Angela Catanzaro (‘Prey’ editor) on how cutting a film with minimal dialogue can have ‘a very profound impact on the viewer’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“It’s always a very rewarding experience for the audience when they can just watch and hear, and the scene can still have a very profound impact on the viewer,” reveals “Prey” editor Angela Catanzaro A.C.E. about immersing the audience in a visual and sonic adventure in which the human vs. alien death-match is presented with minimal dialogue. For our recent webchat she adds, “that’s always one of my favorite exercises to do as an editor. I’m a very much a minimalist when it comes to dialogue, to see how much we can do with just a little bit.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
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“Prey” is the latest installment in the “Predator” film franchise, serving as a prequel to the first four films. The Hulu film is directed by Dan Trachtenberg and written by Patrick Aison, and stars Amber Midthunder, leading a mostly indigenous cast including Dakota Beavers as Taabe and Michelle Thrush as Aruka, with former international basketballer Dane DiLiegro co-starring as the fearsome Predator, who wields primitive versions of the advanced weaponry used by Predators in previous future-set films. The story is set in the Northern Great Plains of 1719, where Naru, young Comanche woman is determined to prove herself as a hunter. She finds herself protecting her people from a vicious alien (the Yautja, otherwise known as the Predator), which hunts humans for sport, as well as from French fur traders mindlessly destroying the buffalo that her tribe relies on for survival.
Catanzaro had her work cut out for her (no pun intended), not only because so much of Naru’s odyssey is told with very little dialogue, but also because this is not your everyday action film. Character development and emotion was always front of mind for the creative team, which Catanzaro acknowledges made the project even more challenging to navigate. “This is going to sound strange, but I find cutting action a lot easier and simpler than cutting complicated emotional scenes or dialogue scenes between two people. Sometimes they’re the most difficult things to really get right. Action for me, I enjoy it more than anything, if I had to cut something,” she admits. “It is more like a puzzle than anything else and most editors gravitate towards that. We’re puzzle-solvers. So, you have more pieces than you do in a dialogue scene, and they all have to fit together in a certain way,” she says. “The most important thing cutting in action sequences is to really trust my instincts when I see the shots for the first time. If they do 10 takes of this one action, there’s always going to be one or two that I find initially, ‘oh, that’s the one that’s the most impactful.’ And a lot of times with action, you revisit it over and over again, and you second guess things. But I think it’s really important to remember how your first viewing made you feel, because the audience is only ever going to see that action sequence once. So if a punch played when you watched the daily, then that’s the one to use.”
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