Naturalistic Battle Scenes, a Gamer's Point of View, and Drafts and Redrafts in the Editing Room

Dody Dorn, ACE, began her career as an assistant film editor, as most editors do. But she soon moved on to Foley and dialogue editing, becoming a supervising sound editor before transitioning back to picture editing in the early 1990s. This fluency with both sound and picture has served her well, notably when cutting the Rubik's Cube narrative in Christopher Nolan's Memento, for which she received an Oscar nomination, but also on films like Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men, for which she served as both editor and music supervisor. In Columbia Pictures' Fury, the latest from David Ayer and Dorn's third film with the director, she brings her nuanced, dual craft to bear on an action film with a searing heart, the story of a world- and war-weary army sergeant named Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) who leads his five-person crew and their roughed up Sherman tank behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany toward the end of World War II.

Dorn, who cut the film on Avid, shares an editing credit with Jay Cassidy, best known for his Oscar-nominated work editing David O. Russell's recent films. On the most basic level, the past three films Dorn has cut for Ayer—including End of Watch and Sabotage—are action films with copious amounts of weapons and weapon fire. But they are unlike any other movies that Dorn has edited. "I've cut many action films for other directors, but it's a very different process in a David Ayer movie," she says. "There's a lot of invention going on in the editing room. David shoots long takes and likes a very fluid camera, and his shots are not necessarily storyboarded and planned out on a shot-by-shot basis the way a lot of action scenes are, especially those with a lot of visual effects."

In fact, she says, Ayer doesn't like to rely on visual effects if he doesn't have to. "There is always something more organic and visceral that he's going for," she says. The hardest part of the process, she admits, is sifting through the material, "drafting and redrafting a sequence until we get it right." Dorn cites a chase scene through Atlanta in Sabotage that she originally cut as it was shot, which Ayer wanted. "There were a lot of visual details to take in as a viewer, in terms of where the cars where going and what their actions were," she says. "The first cut was pretty long—about 7 or 8 minutes—even though it was very fast-paced. But we had to do that first, in order to dial it back down to where it was the appropriate length and pace for the film. There's a lot of intensive labor to get all those pieces in place and really give it a flow."

The tank battles in Fury follow a similar detail-rich trajectory. "David loves these textures and nuances; it's not just two sides firing at each other," says Dorn. "He likes to shoot a lot of intricate details and every beat in an action scene ultimately gets its own due. But those beats might be in and amongst ten-minute takes. He doesn't set up the shot to capture that one moment; it’s part of a longer sequence. You have to search through all of those long takes to find the best piece for each moment. It becomes a very complex puzzle when it comes to his material."

Fury was edited with Media Composer 6, the version available to the team at the start of production. "My general ethos is to go with whatever version the assistants are comfortable with and/or what the hardware providers are comfortable with," she says. "I'm not a fan of upgrading to new versions in the middle of a project, so FotoKem, who we really love working with, brought us version 6 because they had not yet fully tested 6.5, even though a number of folks were already using it at that point. They offered to bring us 6.5 midflight, but we didn't want to do that. I'm sure whatever I do next will be with 6.5."

Editor Jay Cassidy, ACE, came on board for two months toward the end of post-production to help sharpen several scenes, many of which were heavily improvised during production. "Jay and David went into several narrative scenes to mine the material for a specific tone to the relationships that David was searching for," says Dorn. "Because we had such a big movie on our hands with a lot of moving parts, it was great to have Jay to help out. There were hours and hours of material, with so many different shades and colors. David got amazing and varied performances from these fine actors, and then there was the improv that they did as well. Every editor will say a scene can be cut in an infinite number of ways, but I must say, several particular scenes in Fury could be put together so many different ways with so many different tones. That just takes time and experimentation. I had my hands full with so many other things that it was great that Jay was there to do some of that with David."

