For Each Best Picture Oscar Hopeful, Film Editors Are Key 

(From L) Mark Orton, Alexander Payne, and Kevin Tent arrive for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 14th Annual Governors Awards at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Los Angeles on January 9, 2024. (AFP)
(From L) Mark Orton, Alexander Payne, and Kevin Tent arrive for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 14th Annual Governors Awards at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Los Angeles on January 9, 2024. (AFP)
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For Each Best Picture Oscar Hopeful, Film Editors Are Key 

(From L) Mark Orton, Alexander Payne, and Kevin Tent arrive for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 14th Annual Governors Awards at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Los Angeles on January 9, 2024. (AFP)
(From L) Mark Orton, Alexander Payne, and Kevin Tent arrive for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' 14th Annual Governors Awards at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Los Angeles on January 9, 2024. (AFP)

Whether they are snipping an actor's lengthy stare, obliging the viewer to process rapid-fire images or creating tension with a pause, film editors who work in sync with directors play a vital role in giving life to a movie -- and its Oscar chances.

"You can't have a good movie with bad editing," Kevin Tent, who is nominated for an Academy Award for his work with director Alexander Payne on best picture contender "The Holdovers," told AFP.

Tent -- who has been part of Payne's filmmaking inner circle for nearly 30 years, including on Oscar contenders "The Descendants" (2011) and "Sideways" (2004) -- compares his work as an editor to that of a chef making a special dish.

After initial filming, "you're getting all these different elements, and you're chopping things and mixing them" to find the perfect recipe to tell the story, Tent explained.

"If you put too much salt in something, it's no good, or if you put too much sugar, it ruins everything," he quips.

For "The Holdovers," which received a total of five Oscar nominations ahead of the March 10 ceremony, Tent certainly found a winning formula.

Payne's film is a touching holiday tale of three lonely souls who end up spending Christmas together at a 1970s-era boarding school -- a crotchety teacher, a cafeteria manager in mourning and a fragile teenage boy.

Tent is vying for the best film editing Oscar with his peers who worked on "Anatomy of a Fall,Killers of the Flower Moon,Poor Things" and "Oppenheimer," the overall favorite for Oscars glory.

Best picture and best editing awards often go hand-in-hand.

For nearly a century, only 11 movies won the Academy award for best picture without also being nominated for best editing. And 40 percent of all best pictures winners also won the statuette for editing prowess.

Director-editor bond

Those statistics show the extent to which editing is indeed the essence of film, even more so than the screenplay or the cinematography.

Legendary directors like Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles said editing was the key to making a good movie.

"'Movies are made in the cutting room' -- many people say that, because it's there where you really have the time to be creative and think about what the movie is, and what it's going to become," explains Tent.

He worked with Payne on "The Holdovers" for nearly a year.

That gave the duo time to cut more than 30 minutes from the film's run time, as compared to their early cut, and find just the right bittersweet, funny-serious tone thanks to test audiences.

The film has been praised for its use of "dissolves" -- overlapping images that allows a new shot to surface while the previous one disappears -- which help to develop the emotional evolution of the characters or the melancholic beauty of winter.

Such precise work requires a director and editor to be exactly on the same page, which is why many directors have editors they bring from film to film.

Thelma Schoonmaker, the queen of editing with three Oscars to her name, has worked with Martin Scorsese since the start of his career more than 50 years ago.

Schoonmaker is one of Tent's rivals for her work on "Killers of the Flower Moon," which is also in the running for best picture. She has regularly mentioned in interviews how closely she and Scorsese collaborate.

"He taught me everything I know about editing. Our sensibilities are the same," she told the CineMontage website in February.

'Midwives' of cinema

Editors are usually hailed for their deep technical knowledge and for their ability not to leave their own stamp on the material, as the director's vision remains paramount.

"The editing cannot be noticeable, or branded -- it's really the craft of adapting someone's work," Laurent Senechal, a nominee for his work on Justine Triet's "Anatomy of a Fall," told AFP.

"We are like the midwives -- we accompany them," said Senechal, who worked on Triet's last three films.

Editing "Anatomy" -- a courtroom thriller about a writer accused of murdering her husband, which earned five nominations including best picture, director and editing -- took 38 weeks, Senechal said, calling the time a "luxury" in French cinema.

