By Jon Silberg, December 29, 2006
Director Todd Field never told Leo Trombetta exactly why he hired him to edit the film Little Children, but the editor thinks it likely has to do with sound. The two had worked together only once before, on an episode of the HBO series Carnivàle, and at that time Trombetta drew more than he normally would as a picture editor on his early experience as a sound editor. Little Children, starring Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson as dissatisfied parents, is an empathetic, emotionally subtle tale of suburban dreams and delusions, conformity and rebellion, disappointment and self-deception in a small Massachusetts community. Field, whose interest in music long preceded his filmmaking work, wanted to ensure the soundtrack was used as creatively as possible to help tell the story.
Trombetta started his career in New York as an assistant sound editor and then a sound editor for directors including Brian De Palma, David Mamet and Sidney Lumet. When he shifted his career to cutting picture, he was already attuned to the power of using the right sound effect or off-camera line to help sell the drama of a scene. Not all directors think about sound that way, but Trombetta says that Field is at least as attuned to the subtle power of sound as he is himself.
"Todd likes to go through the whole film again and again and really get involved in the minutiae of finding the best readings, not just of lines but of individual words, and building a performance that way. We did an awful lot of sound work during the edit with dialogue, sound effects and backgrounds," says Trombetta.
Like the picture editing on Little Children, there's nothing about the sound work that jumps out at the viewer as flashy or self-conscious, and this is by design. The screenplay, written by Field and Tom Perrotta and based on Perrotta's novel, is a delicate tapestry of converging story lines, any of which could easily declare itself as melodrama or satire but which Field wanted to keep within the realm of believability. The film has both funny scenes and strong emotional scenes, but a lot of the editorial work had to do with toning things down when they went too far.
Originally, Trombetta recalls, the plan was that several sequences would be presented simultaneously in separate boxes on screen, similar to the 1960s films The Boston Strangler and The Thomas Crown Affair. "As originally scripted, there was a handful of sequences where several actions happened simultaneously on screen in boxes of various sizes and shapes. The boxes would move, and one character's box would push another's off screen," he says. He presented Field a rough edit of the scenes that way, but Field decided to drop the idea. "I give Todd a lot of credit. He realized that it was a distraction and would have hurt the film. It was too clever for its own good."
Trombetta came on board just a week before principal photography commenced. The filmmakers used locations in and around New York City-Staten Island, Queens and Upstate New York-to stand in for the Massachusetts town where the story is set. The editor and Assistant Editor Ken Terry were stationed in a Times Square cutting room. Trombetta would assemble dailies as they came in using Avid Meridien version 11.2.6. Recordist Ed Tyse and Supervising Sound Editor Will Riley would send audio to Trombetta using a secure FTP site so that Trombetta and Field could work with many of the actual sound effects that would ultimately go to the mix rather than building temp tracks that would be replaced later. "It became part of how I approached the raw material," Trombetta says. "Not just sounds that go with the picture but how other sounds influence what you're looking at. This was very important to Todd and me."
The film presents a symphony of clocks, train whistles and swing set squeaks, all of which were shaped and designed in the editing room. "The train whistles provide the idea of escape-that there's a way out of the stifling life they lead." The whistle also helps to tie the characters together. "There's a scene where Brad [Wilson] is opening his bills, and at the end of the scene, you hear a train in the distance. That sound leads you to a shot of Sarah [Winslet] in her house, at the window, wistfully thinking."
Field and Trombetta would watch the film every day in the editing room near Field's house in Maine, where editing continued after principal photography wrapped
. Although there are a number of scenes that were cut, Trombetta credits Field and Cinematographer Antonio Calvache for shooting as much material as they did. "There were many times I was glad he shot footage that I originally thought was unnecessary because it gave us so many options as we were finding the direction the story would take," the editor explains.
"You never know exactly how a scene is going to work with those that come before and after until you're finally able to watch the film in a run. For example, there was a hilarious montage sequence that we had to remove because it undermined the drama in a scene that followed soon after. There was an entire character that was cut out of the film. But there were also scenes and pieces of scenes that weren't in the original script and that we weren't sure we would need."
In one scene, Brad gets talked into playing football for a local league. "We were only supposed to see a few seconds of the game in flashback," Trombetta says, "but Todd shot quite a bit of film of that football game. It wasn't until much later that we realized how valuable it was to have that additional footage, both to help tell Brad's story and to give us a way to include some information that was cut out of another scene. We'd have had a serious problem if we didn't have that extra footage to work with."
Though Little Children is by no stretch an "effects film," it does feature a number of invisible effects whose purpose is to combine pieces of separate takes into an apparent single shot. Trombetta was able to work out positions and timing in the Avid, then hand the project to Randy Balsmeyer of Big Film Design in New York. Balsmeyer re-created the effects at higher resolution for inclusion with the material used in the DI.
Trombetta adds, "There was a shot where Brad's wife, Catherine [Jennifer Connelly], drives him to the train station thinking he's going off to take his Law School Admissions Test [LSAT]. The camera tracks with him as he enters the station, waits a moment, and then runs back out to Sarah, who's waiting to pick him up in her car. We had a take where everything worked perfectly except that the car lurched as they drove off. We found another take where the car took off more gracefully, and we used a brick wall as a traveling split-screen so we could marry the two shots."
In another scene, Brad and Catherine are seated at the dinner table and their toddler son, Aaron, is in a high chair between them. "During the best takes of Patrick and Jennifer, the boy would periodically look into the camera," Trombetta explains. "But we also had takes where he was responding to the adults very nicely, so we did a composite using the best of both. That's the thing I enjoy about working on an Avid. We can try all these things and see very quickly if they're going to work or not. When I was cutting the sequences with the various boxes, it was time-consuming enough to frame them and work out their individual movements. I remember thinking, 'How in God's name did the editors on those '60s films ever do this when they had to wait for every sequence to come back from the optical house?'"
It may be Trombetta's comfort in working with sound that cemented his working relationship with Field. A lot of Little Children's action takes place in a park where the parents' interaction is surrounded by a gaggle of children playing. Some directors might not be that concerned about what sounds children make when they aren't the subject of a shot, but not Field.
"We spent a lot of time working on every individual line of the children in the background," the editor says. "Todd spent many hours directing the children playing and talking for all the off-camera audio. In one scene at the pool, when Brad allows himself to acknowledge his physical attraction to Sarah, you can hear one child ask, 'Want to play doctor?'"
"There was another scene," Trombetta adds, "again at the pool, where Sarah is frustrated about her chances of a serious relationship with Brad. In the background, her daughter is playing with a fishing pole. We found dialogue in her wild track, where she is trying to coax a fish onto her hook, that we placed in her mouth. The audience may not notice these things consciously, but I believe you pick them up anyway. There are similar things going on in the background of every scene, and it's nice to know they're there. I think it makes the whole film richer."
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