How Do You Craft a Docuseries With 30 Plus Years of Footage?

As any seasoned documentary filmmaker can tell you, sometimes watching through and getting a feel for all of the footage at your disposal (both shot for the production as well as the collected archival library) can be extremely daunting. Most projects have days upon years of material to intimately know and become familiarized with to tell your best story.

Or, in some cases, it can be 30 plus years of two of the most photographed celebrities in the world. Oopsies.

So is the case for Netflix’s extremely well made docuseries Beckham, profiling the celebrity footballer through four episodes of dense history and insight into his life today. The series, exquisitely edited by Emmy-award-winning ACE Michael Harte (Three Identical Strangers, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie), certainly feels crafted by creatives that didn’t take any shortcuts in the cut.

Beckham is seeping with as much heart and dedication to its subject as David Beckham himself brings to the pitch. It’s currently nominated for five Emmy awards, including best editing for Harte.

We were lucky enough to sit down and talk shop with Harte, where he breaks down the importance of obsessive organization, finding your voice as an editor, and so much more.

Editor’s note: The following quotes from Michael Harte are edited for length and clarity.

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Michael Harte: From PA to ACE

“I was living in Dublin and there was a really strong documentary scene there.

I started working with an editor as runner, and he showed up with a Harley Davidson—his name was Bob Caldwell. He was very cool guy and had a house on the beach in Dublin, which is unheard of, and even as an editor. And I was like, well, if I edit, this is what I’ll get—a Harley Davidson and a house on the beach. I have neither.

And he just let me cut from day one. We got on really well, and he was really encouraging. He had a tiny boutique edit suite and said, it’s just me and, and when a project comes in, we’re going to share the load, but you’ll have to do some of the assistant edit work, but you’re going to have to cut too because the industry started to take off. [After working there for a bit I went to London and eventually landed Three Identical Strangers].

That opened a lot of doors for me in terms of work.”

Define Your Workflow 

“It depends on the director and how much work they’ve done by the time I come on board.

With Three identical Strangers, [director] Tim Wardle was very organized before we even started. He knew a lot of the story beats—the story had already happened. So I could focus entirely on the editing on that one. The third act was the only exception, that was unfolding as we were cutting it, so we were trying to find that part of the story.

With other projects it can be different. I don’t like the word “pre-production” anymore because—sorry to post-production—because a lot of the times you come on board and the production is far from finished—it’s almost like 20, 30 percent.

I’m a big fan of bringing the editors in earlier so they can talk to the director and build a relationship with them as they’re shooting—or especially if there’s a lot of archive to work with. You can go through the archive and start thinking about the story earlier.

I was brought on board for Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie from day one with Davis Guggenheim, and that was his way of working. He wanted us to go through the archive first. It sounds counterproductive, but he wanted to start in the edit.

The truth is my favorite way of working is when I watch all the archives first. You’ve seen Beckham and he could be slightly obsessive with the organization and how things are put in order. I’m exactly the same in the edit. I get obsessive about making sure I know where everything is—it sounds so boring.

I think organization is the key to any good edit—or definitely documentary.

This thing about like, “Oh, we’ll just see if it goes, let’s kind of lose ourselves in the material.” No, no. If we lose ourselves in the material, we will get lost. And I love to have structure and a schedule for what we’re doing, if we’re trying to hit deadlines that we’re trying to hit for producers and the broadcasters. I like to know all that. It sounds so boring.

When it came to Beckham, there’s just so much material. It was like my Mt. Everest of material. I thought I had that with Michael J. Fox Movie, where I had to go through all his TV shows and all his movies. I literally have to see everything. I have assistants, they help me kind of break stuff down, but I need to watch everything.

When I got to Beckham, it was like, okay, you’ve got the most photographed person in the world who ends up marrying one of the most photographed people in the world. And not only that, he’s played in hundreds of matches of football games over the course of 20 years, and you’ve got the pre and the post of the matches, and then all the newspaper and news items that go with it. And that’s not even thinking about their personal archive that they’ve got.”

The More Organized, the More Robust Your Edit Can Be 

“So I was like, well, can I watch all this stuff? Is it possible? And on this project, I kind of had to give it over a bit to the assistants, but with very strong direction. When we started to make the documentary, the first couple of cuts of the series were very much about football.

It was very much about is he going to win the league? Is he going to win that cup? Those were the goals. And as an Ireland football fan it was hard for me to watch all these games, but it was still a really, really good documentary if you love football.

I remember sitting down with my partner Claire, and showing her a rough cut, and I knew 10 minutes in [it wasn’t the right direction]. There’s no more honest feedback than when somebody picks up their phone. I remember thinking, this is missing a huge part of his story. And we were using David as a way into football, and what I realized, we had to flip it around, we needed to use football as a way into David. I rewatched everything with that in mind—that this can’t be about football. And what really stuck out was this is a story about family. This is a story about relationships between people.

Once we figured that out, it was much easier to go through the mountains and mountains of archive because I knew what I was looking for. So when we were watching the games, I was less interested. It was easy to find the goals they scored, and the assists that he did, and they were great, they looked great—he looks great on pitch. He was like someone you’d never seen before in a football match. But what I was starting to look for was the moments that he didn’t have the ball. The moments where he would look at the sideline to see if his manager Alex Ferguson was watching him, and vice-versa.