That pace allowed the pair to carefully master the desynchronization of sound and image, which helps to propel the ambiguity of the film, which depicts the couple's collapse and the unclear circumstances of the husband's death.

When the couple's son, who is blind, testifies in court, the audience sees images of the husband, who is speaking with the child's voice -- did these images occur in the past, or are they false memories?

"Justine is totally obsessive," Senechal said. "Editing is one of the most essential things for directing."



Richard Linklater’s Ode to the French New Wave Enchants Cannes

(L-R) Aubry Dullin, director Richard Linklater, Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck attend the photocall for "Nouvelle Vague (New Wave)" during the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, France, 18 May 2025. (EPA)
(L-R) Aubry Dullin, director Richard Linklater, Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck attend the photocall for "Nouvelle Vague (New Wave)" during the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, France, 18 May 2025. (EPA)
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Richard Linklater’s Ode to the French New Wave Enchants Cannes

(L-R) Aubry Dullin, director Richard Linklater, Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck attend the photocall for "Nouvelle Vague (New Wave)" during the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, France, 18 May 2025. (EPA)
(L-R) Aubry Dullin, director Richard Linklater, Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck attend the photocall for "Nouvelle Vague (New Wave)" during the 78th annual Cannes Film Festival, in Cannes, France, 18 May 2025. (EPA)

When Richard Linklater first started thinking about making a film about the French New Wave, he figured he'd show it all everywhere except one place.

"I thought: They'll hate that an American director did this," Linklater said Sunday. "We’ll show this film all over the world, but never in France."

But Linklater nevertheless unveiled "Nouvelle Vague" on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, bringing film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" to the very heart of the French film industry. It was, Linklater granted, an audacious thing to do.

And "Nouvelle Vague" went down as one of the biggest successes of the festival. At a Cannes that's been largely characterized by darker, more portentous dramas, "Nouvelle Vague" was cheered as an enchanting ode to moviemaking.

"Nouvelle Vague" is an uncanny kind of recreation. In black-and-white and in the style of the French New Wave, it chronicles the making of one of the most celebrated French films of all time. With sunglasses that never come off his face, Guillaume Marbeck plays 29-year-old Godard as he's making his first feature, trying to launch himself as a film director and upend filmmaking convention.

Linklater's movie, which is for sale at Cannes and competing for the Palme d'Or, is in French. It not only goes day-by-day through the making of "Breathless," it endeavors to capture the entire movement of one of the most fabled eras of moviemaking. Truffaut, Varda, Chabrol, Melville, Rohmer, Rossellini and Rivette are just some of the famous filmmakers who drift in and out of the movie.

Linklater told reporters Sunday that he wanted audiences to feel "like they were hanging out with Nouvelle Vague in 1959."

"It was an old idea of some colleagues of mine," said Linklater. "Thirteen years ago, we started talking about it. We're just cinephiles Austin, Texas, who love this era, and it's meant so much to me in my filmmaking. It represented freedom and the notion of the personal film. I've made a lot of films, and I've always felt if you do it long enough, maybe you should make one film about making films."

The stars of "Breathless" — Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg — are played by Aubry Dullin and Zoey Deutch, respectively, in "Nouvelle Vague." With precision, Linklater captures them making some of the most famous shots from "Breathless" with a visual style and camera movements typical of that time.

"We couldn’t work quite as fast. We had sound and things," said Linklater, chuckling. (Godard dubbed sound after shooting.)

"It was a crazy idea and I haven’t really ever seen a film exactly like this. I said: We’re making a film from 1959 but it’s not a Godard film," said Linklater. "You can’t imitate Godard. You fail. But we could imitate the style of the time."

In "Nouvelle Vague," Godard is surrounded by doubts — Seberg is notably unsure of the project — but he stubbornly sticks to his instance on spontaneity. There's no real script, some shooting days just last a few hours and lines are improvised on the spot. In one fittingly moment where Godard tells his actors just to quote Humphry Bogart movie lines, he explains: "Not plagiarism. Homage."

Linklater's own homage in "Nouvelle Vague" brought him back to his early days as a filmmaker. His first films — "Slacker,Dazed and Confused,Before Sunrise" — have much of the independent spirit of the New Wave, he said.

"Making this film all these later, I felt like I erased my own history," said Linklater. "I was going back to being in my late 20s making my first film. I told a friend last night: I felt like I was 28 years old making this film."