The counterpoint to the film's unrelenting battle scenes comes when the tank crew liberates a German town held hostage by sadistic SS Troops. Pitt's Wardaddy and his youngest recruit, Norman, enter the home of a German woman and her young cousin and act out a strained but moving shadow dance in domesticity. When the rest of the crew shows up, everything intensifies. "I think that scene is the emotional heartbeat of the film," says Dorn. "As a segment, in full flower, it was almost 30 minutes long, beginning when Norman and Wardaddy first go in." There were "multiple drafts and redrafts of this scene," she adds. "There was also a lot of improvisation and there were so many different tones to consider. For example, how aggressive would the rest of the crew be when they discovered Wardaddy and Norman in the apartment? How aggressive or how gentle would Wardaddy be with the women? We were fine-tuning those things until the very end of post." Both Dorn and Cassidy did work on the scene. "I had a very fine cut of the scene and Jay came on did some alternate iterations," Dorn says. "And at the very end, about two weeks before we finished the mix, I recut the entire scene from when the guys came in until the end."

Reactions to that scene's early drafts were all over the map. "This was a very polarizing scene, in terms of how outsiders responded to it," she says. "Some loved those early versions, while others hated them. David knew there was a very specific tone he was reaching for. After I recut it the final time, I told David I was in a trance when I did it," adds Dorn, laughing. "Frankly, I felt as if I was. I had cut and recut that scene so many times, as had Jay. But David loved that final version and that's what we stuck with."

Regardless of the number of revisions that lay ahead, she believes an editor's primary responsibility should be to get each scene as polished as possible from the outset. "As an editor, it's my job to do all the nitty-gritty and present something to the director in a first-time viewing that will stimulate a lot of discussion. I prefer to get something dialed in, to present something that plays so you're working more in refinements in subsequent passes. It's sort of like script-writing that way: you don't want to show somebody your pages as you're going. You want to hand them your completed script, even if it's a first draft. Then you go back and do the redrafts." 

Because of how David Ayer shot Fury, multiple-scene drafts of multiple scenes were inevitable. "For the scene directly following the battle with the German Tiger tank (a tank with much greater fire power and physical size), where they are all spent from struggling to barely survive, there was so much material," she says. "It was really difficult first to find all of the material, because so much of it was at the end of the takes where they were still fighting. We really had to search to find all those pieces to consider. Additional Editor Rob Bonz had done a draft of that scene during shooting that had really haunted David. It was a kind of post-coital exhale from having survived the Tiger attack. They shot the scene as written with the dialogue months later. We cut it traditionally but David kept wanting to go back and get this really naturalistic, exhausted feeling. The final version of the scene that's in the finished film is actually an amalgamation of a version that Jay did, a version that I did, and a version that Rob did." (Dorn praises the strong editorial department team and singles out additional edtiors Bonz and Geoffrey O'Brien for their work throughout.)

In addition to Fury's in-house visual-effects team, which included several VFX editors, the film used a number of outside VFX houses. "We discussed visual effects daily, sometimes twice a day," says Dorn. "Getting the American and German tracers just right was probably the most difficult aspect of the VFX. There was a very specific look David was going for that was unlike the standard tracer fire look that had been used in recent films. There had been a trend toward making them look like lasers, which David really didn't want. But once we found the right look, it was tricky to make sure all the different vendors standardized that look so it was seamless."

There are nearly 700 VFX shots in Fury, but Dorn says each one was rendered with the utmost subtlety. "All of the visual effects are really just subtle enhancements, which is in keeping with what David wanted for the entire film," she says. "So many of the effects in the film are practical, and I mean that even for the explosions and the debris. For the editorial team, it's really about dialing everything in together so that it is very much of a seamless piece."

Even with its naturalistic battle scenes, Fury also consistently references the language of gaming through POV. "I'm not a gamer, and I don't know if David is either, but when you have a shot that's over the barrel of a gun toward your target," says Dorn. 'The audience instinctively knows, 'oh, this is gamer perspective.' We didn't talk about it from a gaming point of view, but it is a look that David has used consistently, from End of Watch to Sabotage. He likes to give this feeling of 'you are there,' and there is definitely a kind of instinctive mirroring of game play going on in his scenes. I think there is this kind of intense visceral, experiential quality to David’s action scenes, and I'm sure that's especially attractive to people who play video games."