One of my favorite scenes is when Alex Ferguson is relentlessly chewing gum and it’s like he’s under pressure because what’s happening on the pitch isn’t to his liking. That’s when we realized what we were looking for. It wasn’t just about the goals, it wasn’t about the league, it was about the stage that was the pitch. And can we have fun with that? But can we be subvert it slightly so that you’re watching theater on a football pitch?

The way I work is a bit of a nightmare for producers and for broadcasters, and especially for directors, because they feel the need initially to cut when they get into the edit. A lot of times they’ve seen the material [they’ve shot], they know it inside out. There’s an instinct to cut immediately because they have to take a back. They’ve got to sit down and just watch you work.

And what I try and do is, and I think I have more license to ask now, is that I need time to go through this myself. You can chill out, you can relax. You’re going to trust me that what I’m doing is progressive and it will pay off in the end because everything will be a couple clicks away.

Sometimes it’s going to take weeks. It may slow the process down at the start, but when it comes to it, when you start to cut, I can cut much faster and that pays off. They start to relax and they edit. It makes it so is your mind and your brain are totally in sync with the material and you never have to think. You never worry about looking for material when you’re cutting. If you have an idea in seconds, you can do it. You’re limited only by your imagination.

If you’re super organized and become the most boring editor for the first seven weeks—no music, stay away from music at first. It’s purely the organization of your material. If you are that boring person, you’ll look a little more cooler near the end of the edit.”

The Art of Juxtaposition 

“We had a lot of fun with the people and characters in Beckham, and I think the audience responded to it nicely. We didn’t want this to be entirely from David’s point of view, we needed other voices to give other perspectives. When it comes to celebrity docs, there’s this idea that they’re controlling it. In this series I don’t think that’s the case. There are a lot of other voices saying other things, counter to what David says, but also you get to have a lot of fun in the edit with that.

[For instance], at times David would say something and someone else would say the opposite. So when he says, “I don’t think the fame changed me”, [then we cut to Alex Ferguson] who says, straight after, “the fame changed him.” The more we can do those juxtapositions—one, it’s funny—but it also means that there are many points of view here.

You can’t pull that stuff off consistently in a series if you’re not super organized.

I remember hearing David say that, “oh, fame never changed me.” And I remembered Ferguson said something similar—I have a good memory for the stuff even though there’s hundreds of thousands of hours. But I was able to find Ferguson’s line in two seconds because I just typed in: “Ferguson changed,” and there was.

If I wasn’t organized we wouldn’t have made that call. It would have been too hard to find.”

How Much Material Was There for ‘Beckham’? 

“Honestly, I think still think they’re still ingesting material. There was so much. There’s so much I can’t give you the honest answer.

In years? It was 30 to 35 years of material because he was constantly—especially when he turned around 14, 15 when he started paying for Manchester United—every day, there was somebody with a camera. And then by the time he hit his 30s, every day there was 50 people with a camera.

So my answer to how material? It’s an endless amount of material. I think the most important thing, I think when something like that happens is you need to figure out the theme. You need to start paying attention to what the theme of the film is, and then it’ll help you wade through that stuff.

Otherwise you’ll get lost in there.”

Harte’s Advice to Editors 

“Don’t be afraid of your own ideas in an edit. There’s a thought process that the editor is there to serve someone else’s vision.

I’ve been very lucky that I’ve worked with really good directors who are very supportive of, “Well, what do you think? What does the editor think?”

And Davis Guggenheim was very supportive of that. I had a run of really strong directors who encouraged me to come up with my own ideas. It’s hard to do if you’re starting out to present an idea because it’s you, and it’s reflective of you as a person, whether you like it or not.

Whatever you present, it’s not just like a piece of documentary footage, it’s the way you cut it. But I find sometimes that the editor—that the process of editing—is the most personal, because you’re making the decisions. The director, the camera person, they’re shooting, they’re creating endless amounts of material. But when an editor comes in, they have to say, “Well, I think that goes with this because of that.” And it can be a scary thing to do because somebody can turn around and point and say, “this is crap.”

You shouldn’t be afraid of that. You have to put yourself out there and be more than a button pusher, because the director needs it. Then [an editor] needs a director. It’s a two way street in an edit. It definitely is.

Within that, what I would say is the best way to get your idea across is to just fucking cut it and show it. Don’t talk about it.

The worst thing you can do is pull a piece of music and say, “I love this piece of music. I think we should use it.”

One-hundred times out of 100 times when I’ve done that, they’ve gone, “I don’t think so.”

You can never sell that idea. The only way an editor can sell an idea is just by cutting it. Don’t even tell them. Just say, “I need a couple hours. I need a couple of days.”

Cut something and present it, and then you have a better chance. So getting your idea across in film is the language in and of itself, and you can’t talk your way into a good idea, really. You can get only so close.

You just do it. Not sound like Michael Jordan or Nike. But honestly, you just got to do it.”