Seized has been one of the most talked about movies at Sundance this year. We went inside the edit with the film's editor Derek Boonstra.
Seized is one of those movies that seems to be surfing a very current zeitgeist, especially in the US. It charts the fallout following a police raid on the Marion County Record, a small US town’s even smaller local newspaper, and the way it spiralled out onto the national stage to kick off just one of many current fierce debates about the abuse of power, journalistic ethics, local journalism, and the United States Constitution.
It was edited by Derek Boonstra on Adobe Premiere, who found himself single-handedly having to cope one of the highest shooting ratios of any film in his career to date. But first, here's director Sharon Liese to set the scene and explain quite why the film shot over 40 TB of material across a two year period...
RedShark: At what point in the process did the film truly “find itself” in the edit? How different did it look from the version you imagined on set?
Derek Boonstra: So, when I was brought onto this film, Sharon (Liese, director), Paul (Matyasovsky, producer) and the production team had already gathered about 18 months worth of footage (and they would go on to shoot a good amount more during the nine-ish month edit and as the story continued to unfold concurrently to the cutting).
So I was coming in as a blank slate, but they were deep in it, and so we started by talking about the versions of the film that they had imagined. Sharon definitely had a clear vision for some aspects of the film, but she was also explicitly excited for the process of discovery that unfolds in the edit, which (not surprisingly) is generally what you want to hear, as an editor.
And there was a lot of unfolding on this one, largely because of the unwieldy nature of the story itself. The reality of the raid on the Marion County Record is that it rippled through a lot of people's lives and that there was a complicated chain of events that led up to and followed from it.
The production team had kept a meticulous document that detailed those events that was 30 pages long (small type) and they had about 2000 pages of interview transcripts in the end. 600 of those pages were for Eric Meyer, the Record's editor/publisher, but they interviewed dozens of other people as well, many of them multiple times, and it wasn't clear at the beginning exactly which events would be necessary to track in order to land at a film that gave nuanced context for multiple participants while clicking in at 90 minutes.
Because of that reality, I'd say that there were ways in which this film was necessarily finding itself in throughout the entire process, but at the same time it also feels like we pretty much made the film that was discussed in those initial conversations, in terms of the tone, the non-linear structure and making space for multiple perspectives to be heard.
DB: The rhythm and pacing were definitely on our minds from the beginning and we did a lot of distilling to be able to arrive at something that (theoretically) maintains an engaging/evolving momentum throughout. From the first rough edit we leaned into music, specifically the music of Moondog who was a less widely-known but also influential composer/musician who grew up in small town in Kansas similar to Marion before moving to New York and becoming a street musician and muse for more well-known musicians like Charlie Parker and Philip Glass.
RS: How did collaboration between editor and director evolve over the course of post-production, particularly when difficult cuts had to be made?
DB: Sharon was pretty much an ideal director to collaborate with as an editor. She had no illusions about the fact that she had collected a daunting amount of footage, and she allowed me to wrestle with it in the ways that came naturally to me, while also providing a clear vision to guide the trajectory of it all. Along with the producers we would regularly connect to talk about goals for the next few days or week — or whatever timeframe we thought made sense based on the material I needed to wade through next —, and we would collaboratively figure out some concepts and scene ideas for me to work toward. Then once I ventured into the jungle of footage and would inevitably be pulled in different directions by what I encountered along the way, Sharon would embrace new possibilities that I might emerge with on the other side of an edit session.
Overall it felt like this team was good at listening to each other throughout the process, and we generally found consensus about what to focus on and how to evolve the film at each step along the path.
RS: What were the biggest technical or creative challenges you faced in post and how did your editing tools help you work through them efficiently?
DB: This film had one of the highest shooting ratios of any film in my career. I've edited films that had a bigger pool of archival material to pull from (like the Bee Gees documentary I cut alongside Robert Martinez a few years back), but Seized may be the largest amount of primary source, specifically-shot production verité footage that I've ever contended with for a single story.
Sharon, DP Jackson Montemayor, and the rest of the production team shot over 40 TB worth of raw material (primarily comprised of relatively lightweight Sony MXF material) over the course of 2+ years. So just the daunting amount of high-quality, usable material was probably the biggest creative and logistical challenge... but it's a good problem to have, as far as they go, as it meant the ceiling was high for what the film could become.
I was flying solo in the edit for this project and it was a pretty consuming process, but being able to cut in my preferred NLE (Premiere Pro) from my dialled-in home office setup locally made for the most frictionless way to climb the mountain.
RS: For films dealing with memory, trauma, or complex social realities, how did you approach ethical responsibility in the edit?
DB: This is definitely a film that deals with all of those things. Across the dozens of interviews that were filmed, there were different and conflicting perspectives about events that caused lasting negative impacts on people's lives. As with any documentary that takes on these kinds of weighty things, we had countless conversations about how to arrive at a finished product that gave due respect to everyone involved.
But one somewhat unique meta-layer to this film is that the subjects of the documentary were wrestling with the ethics of storytelling/journalism themselves in our footage. That made for a really interesting funhouse mirror-like process where we were examining our own ethics while putting together scenes in which our subjects were also examining theirs.
Ultimately encountering ethical dilemmas is an inherent occupational hazard in both documentary filmmaking and journalism, and to be able to bring those ideas to the surface in this story was engaging, as a career documentarian
RS: Looking back, what’s one editorial decision you now see as pivotal to the film’s final emotional impact?
DB: One choice that we committed to at the beginning that ended up being a great one, in my opinion, was to have the arrival of Finn Hartnett, a fresh-out-of-college journalism student, serve as a framing device for the whole film.
Finn arrived in Marion about a year after the raids took place (and after Sharon had started filming), so we knew we were committing to a non-linear mode of storytelling if we started the movie there. But for the audience to be able to enter the world of Marion through the eyes of someone who is also trying to figure out what it all means really gave us some interesting storytelling opportunities that we might not have discovered if we had tried to tell the events in order.
Committing to a non-linear structure is sometimes a gamble and it doesn't always pay off, but it did in this case especially because Finn ended up being a very thoughtful, likeable and empathic individual who had an interesting journey of his own over the course of his year working for the Marion County Record. It's hard to imagine what the movie would have been like if he hadn't come through town.