Joe Walker has spent much of his career finding the rhythm of films that resist easy categorization. The British editor, who began his career as a sound editor at the BBC and trained as a classical composer, has become a go-to collaborator for two very different filmmakers: Steve McQueen, with whom he edited Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave, and Denis Villeneuve, whose increasingly ambitious cinematic worlds he has helped shape through Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and the Dune films.
Oscar-nominated for his work on 12 Years a Slave and Arrival, Walker finally won the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Film Editing in 2022 for Dune.
In a wide-ranging conversation with The Hollywood Reporter at the ToruńCamerimage film festival, where he received this year’s Editor Award, Walker discussed completing Dune: Part Three, his collaborations with Villeneuve and McQueen, and his next gig: editing Villeneuve’s upcoming James Bond. “For a British editor, as you can imagine, Bond is pretty high on my bucket list.”
You’ve now finished work on Dune: Part Three. How long ago did you wrap?
I finished about two or three weeks ago. My assistant is still holding the baby, so to speak, in terms of checking all the 70mm prints, trying to get the grading to match and making sure every blue eye looks blue. But I’ve signed off on everything I need to: the main formats, the 2.20 [70mm], the 1.90 [digital IMAX], the 1.43 [full-frame IMAX 70mm], the D-vision [Dolby Vision], the IMAX mix and the Atmos mix. The number of versions you have to do gets insane.
We finished cutting back in the summer, and then there’s another two or three months of dubbing, writing the music and finishing the visual effects. That’s a big part of the process.
Does Denis Villeneuve consider IMAX the definitive version of the film?
It’s designed for an IMAX experience, but it has to be compatible with the other format. They both have to work. They’re looking at both framings on set and mastering in both aspect ratios. The fact is that I think there are only 41 screens where people will be able to see the full thing [in IMAX]. But the amount of effort that goes into that is no different from the effort that goes into the 2.20 version that most people will see.
Was your approach to Dune: Part Three significantly different from the first two films?
This one is different. I think it’s going to surprise people. It’s born of the story, which is told almost two decades into the future from where we left off in Part Two. I think there’s a new look and a new pace. Actually, it’s shot for a faster pace of cutting in a way. Part One feels very contemplative now, and that approach didn’t fit this story.
The scale is different, too. We had, I think, a 44-day worm shoot on the second film, and almost 100 days of worm on this one. I can’t tell you exactly, but it’s scaled up. There’s a huge amount of worm.
Given how much of the Dune universe is created digitally, how much of what we see is actually built and filmed?
These guys try to do everything, short of having live train worms. It’s amazing. If you saw the film without the visual effects, it wouldn’t necessarily interrupt your enjoyment or understanding of the story. It’s not as though there are castle sets that are just imagined digitally. They’re built to scale. Patrice Vermette, the production designer, is making these huge castle sets.
With the worm, there’s always some substantial part of it that they’re filming on, on a gimbal, and then they fill it out later. But they have wind and effects and sound effects. Basically, it’s a lot of actors having a lot of things chucked at them.
On Dune: Part Two in particular, I used to look out of the window at the end of the day and see all these bedraggled people coming away, just covered in shit. I’d think to myself, I definitely took the right career path. You know, air-conditioned. Lovely. Maybe my latte got a little cold.
You mentioned that the new film has a faster pace. That’s interesting given Denis’s tendency toward more contemplative filmmaking, even in his large-scale action films. What does that mean in editing terms?
Pace is a funny thing to talk about, isn’t it? There’s the surface pace, and then there’s a much more subcutaneous pace: the long tectonic plates that move in a story.
They’re all densely packed worlds, but this one in particular has a really epic story, perhaps in a shorter time frame than the others. It’s a different book.
It’s also interesting that this festival [Camerimage] is focusing a little on AI, because in a way Frank Herbert’s book is all about that. For those who are into the Dune lore, the whole world is based on a world without computers.
There’s the idea that there was a jihad, the Butlerian Jihad, an anti-AI jihad, thousands of years before the events of the book. What’s interesting is that it’s not so much about machines killing us as machines removing our independence and our own ability to predict. That’s what the revolution was supposedly about.
