Hello, this is an extract from a recent essay I wrote about Chris Dickens, the Editor for a crazy amount of great Films and TV. The main sources I used are down at the bottom of the page 😉 .
Chris Dickens is now an Oscar Winning Editor for his work with Danny Boyle on Slumdog Millionaire (2008), but he has had a diverse and successful career before and since, on some of my favourite films and TV shows.
With initial visions to be a sculptor, he felt like it would be more important, coming out of Bournemouth Art College, to be employable while also being creative. He secured a job as a post production sound trainee through a university connection, and was employed as a Sound Designer in the early nineties on The Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993) and Comic Strip (1982-2012). Finding that this lacked the creative freedom he wanted (editfestivalchannel, 2010) he moved onto video editing for short documentaries and TV comedies, eventually running up to Spaced (1999-2001) Edgar Wright’s breakthrough sit-com, popular with critics and passionate fans alike.
Wright met Dickens while on his Diploma course at Bournemouth, and Dickens’ career has been helped hugely by their creative relationship. Much of Wright’s frenetic and propulsive combination of action and comedy is built for the edit. On Hot Fuzz (2007), a film with 5,500 cuts, Dickens notes:
He would plan it, but he would also plan for changing it. Therefore you’ve got something that’s got quite a lot of energy and movement, and therefore the edit has more energy and movement and wit –
…
Edgar shoots for the edit, with two and three cameras at times, lots of angles and various styles. He likes to try out different things and often this only makes sense once you actually cut the shots together.
(Hullfish, 2018).
This amount of cutting is not frivolous or lazy, it is baked into film’s DNA, and often designed not to be noticed. Dickens mentions using techniques like hidden split screens to speed up the pace of the film (Peters, 2007).
Hot Fuzz’s Assembly cut was half an hour longer than the finished film, but he believes “If you concentrate on making things work” (ibid.) then the length will not be an issue because you will be conforming to the natural pace of the genre.
We can see echoes of his work on documentaries, and with Wright’s multi-camera shooting style, in films like Goal! The Dream Begins (2005), Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and most recently Rocketman (2019).
Slumdog Millionaire in particular was a challenge to Dickens because of the multiple formats Danny Boyle chose to shoot on. He had to transcode and process 35mm film, a small digital stills camera which could shoot at 12 fps and footage from a Silicon Imaging SI-2K Digital Camera,(Picone, 2015), (Peters, 2015) which was used to shoot on location in the Mumbai slums. What was planned as a more episodic film in the screenplay, became more “fragmented” as the edit reached completion. For example, the ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ segment was shot in full and edited like a real TV show, but Dickens and Boyle discovered after a certain amount of time, they would forget they were watching a film (ibid.). Particularly one shot largely Cinema Verite.
For a film with as many moving parts as Slumdog Millionaire, Chris Dickens does an amazing job telling a simple story in a complicated way, without making it any less clear.
We see a move away from the quick cutting style in his collaborations with Richard Ayoade for his inaugural feature Submarine (2010) and and his follow up The Double (2013) both films which continue the tradition of humour from his early career, but bring it to a darker, more existential place. His collaboration with Peter Strickland on Berberian Sound Studio (2012) also runs this dark trend, but also hearkens back to Dickens’ days as a Sound Designer.
In the same way a modern editor may create visual effects for reference, Dickens “loves to intertwine music and sound effects to create a ‘soup’ that is very atmospheric” (Peters, 2015).
This way he has a heightened communication with the incumbent sound designer, and more influence over the cinematic feel of the end product. For Berberian Sound Studio this was extremely important, because of three things: the film is about a Sound Designer working with Foley, a lot of the sound is communicated through diegetic close ups, and the film is about a psychological downward spiral. Foley sound in the film is emotional and part of the story progression, and it also forms part of the auditory ‘Soup’ with the band Broadcast’s mostly ambient instrumentals.
In this clip, one can see how closely picture, SFX and music are interwoven.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytVb4AOoxjE
(Evetts, 2016)
In an interview for Mary Queen of Scots, Dickens describes his process when working with dalies, something which can be overwhelming for an inexperienced editor.
I watch everything and it’s like a memory bank. I mark the things I like with a marker and then I remember it in my head. I say, “OK, there are three different types of performance in that and I wonder which one’s best?” So I’ll just go for one.
(Hullfish, 2018)
Here is where an eye for performance and creativity meet organisational skills, and because creativity can sometimes fail, Dickens will try to find one take he likes, and then build outwards from that point (ibid.).
On the one hand he describes, as an editor, to look for performance, but on the other, to always prioritise story, to not “choose a shot because it’s beautiful”(editfestivalchannel, 2010). This might mean completely disregarding the Director or screenwriter’s vision if the necessity to ‘reevaluate, rework and rewrite’ calls for it (mediamonkeymovies2, 2012).
Throughout his career Dickens has worked on projects for no charge, and the reasons for doing so do not change much. He wants to keep building a network of people to work with in future, and also, on a wider scale, he believes free work is how the industry keeps churning. People tend to hire people they know or have been recommended for paid work (HDFilmTools, 2009).
Without people who are willing to work for free, a lot of film-makers wouldn’t be able to access the resources necessary to climb the ladder. He is ‘paying it back’ as his nearly thirty year career was kickstarted by people taking chances on him, giving him the reins to projects he was not technically qualified for.
All of the directors Dickens has worked for have been around his age. Born in the sixties or early seventies, this generation now has a powerful creative influence on British Cinema, so we see a rise in prestige as his career has progressed. It helps that he has ridden a wave of British creatives to ‘break America,’ an achievement helped by his Oscar win. But it also means there is a generational cycle, which arguably depends on an independent film movement which does not exist now as it did in the 90s. Even if accessibility to resources has improved for editors as well as film-makers, this pluralisation means it is more difficult to be noticed, and it is tougher to get a television network or film-studio’s stamp of approval as a newcomer.
Dickens’ big break was the TV show Spaced on Channel 4. It feels like Edgar Wright’s signature style, and in his words would not have been given as much freedom now in 2019. So what would have happened to Edgar Wright’s style if Channel 4 interfered, to the success of the show, to Chris Dickens’ editing career?
https://www.provideocoalition.com/aotc-dickens
https://variety.com/2008/film/awards/chris-dickens-1117995899/
https://gizmodo.com/slumdog-millionaire-crowd-scenes-shot-covertly-with-can-5130380
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