When working with a director like Paul Thomas Anderson, it’s important to be ready to pivot to whatever will work best for the scene. As a frequent collaborator of Anderson’s, and the previous editor of Licorice Pizza, editor Andy Jurgensen knows how to best be “fluid” in his work to match his director’s sensibilities.
One Battle After Another follows Bob, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, an ex-revolutionary on a journey to rescue his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) from an old enemy. With a mix of genres making up the film, Jurgensen had his work cut out for him to balance everything and create the right tone for the satirical dark comedy.
Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘One Battle After Another’
Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection
DEADLINE: At what stage of the process did you get involved? Did you see the script before you started, or had they already begun filming?
ANDY JURGENSEN: We were actually doing camera tests before I even read the script. We were shooting on these VistaVision cameras, just testing the technical capabilities of the cameras. [Paul Thomas Anderson] sent me the script, didn’t really tell me much about it, and he also didn’t really tell me the tone either, he just handed it to me. I remember I read it twice because the first time, I didn’t quite get the satire right away. I guess I was expecting it to be more serious, especially with how it starts, but then reading it again, I was able to feel the different genres that he was going for. And I remember the next morning, sitting at his kitchen table and just chatting about all the crazy characters.
DEADLINE: How do you balance all of the different tones and genres in the edit?
Chase Infiniti in ‘One Battle After Another’
Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection
JURGENSEN: Well, you’ve just got to trust your gut. You’ve got to just feel it. There’re moments where you feel like, we need to have a laugh here, or this is a really tender moment. The characters are really connecting emotionally, so we’ve got to go for more of the emotional core for this scene. A lot of that has to do with Paul’s directing, but you’ve just got to lean into what the scene is telling you. It was just finding these peaks and valleys of the movie because it’s moving at a fast pace and there’s a lot of energy, but you also need to have these moments where the audience can breathe and catch their breath. We did screenings, and what you do is you just see how it feels in the room, see where the laughs are. You see where people are leaning forward in their seats and then you just shape the movie from there.
DEADLINE: The car chase at the end of the film was incredible, can you talk about piecing together that scene?
JURGENSEN: It was shot over a number of days and there really weren’t storyboards for it, they just had ideas for the beginning, middle, and end. It was really a matter of shooting the cars from the different perspectives, like in front of and behind Willa’s car or Tim Smith’s (John Hoogenakker) car, and then Bob once he gets involved… We just had to make sure we had all the pieces. I did a string out of all the different perspectives as we were shooting the scenes so that we made sure that we had good moments from all the angles, then it was finding the best bits and starting to assemble. It was just a long sequence going through all of Willa’s shots of her eyes, looking at both the rear-view mirror and the side view mirror looking behind at the reflections… You’re just slowly kind of whittling down the best fits.
Then we sent that long sequence to the sound department and they built a rough sound design, which helped our feeling of what the sequence is going to be, because using just production tracks wasn’t as strong. We needed the sounds for the three different cars to kind of act as characters, and then from there, I believe Jonny [Greenwood] sent something as an idea for the music, which was really more of a percussive feel. And then just making sure the ending was as dynamic as possible as well with the crash.
They did such a great job finding these amazing locations. This was a scene where Paul didn’t really know how the chase was going to be shot, and he went to the location and found these hills and kind of came up with the idea as we were on location that the chase should be in these rivers of hills. So, the whole sequence was kind of inspired by the location, which I love, and the whole production was able to pivot to make this work. You think about Marvel movies where everything’s so pre-visualized, and Paul doesn’t do a lot of visual effects. We had to paint a few things out, but there’s no green screen or anything like that. That’s all the real background in the car windows. When you’re able to be fluid and the crew is willing to be fluid, you can just really get some amazing things.
