Last year veteran spot editor Dan Swietlik won the American Cinema Editors’ Award for best editing of a documentary for An Inconvenient Truth. It was his first time editing a documentary. His second venture into the doc realm cutting Michael Moore’s compelling documentary SiCKO has earned him a nomination for another ACE Award for best-edited doc. We spoke with Swietlik about editing the film and how it differed from that on An Inconvenient Truth.
How did you come on this project and what attracted you to it at the beginning?
They were looking for an editor for SiCKO. Someone I knew the archive producer and she mentioned my name and the fact that I’d done An Inconvenient Truth to Michael Moore and that got me the first sit down interview with him. I walked out of the interview not having a clue about how it went but they called me soon after and asked me to fly out to New York and get started the next week.

The primary reason I wanted to work on it was the same sort of reason I did An Inconvenient Truth: to make a change, to get the message out there. So I got up every day heading to work saying I am trying to fix health care. But also very important to deciding to do this was the chance to work with Michael, someone whose films I’ve always enjoyed and who I admired as someone who gets an opinion out there and gets people to think, whether you agree with him or not. That’s what documentaries should do and he sort of broke the mold of documentaries as being unbiased observers and letting the audience draw their own conclusions to creating very opinionated documentaries, which makes them a little more entertaining. That’s why he refers to them as feature-documentaries

How was the job divided between you and the two other editors, Geoffrey Richman, Chris Seward?
I was brought on first first. We knew there was going to need to be a second editor all along. I was there from July until October by myself and then Geoff Richman came on. And then Chris came on in November.

We all started working scenes individually. It was really divided character by character, depending on who these victims of the health care system were. Se we each individually started cutting scenes and then we started working those scenes into sections of the film and each of us working those sections. We kept dismantling scenes and sections and handing off parts of it to each other. So in the end I think all of us worked all of the film at some time or another.

It’s said that documentaries are in large part written during editing. Was that the case?
This was totally written in the editing bay. And there were a lot of days here we all, the three editors, two producers and Michael, and just look at index cards on a giant cork board and do paper cutting structures of the film. That we did a lot.

We arrived at the final structure probably nine months into it. Once we had a structure that we felt worked, and believe me there were a lot of structures prior to that that didn’t, we did a couple test screenings. We took a lot of feedback from audience responses. We didn’t do a lot of structural changes but we did a lot of fine tuning and clarifying of scenes.

What was the input received from the audience at the test screenings?
That it was very easy to cover the same turf more than once and we were doing a little of that. It’s a tough subject. How do you turn a film about healthcare into a comedy? In fact at one point we had a giant banner up in the office that said “It’s a comedy stupid”. The real challenge was to not tell people what they already knew because everybody already kind of knows that the American health care system sucks. To streamline that to convery that it sucks worse than they thought, and then to move on to how it is done in other countries and to just not labor any points while also making sure everything was clear because you can’t really race through explaining the faults of the healthcare system because you’ll lose them along the way. On the other hand you can’t get too detailed because the audience will glaze over and tune out.

We really relied on these screenings to tell us when we were going too slow and getting boring and going too fast and not being clear enough.

What was the technical workflow on the film?
They shot everything on HD. Then there were massive amounts of archival footage that came in all kinds of formats, from silent black and white films, to stills. The archival section of the film was an entire department of the film itself. We edited on four Avid Media Composers attached to a Unity.

How difficult is it to transition from editing commercials to documentaries, and how do the skill sets differ?
Well, I will never complain about having six hours of dailies on a commercial again.
By the time we were done with SiCKO we had a thousand hours of footage in the system.

So the transition is workload but also more in just the mindset and your role in a project. In editing commercials the editor is much more of an artist and in documentary the editor is much more of a writer. That was a huge eye-opener to me, how much of a writer the editor of a documentary has to be. It’s a completely different type of challenge

With such large amounts of footage and no set structure how do you approach it so that you are making progress?
You start pretty broad. Our approach was to create a bunch of different scenes, but you can’t link the scenes together because there is no structure at that point. So there’s really no such thing as editing, there’s on re-editing. Once you see scenes in context of other scenes you have to go back and modify other scenes. We didn’t know at the beginning what footage we would use and what we wouldn’t. By the end we were going back through stuff that we thought for sure wasn’t going to make it into the film and now that we had a completely different perspective knowing what the film was saying some of this stuff that was thrown out early on go brought back in. Some stuff that we thought for sure was the best and funniest scenes early on, never made it into the film.

What were the differences between editing SiCKO and An Inconvenient Truth?

They were very different approaches. In certain respects we had a script with i>An Inconvenient Truth because Al Gore’s presentation was the foundation for that film. There was a pretty solid structure going into that film. Sicko was wide open and was an incredibly large topic.

At first we had a three-headed monster we were going to attack: the insurance companies, pharmacuetical companies and the hospital system. We realized half way through that it was just too big. It was like three separate films. So we cut off a couple heads of the monster ad focused on the insurance side of things.

What are you working on today?
I just finished some ESPN commercials and now on to Chrysler commercials. They were comedy spots but shot very documentary style. Now I’m the guy who does documentary-style commercials.

Is there another documentary on your horizon?
I’m looking at a few projects but just need to be careful about jumping on. If you can’t live, eat and breath a topic 24/7 for a year at a time, you’re going to go nuts doing a documentary.