My V̶i̶l̶l̶a̶i̶n̶ Editor Origin Story: Part 2

Happy Thursday everyone, I’m here with a special bonus episode of SPLICE WORLD: Part 2 of My Villain Editor Origin Story. If you missed Part 1, you should catch up here because, as with any sequel, skipping the first one is a terrible idea. Unless it’s Top Gun: Maverick, then you get a pass. Let’s turn and burn!

This article is inspired by the various aspiring filmmakers who have asked me some version of “How did you break into the film industry??” Enjoy, and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming on Tuesday.

When we last left our hero (hey, that’s me!), I had quit my production assistant job, been fired by a leading documentarian, and felt like I had wasted four years of my life directing and editing a movie nobody wanted to see. Not to mention all the scripts I had submitted to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab (rejected every time). It wasn’t looking good. What was a budding filmmaker to do?

At my day job as a glorified janitor, I met two co-workers who would become integral partners in my filmmaking career: Bobby and Conrad. At the time, they ran a catering company called…wait for it…BobRad Catering. One day, Conrad told me they had just returned from Park City, Utah, where they had scored a contract to serve coffee at the Sundance Film Festival. When he told me this, I was livid! Why hadn’t he hired me as his barista? I knew my way around a La Marzocco and I was pretending to be a filmmaker! Come on, dude!

Luckily, even though Lucy had fired me as her assistant a few months prior, she knew that I had edited my own documentary and that I was hungry for work. She called me and told me that she and editor Pedro Kos were cutting The Crash Reel, a documentary about snowboarder Kevin Pearce. They were under an extremely tight deadline to submit to Sundance, and needed all hands on deck for the edit. Even the hands of her shitty ex-assistant (hey, that’s me!).

Lucy told me they would bring me on as an assistant editor, but I wouldn’t be doing technical work. Instead, I would lend a creative hand on certain scenes that Pedro didn’t have time to complete. Not only would I be editing, but I would have a team of assistant editors at my disposal to help me with whatever I needed.

This was very intimidating! I had only ever edited in my bedroom! I didn’t know what I was doing! I barely knew the Final Cut keyboard shortcuts! I was under-qualified and completely terrified, so of course I said yes.

At first, Pedro and Lucy gave me small jobs. There was one scene where the voiceover needed to be replaced with audio from a new interview. My job was to find the corresponding lines, swap them out, and no matter what DO NOT TOUCH THE VISUALS.

After spending an inordinate amount of time trying not to fuck anything up, I took the long, lonely walk to show Pedro and Lucy my version of the scene. I was sweating bullets until Pedro yelled, “Perfect! Don’t change a thing!” I breathed a huge sigh of relief and was given bigger jobs from there. I ended up cutting the opening and closing credits (which had a lot of cool visuals), as well as the titular crash reel in the middle of the film. It was like going through a hands-on film school for three months.

Flash-forward and The Crash Reel is accepted into Sundance. I wrangled a festival pass from producer extraordinaire Julian Cautherley, found a couch to crash on, and strong-armed Conrad into hiring me as a barista. We drove to Park City, where I spent my days slinging coffee and my nights watching movies.

After Sundance, I latched onto The Crash Reel and wouldn’t let go. I attended every festival I could. I was so associated with the film that a few people thought I was actually the editor (sorry Pedro!). But this was my first chance to get out into the world and meet other filmmakers, and I wasn’t going to let that pass by.

After a year of traveling the festival circuit, I drummed up a few short editing gigs with newly-minted film fest friends. None of these jobs were paying me enough to survive, though, so I was still working as a glorified janitor. Despite the financial uncertainty, I knew that I had to focus on being an editor if I wanted to keep making movies. So, I quit the event space and hoped I could find an edit gig before my money ran out.

It was pretty rocky for a few months, but editing jobs were becoming a little more frequent. Then, in early 2013, I got another call from Lucy. She wanted me to edit a short documentary called The Lion’s Mouth Opens. She would pay me a flat (and, frankly, very low) rate to edit the short. Honestly, I think Pedro was busy and I was the B-Team, but, as usual, I jumped at the opportunity.

The footage was limited but very powerful, chronicling a 48-hour window in which a young woman prepares to find out if she has Huntington’s Disease. I would edit on my own for a couple of weeks at a time, then show Lucy my assemblies. This went on for a few months, during which Lucy was very patient with me. I was still learning how to be an editor, so I’m sure my process was both slow and chaotic.

After a lot of back and forth, the story started to come together. We hammered a 14-minute movie into shape and submitted it to Sundance in the fall. Insanely, we got in. I’d be at Sundance two years in a row, this time as an editor!

No one pays you to go to Sundance. In fact, it costs a shitload of money. So you best believe I convinced Conrad to hire me as a barista again. I worked fewer shifts that year, but I did make coffee when I wasn’t watching movies. We stayed in the basement of a house that was so large we called it “Chateau Billionaire,”1 and at one point Moby told me he thought The Lion’s Mouth Opens was very emotional. He’s a vegan. It was a very surreal experience.

At Sundance, HBO bought The Lion’s Mouth Opens with one caveat: they didn’t air any shorts that were under 28 minutes long. So, my second “real” job as an editor was a very unique one: take the movie you made and double the length. Over the course of a couple months, Lucy and I incorporated new archival footage to round out the story. The result is a different but even more emotionally devastating version of the same film.

More than anything, Lion’s Mouth gave me a track record. No one had seen Mule Days, but Lucy was a known director. While the film was on the festival circuit, I started getting emails from directors I had never met before. Other filmmakers had seen the movie and at least a few of them were interested in working with me. Incredible!

The longer version of The Lion’s Mouth Opens aired on HBO and was shortlisted for the Academy Awards. I now understand this to be an extremely rare honor, but at the time, much like having a heart-to-heart with Moby, the whole experience was very surreal. It gave me a confidence boost that I might actually be good at my job, but I was still picking up shifts at the event space to make ends meet. It’s not like Michael Bay showed up on my doorstep with a dump truck full of cash asking me to edit Pain & Gain 2.

Uh oh, do you hear that? That sound means it’s time to…

I’ve worked as an editor for 13 years now. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that this job is insane and there’s no right way to become, or continue to be, a filmmaker. I seem to have done everything backwards: I didn’t start as an assistant editor and work my way up. In fact, the first time I worked as an AE was after I directed and edited my first film, which I didn’t even mean to direct or edit in the first place. And my first real “break” came from making a movie longer, which I thought was the opposite of editing…

I’ve cut with first-time filmmakers and Oscar nominees, actors-turned-directors and programmers-turned-podcasters. But the reality is, being a freelance editor is still difficult. There are still months when I don’t know where the next paycheck will come from. I still want to write and direct fiction, and I still have other documentaries I want to direct. But I love making movies, and that’s what keeps me cutting.

Oh, and I finally directed a documentary that people actually saw! It’s called Bad Press. Remember Conrad? He produced it! We even won an award at Sundance almost ten years to the day after my first trip to Park City.

But you can read about that sub-sub-subquest in The Hollywood Reporter.

Joe Peeler is a Sundance award-winning director and editor who writes about the art of making movies through the lens of film editing.

SPLICE WORLD. The world of movies, y’know, spliced.

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