In Dune, they have Mentats, people whose brains function like computers, capable of performing extraordinary mathematical calculations and making predictions, particularly in a military context. And Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is himself the product of a breeding program designed to create somebody who can predict the future.
In a way, it’s a remarkably relevant story for something that’s nearly 60 years old. [Herbert’s novel was published in 1965]. I always find it quite amusing that this is such a substantial part of what Frank Herbert was talking about.
You’ve worked with Denis on several films now. How would you describe your working relationship?
I always find there’s more in common between directors than there are differences. I’ve worked predominantly with Steve McQueen and Denis, and I’d say there’s a lot more to their approach than you might initially think. Their understanding of human beings is the fundamental thing.
Denis does a huge amount of planning, particularly on these big-scale films, where the process has become very sophisticated. It nearly always starts with the script, but there’s also the storyboards. He works with a fantastic storyboard artist in Toronto, Sam Hudecki. They sketch things out and then revise the script based on what they’ve discovered. They’re testing the material, and ideas emerge that they flesh out. Two of the most glorious signposts for me are the art book I get from Patrice and the storyboards.
But what Denis does with all that preparation is go on set and tear it up. If something from nature is better, then it’s better. You can’t quite predict how a director of photography and an actor are going to find their shot, and that might completely change the coverage. Nothing is nailed down. It’s all very bendy and flexible.
Does your background in music influence the way you approach editing?
Absolutely. I have a background in composing music. That’s what I studied, and I was a sound editor for quite a while. So my way into cutting things is often through sound. I’m led by sound.
I rather envy editors who can knock the sound around and somehow ignore things bumping in and out. I’ll smooth everything out, but I’ll also start exploring things for the sound department that you can’t just pick off a shelf. There’s no existing sound for the ornithopter [the insect-like helicopters in Dune] you can simply use. On Blade Runner, with the Pilotfish [recon drone] we started developing sounds earlier so that I always had some thread to work with.
The other rather unusual thing I share with both Steve McQueen and Denis is that we try to avoid music until really late. The idea is to give the story its best chance to work, and perhaps to give sound effects and sound design some space in the movie. Only in the final stages do we start applying music. Then you’re often changing the cut to accommodate it.
Sound design seems like such an integral part of Denis’s films.
I think that’s one of the reasons why we get on so well. He really loves sound. One of the luckiest things about working with Denis is that we’ve grown together. Sicario had only a few dozen visual effects shots, perhaps some vehicles added to a shot or a few minor fixes, nothing major. Then Arrival stepped things up quite a bit. I think there were 700 visual effects shots.
That’s really where sound can help you, because for the longest time you’re dealing with actors playing against somebody holding a tennis ball on a pole. Developing the sound of the heptapods [the alien species in Arrival] happened much earlier than the visual effects, and it influenced how the visual effects eventually looked, how they breathed and moved.
We work with many of the same people. Dave Whitehead is a sound designer who specializes in alien voices. That’s his niche, and he’s done everything. He develops these things in conversation with us.
For the longest time, the music of a film is often the sound effects for us. Denis loves a sense of what we used to call FDR, fake documentary realism. The sound effects should be very grounded. If I put in footsteps, they’re often wild tracks I’ve kept over the years of real people walking on real planks or going up stone steps in real environments. It’s about grounding the film. Those films have a strong sense of being optically possible, and audibly possible, too.
There’s a physicality to that approach to sound that makes it hard to reproduce with AI?
One of the things we love about working with Richard King, who’s our sound designer on Dune: Part Two and Part Three, is that his stuff is sometimes so raw. There’s always some moment where there’s a blaring horn or a klaxon. It’s really dirty. You almost feel you can smell the sound. I love working with those guys.
We’ve worked with the same sound mixers since Blade Runner. Before that, Sylvain, who was our sound designer on Arrival, was completely dedicated. Denis used to joke that if Sylvain drank too much and felt inclined to throw up, he’d get his sound-recording gear out first.
He would travel just to record a particular wind. There was an idea in Arrival that the wind is disturbed underneath the spaceship, and there’s this incredible sound. If you listen to it again, it feels as though the wind has been cut up. It’s very strange. But it’s actually a real Saint Laurent wind that he travelled 600 miles to record.
