How Do You Keep a Film Moving When Your Protagonist Can’t?

Written by Josh Ethier, ACE

The title page of T.J. Cimfel and David White’s script held an ominous challenge for an editor. In huge, bold, black letters. DON’T MOVE.

As an editor it’s our job to keep things moving, to give the audience the necessary information for emotional impact but to also make sure that no one gets too far ahead of the film. My challenge was multiplied by the fact that at some point during the credits, “Produced by Sam Raimi” was going to be on screen.

Everyone who loves genre films knows that Sam Raimi movies don’t move slowly. Added to that, I hadn’t yet worked with directors Adam Schindler and Brian Netto. They were familiar with my work on films like Bliss, Gretel and Hansel, and Orphan: First Kill, but this felt like something completely different. It felt closer to films I grew up loving, like The Hitcher or The Vanishing. I have to admit that title page was intimidating.

In the film, Iris (Kelsey Asbille) returns to a place of trauma in her life, swallowed whole by grief. After a chance meeting with Richard (Finn Wittrock), she’s attacked and subdued by a killer who preys on women. The killer injects her with a paralyzing agent which gives her 20 minutes of failing mobility before she’s ultimately unable to move. Through the course of the film, she has to fight to survive using only her wits and the minuscule movements she’s capable of as the drug takes hold.

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The opening sequence became the biggest challenge we came up against during the editing of the film. With a title like Don’t Move, the audience knows what they’re in for, so we were repeatedly revising those opening fifteen minutes of the film, trying to give it the correct amount of weight and atmosphere. Concurrently, we had to remind ourselves that we were making a thriller and we didn’t want to lose our audience. The initial path of that first conversation between Iris and Richard was much more complex, with Iris exhibiting more frustration and Richard coming off more aloof. Initially Richard was meant to badger her into giving up her story. We re-arranged the sequence so that instead of badgering her, Richard opens up to her about his own past. This in turn gave Iris the power to decide when she wanted to share her story. We removed her frustrated responses and instead pulled from quieter sections of her performance, allowing the audience to settle in with her. There’s so many layers to that sequence; we didn’t want to rush the audience through it too fast. By the time the main title hits, you know everything you need to know about where Iris is emotionally.

For the rest of the film, the trajectory of Iris’ paralysis was of the utmost importance. We had to carefully examine takes to make sure that there wasn’t any extra movement exhibited. In some scenes it boiled down to the volume of her voice and the speed of her breathing. There was one section of the film early on where we didn’t feel that she wasn’t visibly losing enough strength so we trimmed a full scene to make sure that the effect of the paralysis was more obvious. In creative pursuits we refer to that as “killing your darlings,” but in this case the only darling we were concerned with was Iris’ physical state. If the audience wasn’t feeling her losing (or later in the film, gaining) strength, then they weren’t going to be invested in what was happening around her.

In the middle of the film Iris is completely unable to move. This cues up the most fun section of the script. Iris winds up in the care of a lonely, old widower who doesn’t know who she is or how she wound up on his property. She is effectively handing off the narrative of her own film. It’s at that exact moment that the killer shows up to collect her. What follows is my favorite section of the film. Initially, the sequence contained more backstory from the widower and a lot more leading questions from the killer trying to suss out Iris’ location. With each pass on the sequence, we whittled away at both ends, trying to see how much information we could withhold without snapping the rubber band of tension we were trying to create. The last thing to go was an exchange between the two I lobbied to keep through multiple passes. That section of the script is what excited me most about working on the film, but that didn’t matter now that it was in front of me. You always have to be ready to kill your darlings.

Josh Ethier, ACE

Having not worked with Brian and Adam before, I wondered how the two approached directing duties. I was delighted to find that they were both passionate and articulate but had completely different tastes and stylistic approaches when it came to editing. They had cut their previous film together so a big part of my job was taking my experience from my decade of cutting and being a gentle tie breaker between the both of them. What resulted from the three of us together was bigger than what one of us could have achieved alone, and we ended up having some incredible days in the editing room because of it. By the time we began screening for producers and testing the film with audiences we had become a focused hive mind.

So how do you keep a film moving when your protagonist can’t? Hopefully Don’t Move answers that question when it premieres on Netflix on October 25th.