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Mine has been an eclectic storytelling journey that compelled me into the realms of both documentary and fiction, short form and long and within an array of budgetary realities. I’ve worked in the worlds of film marketing, commercials, music video, virtual reality and on Johnny Depp’s wedding video (shhh). What I’ve discovered is that I’m most at home in the editing room, where the pulse of the story is detected, listened to and amplified. 

 

When I began editing, it was on six plate Moviolas with guillotine splicers. Every edit was an actual incision, which could not be undone, only taped back together temporarily. This meant you spent a lot of time thinking before cutting. Back then, you literally held your film in your bandaid covered hands. In many ways, an editor still does. I consider that responsibility both an honor and a privilege.  Call me old school, but I still value the thought before the act. The decision before the incision. 

 

Most recently, I was editor on The Infiltrators, a hybrid-documentary feature and double award winner at Sundance 2019. The Infiltrators was unlike any film I’d ever worked on, both in its hybrid form and in the madder-than-usual-dash to a festival deadline. The daily storytelling conversation and team orientation was the metastructure that made finding the film’s structure possible. In the end, what we discovered wasn't new. Rather, we were reminded that films, at their best, operate on an internal value system consistent in the world of the narrative, that characters are defined by action and action either creates or releases tension. And tension is drama. The timing of the rise and fall of that drama is in the heart of the story.  

 

I love being part of a team that has the heart of a story in its hands.