FLEE
Janus Billeskov Jansen, editor
Writer-director Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary Flee — a contender in categories including feature animation, documentary and international feature (representing Denmark) — was edited by Janus Billeskov Jansen, a veteran editor whose award-winning work in features, documentaries and shorts includes Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, which won the Oscar for best international feature in 2021.
For Flee, released by Neon and Participant, the editor worked closely in the cutting room with Rasmussen to tell the intimate story of pseudonymous subject “Amin” (a childhood friend of the director) who as an adult shares his story of his extraordinary escape from Afghanistan as a child refugee.
“Working with Jonas as a young director, and me as an old grumpy man with 50 years of experience, is a fantastic thing for me,” Jansen says with a chuckle, adding that he was grateful to work on the film with Rasmussen. “I always like to talk about it as a documentary which is animated,” he says, explaining that the early part of the process involved editing conversations between Rasmussen and Amin and constructing the story with simple animatics. “Their talks were filmed as if it were a documentary film, and later it became animated,” he says, noting that Rasmussen chose animation for reasons including the ability to give Amin his anonymity and because it “makes it possible to take his childhood story back to Kabul in the ’80s in a completely different way.”
Jansen relates that the process involved a lot of back-and-forth, even using the interviews in different ways. Sometimes that involved taking a story by Amin to create an event in a flashback: “For instance, when they walked through the forest and the little [boy] had blinking shoes, that is a story Amin has told.”
During the editing process, they found and incorporated archival footage. Jansen cites as an example the animated sequence during which young Amin and his companions are on a boat, hoping to be picked up by a ferry to Norway, but instead they are taken into custody by police. “We realized there was a film crew [at the actual incident],” says Jansen, who says the production was able to locate that footage to use in Flee. “[Amin] could point out his cousins. He could point out the little kid and other people. It was a fantastic thing that made the true story even stronger. And all that happened during the editing.”
While Jansen worked closely with Rasmussen over the course of the three years that he was involved in editing the movie, the editor says he never met Amin: “I shouldn’t. Nobody’s going to meet him until he, by himself, steps forward.”
THE MITCHELLS VS. THE MACHINES
Greg Levitan, editor
In the Sony Pictures Animation comedy, produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and released on Netflix, the Mitchell family stops a robot apocalypse en route to dropping daughter Katie off for her first year of film school. “The comedy was really fun,” says editor Greg Levitan, noting that writer-director Mike Rianda and writer Jeff Rowe “come from television, and there were no areas of dryness. So it was trying to figure out areas to actually remove, and then leaving what was working so well, and then making it even better … I would bring them in and we’d watch it and we’d work it until they basically fell off their chair with laughter.”
For the more emotional moment at the end of the story, as the Mitchells finally drop Katie off at college to begin her freshman year, she presents her father with a moose toy that was symbolic of their bond, “to say, ‘I’m still with you, even though I’m leaving for college’ … That timing was very important,” says Levitan. He adds that he worked on the cut and finally, at one screening, he felt they unlocked the scene. “I remember that screening when it did happen, [when audience members were] tearing and crying. It was like, yes!”
VIVO
Erika Dapkewicz, editor
In Sony Pictures Animation/Netflix’s musical Vivo, the Lin-Manuel Miranda-voiced kinkajou goes on a journey with 9-year-old Gabi. The pair find themselves on a raft in the Everglades and sing Miranda’s original song “Keep the Beat.” “Initially, that wasn’t a song,” admits editor Erika Dapkewicz. “When we first built it, it was meant to be a talking-head scene. Eventually, director Kirk DiMicco wanted to make it more musical. I’m a musician myself, and I ended up coming up with a rhythmic section for the two of them to be able to play off of each other.” She adds that Miranda, who wrote original songs for the film, saw an early version of the scene and recognized the opportunity for a musical moment: “He took what we built, took a lot of the dialogue that was around it, and the atmosphere and the emotion, and turned it into ‘Keep the Beat.’ ”
Dapkewicz continues: “It’s kind of got a bookend to it. The first third, it’s the song. And it goes into this drumming bit that existed in the previous version, and then [Miranda] did the ending with the song. All of that came together in editorial, and that’s a really good example of the kind of back-and-forth that goes on.”
Another change that occurred along the way was the decision to reveal that Gabi had lost her father “to get the two to sympathize with each other.” Vivo is grieving for his owner, Andrés. “She never got a chance to say goodbye either,” Dapkewicz says. “That’s why she went over and beyond to help Vivo.”
LUCA
Catherine Apple, editor
Catherine Apple, who edited Disney/Pixar’s Luca with Jason Hudak, admits that the opening of the film — an Italian Riviera-set story of a young sea monster who turns human on land — was a tricky one that they addressed with the storyboards. “After we see the fishermen and we go down into Luca’s world, [we tried] different things,” she says. “We spent more time under the water before we met Luca. And then we did things where we spent more time in the city meeting everybody before we came to Luca. In the end, we decided to meet Luca right away when we get into the water and see the underwater world with him. We tried so many different ways to see what worked best that if we didn’t do it through storyboards, we might not have got the beginning we wanted.”
She adds that director Enrico Casarosa, the writers, story team and others were all involved in these stages. “We have different screenings and we kept trying different things until we found it,” says Apple. “After we’re done talking through the process, they draw it for us and bring it into editorial. We cut the whole thing together and it keeps going back and forth like that until we find something we like.”
This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.