there, but it wasn’t something I always wanted to do, I just sort of slipped into it sideways.”  The rest, as they say, is history.

I’m lucky enough to sit down with Ronald Sanders only a day after Eastern Promises won the audience choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival. We decide to meet in a quiet pub on Danforth Avenue in Toronto. It’s a sunny summer afternoon and I’m relieved to be just on time. I take a look around the place but don’t see Ron anywhere, so I take a seat in a booth and wait patiently. Fifteen minutes pass… then 30.  I’m getting more nervous because I don’t know Toronto that well and am starting to think that maybe I’ve come to the wrong place.  I decide to call him. Ron answers ever so calmly and confirms that I’m in the right place and that he’ll be there soon. I hang up relieved and watch the door intently. When he finally comes through  I recognize him immediately from all the docs and behind-the-scenes featurettes that I’ve watched.  He greets me very graciously, takes a seat, and orders a half pint.  Still humble and modest despite his major accomplishments, Ron immediately begins opening up about the intricacies, difficulties, and theories surrounding his often overlooked art. 

Adam Azimov: How did you break into feature film editing?
Ronald Sanders: When I came to Toronto again I got a job with a guy named Ronald Piggott, an editor who was doing public affairs stuff for the CBC. The show was called “The Weekend” and “Weeknight” and it was on twice a week. It was mostly film – before digital – so we had to cut actual film to fill two hours a week. I came to Toronto and worked on that for a year, which was very good training to learn how to work quickly because you didn’t have time to recut anything. You just got the stuff and cut it. I met a guy named Alan Collins who was an editor there. I worked as his assistant for a month or so before they made me an editor too. He would work at the CBC for a while and then go to Los Angeles where he cut films for Roger Corman, the training ground for everyone in the seventies. He cut Private Duty Nurses, and Escape from Devil’s Island and all those other Corman things. He came back here later that year and was cutting the Clown Murders and he got me on it as the sound editor. I had no clue what I was doing.  But before I worked on the sound each day, I would go in there at night, get a key from the office and open another cutting room. I’d take a reel and help Alan cut the picture. It was totally unofficial and unknown, even to the director, I believe. So I was cutting totally illicitly at night with Alan. I did a couple more pictures with him where I did the sound, including, “Love at First Sight,” which was a Dan Akroyd picture. Sound editing was excellent training, and I still have it in my mind all the time when I’m cutting a picture. Peter O’Brien whom I’d known for some time was producing Love at First Sight. He told me that he’d try to get me on his next film as picture editor. That ended up being “Fast Company” which David (Cronenberg) was doing. So after several months of waiting, he said “David’s in casting,” and you should come in and meet him. I knew who he was because I’d just seen “Rabid” and thought it was one the funniest movies I’d ever seen.  I went in and we talked for a couple of hours, mostly about motorcycles and auto racing and stuff like that.  And the he said, “if you want to cut the movie, that’s fine with me.”  I’ve been on every film since, except “The Brood” which he did at the same time I was cutting “Fast Company”…

I would love to know about any editors or films that have influenced you?
I’ve seen all sorts of films that I thought were very well cut. You look at the editor and say, “ya, they consistently do really good work.” But it’s really hard for them to influence you because every situation is different. When you’re cutting, the material is different, the requirements of the scene are different. So you can’t say, “I’m going to cut like that person did”.  You see all sorts of things all the time. One film that really did influence me completely is Star 80. It was years and years and years ago. Bob Fosse directed it, which makes it a little more legitimate. The guy who cut it was Alan Heim, from New York. He’s still around and he’s a good editor. You don’t hear about him a lot, but people know him because he’s an editor’s editor. The thing that hit me in that film was the dialogue. He was cutting dialogue scenes, and you weren’t always on the person.  The scenes weren’t cut in a straightforward manner; you were hearing people speak and not seeing the person who was speaking most of the time.  It was very free of rules that I thought were important at the time. I looked at it and said, “Wow, it can work like that?” and I went in the next day and actually worked differently. I approached things differently from then on. So that influenced me, but I had just happened to look at a few scenes cut by someone who was very confident and knew what he was doing. He liberated the way I thought about dialogue cutting, because that was still relatively early in what I was doing.

AA: From what I understand, a lot of editors find dialogue one of the hardest things to cut.
Ronald Sanders: Oh, it’s my favorite thing about cutting a film. The thing about dialogue is that people are doing little eye flicks, or no eye flicks.  The performance is so much more subtle and complex than cutting action.  I love it, it’s my favorite thing. It’s the thing that I will never get completely satisfied with in my work. The few percent that I don’t feel completely at home with will be found, if ever, in cutting dialogue, for sure. I just love it, it’s the greatest thing, and the essence of the whole thing. It’s so much fun! I liked cutting the fight scene in Eastern Promises. It was very well choreographed by a really good stunt organizer, and the actors were very good. But it wasn’t difficult to cut because it was very well done, and to add to that, the bravery of Viggo doing it without clothes. That’s what makes the scene. It just wasn’t hard to cut. It was there and it told me what to do. It was kinetic and wasn’t subtle. It was just ‘show the fight’. Dialogue is always different.

There are a lot of editors who work with the same directors, and directors who work exclusively with the same editor.  What do you think it is between you and Cronenberg that has allowed you to work so well together?
We had a lot of the same interests. Originally it was motorcycles and cars… and we do get along very well. We don’t have much in common. You know, he’s urban, Toronto, Jewish. And I’m Protestant and come from the country in Manitoba. But we just get along. He’s very smart, very intellectual, and very well read. He’s not unpleasant, but he doesn’t have much time for people who aren’t smart. You’d expect him to be more of a university professor. I don’t know if it’s true, but I think he got a Canada Council grant to write a novel once and used the money to buy a camera and shoot a movie. 

My beer arrives and I take a nice cool swig. Ronald continues:

We just get along, and now we’ve known each other for a long time. I’m sort of part of his extended family. I go to birthday parties at his house and he comes to birthday parties at my house. 

I’m curious about your working process.  From the very beginning, what happens? Walk me through how you two make a movie together.
For the last several movies, when he gets a script… if he thinks he’s going to do it, if the deal is done, or even if it’s not, he gives the script to half a dozen people. One of those people is me. He’ll usually give me a script quite early, long before pre-production, and he’ll ask me what I think. He gets the same feedback from other people that he knows and trusts. You know, he’s got quite a small group of people who work on his films. He lets me read it several other times in the process, and then we go through pre-production. I get involved at some point or another. For example, Eastern Promises was shot in England so I was getting pre-production diaries for several months. Often he’ll say, “did you notice anything in the script that was unnecessary?” So sometimes I say, “there’re two or three scenes that are just going to get cut, so let’s cut them now.” It’s a lot easier to cut them in the script stage as long as you’re sure you don’t want them. 

So then he’ll shoot. I’ll go to the set occasionally, and we’ll talk about things, or we’ll screen rushes. We don’t tend to screen rushes every night anymore like we did with film, but we’ll send him a DVD everyday. We do screen some film rushes for the look, though. On this one, we printed at least one take of every slate. So we screen together once a week but we talk all the time. There were a couple of scenes, as there always are, that I thought were problematic. Once, he came in on a Saturday and changed the scene a bit. We found that if we altered certain things the scene would work in context, so we didn’t re-shoot. I was there throughout the entire shoot – in London – from October to February.

Revisit with us tomorrow for Part II of the interview!