Red Stewart chats with Brian Kates about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel….
Brian A. Kates is an American editor who has been working in the film and television industries since the mid-1990s. He is best known for his work on Killing Them Softly, Lee Daniels’ The Butler, and How to Talk to Girls at Parties.
Flickering Myth recently had the opportunity to interview him about his work on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel pilot, and I in turn had the honor to conduct it:
Mr. Kates, it’s a pleasure to be speaking with you. Congratulations on the Emmy-nomination! Now, we know that, for television pilots, a larger director is sometimes brought on to do the episode in order to create a standard/feel for the rest of the show. For example, you had Martin Scorsese do Boardwalk Empire’s pilot while Alfonso Cuarón did Believe’s (which you were ironically the editor for). I’m wondering, is that the case with the editing too where one editor will be brought on for the pilot to set a standard for the rest of the season that other editors will follow?
A show takes its cues from its creators. When you have strong creators like Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino, they set the standard even before you come on. When I met Amy and Dan, I could tell that we had a lot in common: love of Broadway musicals, borscht-belt humor, Joan Rivers, NY cultural history—things that are deep in the DNA of the show. They knew my collaborations with John Cameron Mitchell and other directors who work equally in theater and film— a uniquely New York combination— so we bonded. Plus we just cracked each other up. It was an easy three-way marriage.
Sometimes the pilot editor stays on to work on the series. It depends on the schedule and prior commitments. When you edit a pilot you don’t know if it will be picked up, so it’s more like editing a film— a very briskly paced film. That’s maybe why a lot of editors who work on movies also do pilots, which is certainly true in my case.
Kate Sanford and Tim Streeto, who edited all the other episodes of the season, had recently collaborated on Vinyl and Boardwalk Empire and had worked with our producer Dhana Gilbert and visual effects supervisor Lesley Robson-Foster. The fact that the pilot gets so much attention is in no small part because the entire series is edited so well.
I noticed that, before you became a full-on editor, you took on many different roles in the late 90s related to editing. You’re credited as the associate film editor, title designer, rough-cut screener, assistant editor, and so forth. For aspiring editors currently in film school, would you recommend that they do these different roles before taking a shot at lead editor, or is it fine to jump into the fray from the get-go?
I say jump, because landing your first feature is a huge milestone. But it doesn’t usually come right away. I took a slightly different route. In 1992, I was lucky to have a friend at NYU who was a production assistant for Christine Vachon, Lauren Zalaznick, Tom Kalin, and Todd Haynes, and he recommended that I be an intern in their office. That experience turned into my first film job, as a 2nd Assistant Editor and Post Production Coordinator on Todd Haynes’ film Safe. At the same time, I was editing short films directed by NYU students and former-students. So I was learning two skill-sets at once. On some days I was literally rewinding, cleaning, logging and splicing what is now regarded as one of the great films of the 90s, and other days I was on a 16mm Steenbeck at NYU editing shorts.
My long-time assistant editors, Chris Rand and Tricia Holmes, followed the same formula: working as assistant editors during the week and cutting short films on the weekends. The only way to learn how to edit is by editing, so the fact that both of them took the initiative to spend their days off cutting indicated how serious they were about becoming editors.
Now let’s talk about The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. This was the first TV show you did since Believe, meaning that there was a three year gap between the two pilots, during which you focused on movies. When it comes to doing television after a break like that, do you have to spend any time getting used to the new format before you can settle in, or is it an easy transition from the two mediums?
The transition is first and foremost about the people with whom you’re collaborating— learning how they communicate, their work habits, their sensibilities. The format and technical aspects are almost always secondary. As I said, pilots for non-commercial TV are basically short movies. Commercial TV, on the other hand, has format restrictions— act breaks, intros, outros, timings stipulations, profanity rules. But even those doesn’t necessarily change the nature of the work.
Believe was a network show, but the standard of filmmaking was set extremely high. Alfonso Cuarón was able to share a career’s worth of wisdom and intelligence about cinema—e.g. the perfect way to light a green-screen in a moving car, how to perfectly stitch together two shots to make an invisible edit, knowing the exact section of piece of a music by Stockhausen that would elevate a scene. That wisdom and that collaboration was deeply valuable to me.