Her favorite scene in the film happens inside the tank. "It's when Wardaddy takes a drink and Bible quotes scripture," she says. "What you see in the film is very close to the first cut that David and I did, but I think it is the culmination of all that the characters have been going through up to that point. It's kind of like a Last Supper. I thought that the performance by Shia (LeBeouf), who plays Bible, was absolutely heart wrenching."

Dorn's background in sound editing has played a critical role in her education as a picture editor. "Cutting Foley really taught me how to cut to picture," she says. "So much of Foley is the rhythm. You feel it while you're cutting the Foley, and I started examining what the film editor had done and why. That was the beginning of my extreme fascination of the juxtaposition of images, but then I started cutting dialogue, which helped me understand rhythmically what that does. This might sound crazy but a lot of times I cut dialogue first in a given scene and then I put the images to it. That's what I did on End of Watch. When you have a director who does a lot of improvising and moves the camera a lot and you have multiple takes, it's not like you can watch the dailies and go, 'oh, I like this take.' You have to really search for the best moments, put them together, and then make it flow. In that way, my dialogue editing background had a huge impact on the way that I cut."

Director David Ayer on the set of Fury. All photos by Giles Keyte; courtesy Columbia Pictures

Dorn loves cutting for film and television equally, and plays no favorites when it comes to genre. "I don't feel limited, because I've worked across genres for most of my career," she says. "The main thing I'm drawn to is a script that, once I start to read, I can't put down until I get to the last page," something that happened when she first read Christopher Nolan's enigmatic script for Memento. Dorn says she has always been drawn to intentionally visible picture editing, once cutting a movie of the week for German television (1991's Murderous Decisions) in duplicate, each version told from another character's point of view (both versions ran simultaneously on different channels and the audience was encouraged to surf between the two). When she first read Memento's script, however, she needed to read it through four or five times before she felt ready to sit down with Nolan. "It reminded me of Italo Calvino's book, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler," she says. "I was frustrated reading that book because of the way the writer breaks the narrative thread and reaches out from the page to the reader. Frankly, I just got pissed off. But when I was reading Memento and I knew it was going to be a challenge that I might get to be involved with, it became utterly thrilling to me to figure out how you keep the narrative thread moving without alienating people. I knew the structure could work and thought it would be so much fun to do."

Memento's narrative was precisely laid out in the script, says Dorn. "Chris and I clicked on the excitement of that from the start. In our first meeting I asked him if he wrote it (based on his brother Jonathan Nolan's short story, "Memento Mori") in a straight throughline narrative and then chopped it up like a Japanese chef at a Hibachi restaurant. But no, he had written it as it appears in the script. What that did was create a three-act structure, even though the narrative is told in reverse order. The character arc is still there. You don't find out he's a serial killer until the end, but that's what the structure does; it puts you in his head, and like Leonard, you don't know what has come before. He becomes a sympathetic character."

Guy Pearce in a scene from Memento

To keep it all straight during the edit, Dorn devised a system of banners that she had running in the Avid above the images that identified if the scene was the first or second time the audience was watching it. "It was mostly for the sound and music editors, because we matched the sound exactly in both mirror scenes, so the sound cues would come in at exactly the same points. The sound would then signal first to the audience that this is a repeat, not just something that looks similar. We also made efforts to pick phrases to kick-off scenes that would be distinctive, like the way Joe Pantoliano's character says 'Lenny!' We had this very distinct muzak playing in the bathroom, and even the tap had a particular gurgle. Those little details were all finely tuned and repeated as signals of the other repeating action."

Along with her many editing triumphs, Dorn enjoyed her recent foray into producing on Mike White’s Enlightened for HBO, which she also edited. As for what she’ll do next, it’s anyone’s guess. "What I really love is jumping in and doing something completely different," she says.