You first worked with Steve McQueen on Hunger, which dramatizes the 1981 IRA hunger strike at Northern Ireland’s Maze prison and the final weeks of Bobby Sands [played by Michael Fassbender]. The film has two very distinct halves, both in its editing and its visual approach. Was that also how it was shot?
Yes. We filmed for three weeks, and then Michael Fassbender had to lose a lot of weight. So the shoot and the cut paused. There was a break of five weeks or so over Christmas, and he went to Venice Beach and lived on two raisins a day for several months. Then we came back and shot the last section. It was only a week. But it was a very useful break because there were things they’d planned to shoot that we felt we didn’t need anymore. We could slightly cut the script and focus on what we felt we needed differently. So it does very much become a film in two halves, as you say.
You and McQueen have gone on to make several films together. What was it about Hunger that made that first collaboration work?
It might sound odd to say, but Hunger was the first film I did where I saw myself in it, where I had that connection. The thing I’ve always adored about Steve and that film, and one might argue Shame and 12 Years a Slave as well, is that they were all stories that had to be told, and they actually all had to be told by him.
When I first met Steve, I knew of him because he’d won the Turner Prize [as a visual artist] but it wasn’t as though I could take a bunch of Steve McQueen films off the blockbuster shelf and bone up before the interview. All I had was the script and the meeting with him.
When we met, we talked a little about politics. My mum had worked for Winston Churchill. She was his secretary during the war, from 1939 to 1945. Can you believe she got that job when she was 17? We talked about that for a while, but I also talked about my experience of the hunger strikes. I was a teenager when they were happening, and I grew up in a West London Catholic family that was slightly right-wing and conservative in its voting. To them, the hunger strikers were an abomination, not least because suicide was a very forbidden thing.
There were a book or two I could read, a little bit of Panorama documentary coverage, and a short piece of 16mm film showing these guys in their blankets. When I met Steve, it just felt like, oh God, we need to see a 360-degree view of this. It landed with a sense of urgency. It felt like an important story to tell and an opportunity to see something from every perspective.
Steve placed it perfectly. You wouldn’t want to be there, whatever side you were on.
The film’s 17-minute conversation between Bobby Sands and the priest is one of its most striking sequences. How did you approach editing such an extended scene?
I remember particularly holding that 17-minute-long shot. It probably would have been longer, but it was a 20-minute reel of film. They planned to shoot the first part of it, and then they ran until the film went out of the gate. They did two close-ups and some other coverage. I remember there was a rotating shot, I think. But it was incredibly bold.
I’ve noticed with audiences watching it that there’s a moment when they realize it’s not going to cut. You’re just watching this tennis match between these two players. There’s a little disengagement and re-engagement. It’s fascinating what happens in front of that scene.
Steve McQueen uses a similar approach in 12 Years a Slave, particularly in the opening and the lynching sequence. Those extended shots force the audience to confront the physical suffering of the characters.
It’s an outrage, isn’t it? There’s a sense that the longer it goes on, the more you want to stand up and try to stop it. You feel powerless in your seat. It’s a very impactful scene.
I remember the test screenings for that film. It’s shocking that people would cry out in the middle of it. Sometimes you could just tell people were so affected by the film.
Next up you’re working with Denis on James Bond…
Can you imagine the weight on him? I love Denis for having the bravery to take on a science-fiction classic, one that he adored as a teenager. But then you step into something like Bond which honestly belongs to everybody. I’m sure wherever he goes, everybody has their own idea of what Bond should be or who should play him.
I’m trying to shed my own views, my own preconceptions. I want to know what Denis’s Bond is going to be like. There’s obviously a lot of speculation about casting and so on, but at the moment it’s like the papal conclave. All we can see is grey smoke outside the building.
Do you have any sense of what his approach will be stylistically?
None at all. I know so little about it. I haven’t got anything for you there. I don’t know who’s going to be the director of photography or the composer. With Bond, I think it’s healthy not to assume anything.
All I know is that I’m going to edit it. And for a British editor, as you can imagine, doing James Bond is pretty high on my bucket list. I can only imagine the first day when I get to cut the Bond theme in. I can’t wait.
Original Article on Hollywood Reporter