I think Mrs. Maisel is equally cinematic. For Amy, and cinematographer M. David Mullen, “coverage” wasn’t as important as having a strong visual idea of a scene or sequence. For instance, in the scene when Midge goes upstairs to tell her parents that Joel walked out on her, there’s a beautiful steadicam shot through the living-room, into Abe’s piano room, and out again (with Rose) yelling and crying in the far background. Every part of the frame is used to enrich the story. It’s a little masterpiece of choreography, blocking, camera operating, and sound design (and some invisible editing work subtly affecting all of those things). There was no aspect of craft that was compromised because we were making a TV/streaming series rather than cinema.
What was it about the show that made you want to delve into it?
So many things. The script was hilarious. The characters were well-drawn and fully dimensional. I was attracted to the feminist ethos of the show, and loved that it was a slightly oblique view of 1950’s feminism. Midge loves her material Upper West Side world and curates it brilliantly. Not a hair, couch, or table setting is out of place. This isn’t The Feminine Mystique, where the home is a site of oppression. But unfortunately her husband is emotionally limited, and that forces Midge to figure out, through Joel’s screw-ups, that the same artistic impulse and emotional intelligence that make her a brilliant wife could be parlayed into something more personally gratifying and lucrative.
I think there’s a dearth of non-superficial Jewish representation on TV— outside of Israel, of course. Transparent is a huge exception, obviously, and I adore it, but I want there to be more. When I read the script, I loved that Rose Weissman, Midge’s mother, wasn’t a Jewish mother stereotype. Yes, she’s bossy and has particular ideas about child-rearing, but she’s also elegant, refined, and Paris-educated, and Marin Hinkle plays her with freshness and originality. Mrs. Maisel is one slice of Ashkenazi Jewish 1950’s New York, but it’s a relatively expansive view, stretching from the Jewish Upper West Side to the beat poetry and comedy worlds in the Village— which were, in a way, secular Jewish cultural movements. I love that the show encompasses all that.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a comedic series, though it has a lot of dramatic moments as well. But with comedy, it’s interesting because I feel editing is just as integral as writing and acting when it comes to conveying the full power of a joke or a humorous scene. You drag it out too long and it loses its power, but if it’s kept too short then the impact or punchline or resolution can be hurt. When you’re working within the constraints of 1 hour time limit, how do you make that decision? Did you have to rely on the director/showrunner?
The script was precise. I could feel the rhythm of the dialogue when I read it, and my job was to continue feeling it as I was editing— and nudging the footage along to get it right. Amy is a strong director so of course she has strong ideas about rhythm. But we see eye-to eye. We’d increase the pace as much as possible and then together we’d decide where we needed to pause. A sequence that doesn’t contain variations in pace feels flat and loses meaning.
As far as the one-hour time limit, we never worried about it. The first assembly was a good length already, and we were free to work on fine-etching.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is an Amazon exclusive series. Did it being on a streaming service change anything about your approach, compared to if it had been on a cable network?
Not at all. On every job, there’s no doubt conversations going on between studio executives and showrunners about roll-out, marketing, ratings, and PR. I’m sure these conversations are slightly different for a show on a streaming service, but I wasn’t a part of them. A great showrunner and producer shoulder the burden of managing everything that doesn’t affect the physical creation of the show. My job was to be looking at Rachel Brosnahan and be inside Midge’s head; that’s all. The crew allowed me that gift. For that I credit Chris Rand, the associate editor, Brie Stodden, editing room assistant, Dhana Gilbert and Matthew Shapiro, producers, and Rachel Jablin, post supervisor.
One last question, albeit a dumb fun one. I noticed between 2012-2014 you did three “Kill” films: “Killing Them Softly,” “Kill Your Darlings,” and “Kill the Messenger.” Coincidence, or did those titles attract you to their stories?
I wish I could say it was intentional, but it wasn’t. Kill Your Darlings was my buddies’ John Krokidas and Austin Bunn’s script and John’s directorial debut, and it had been gestating for almost a decade. I knew I wanted to work on it but I didn’t know when it would happen. I was in L.A. finishing Killing Them Softly when it was green-lit, and I thought, “wow that’s strange.” I read a press release for Kill the Messenger about a year later, and was attracted to the Gary Webb story and uncovering the Reagan-era contra-cocaine conspiracy. It wasn’t the title that attracted me, but maybe it gave me the confidence to pursue the job with a little more gusto. At the time, I didn’t think anyone knew about the triple-kill confluence besides my husband and me!
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me Mr. Kates!
Thank you. Such a pleasure.
Flickering Myth would like to thank Mr. Kates for sitting down with us. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is available for viewing on Amazon Video.
Red Stewart
