Eliminating the Short Cuts

In one of the first scenes of “Road to Perdition,” the taciturn mob enforcer Michael Sullivan, played by Tom Hanks, wends his car down the snowy driveway to his house.

Seamlessly, as if the audience were seeing Sullivan’s wife and two boys as he would see them through the windshield, the camera captures their reactions to his arrival. In one cut, Sullivan’s wife, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, smiles shyly. In another cut, his sons stop throwing snowballs at one another and anxiously dust themselves off.

Then, in the last cut, the camera is positioned so that the audience feels as if it is standing in the snow, watching Sullivan’s black car pass by as his son runs along behind it.

In that brief, wordless scene, director Sam Mendes and film editor Jill Bilcock deliver the first, telling impressions of each member of the Sullivan family.

Bilcock, a 54-year-old Australian film editor whose imprint on the movie is receiving attention from critics, has spent the past decade alternating between small Australian films and a wide range of U.S. films. But “Road to Perdition,” which was released earlier this month, shows off her classical style rather than the flashy cuts she’s become known for in films like “Romeo + Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge.”

According to Bilcock, the stillness of “Road to Perdition” was the result of performances she “didn’t have to carve around.”

“It was lovely to be able to stay with the actors,” she said from London last week where she and Mendes are finishing interviews for the DVD version of “Road to Perdition.” “I didn’t have to cut away when their performance went a little wobbly at times.”

In addition to Hanks and Leigh, the cast is stacked with critically celebrated screen actors such as Paul Newman, Daniel Craig, Stanley Tucci and Jude Law.

Bilcock said one of her favorite scenes occurs in a diner, where Hanks and Law sit at separate tables, facing each other.

It is a pared-down exchange and each tight shot of Hanks shows the same trickle of sweat crawling down the left side of his face. Bilcock proudly describes the editing as “gaunt.”

“The gangster movie is almost unknown in Australia,” Bilcock said. “I had always done comedy and dance, where I dealt with rhythm, but this offered me a chance to do rhythm I had never explored before. I had never done a story where it was unspoiled and there was a bit of a mystery.”

Bilcock came to Mendes’ attention in 1998, after she finished editing the Academy Award-nominated love story “Elizabeth.” He was shopping around for an editor to work on a script called “American Beauty,” and asked if she would meet with him.

“It wasn’t about the movie [‘Elizabeth’]. You can’t judge an editor by what they edit,” Mendes said Monday. “You want someone you can spend 12 weeks in a room with and share the journey of putting the movie together.”

Bilcock was already committed to cutting “Moulin Rouge,” a psychedelic musical from director Baz Luhrmann, for whom she had already done “Strictly Ballroom” in 1992 and “Romeo + Juliet” in 1996.

With each of Luhrmann’s films Bilcock escalated the speed of rapid-fire scenes, forcing the viewer to try to keep up.

But Mendes was still determined to work with her for a film with an even tempo and an almost “still” tone.

“There’s a lot of story crammed into ‘Road to Perdition’ in under two hours,” Mendes said. “So, you have to balance explosive moments of violence with long scenes that are almost elegiac.”

By the time he had secured the deal for “Road to Perdition,” Bilcock was wrapping up final edits in Australia on “Moulin Rouge.”

“He said he would send me a script, but that the movie would look very different from that because there were a lot of changes in progress,” Bilcock said. “When I read it I felt there were characters as bizarre as Robert Mitchum in ‘The Night of the Hunter’ (1955). I could tell the way he was talking it wasn’t going to be a cliche gangster movie.”

Film editors are like chefs who mix, cut and assemble the ingredients into a feast. Save for research on the set during the filming, most of their work is done in a windowless editing room weeks after the cast and crew have moved on to other projects.

With “Road to Perdition,” filming began in March 2001, and the final edits were not completed until four months ago. Editing can be tedious work, but it is high-stake decision making.

Take, for example, one of the most crucial scenes in “Road to Perdition,” in which Hanks stands in the pouring rain, confronting his enemy.

“We felt there was something not quite right about it,” Bilcock said. “So, we pulled out the sound at the last minute, and it helped it tremendously because it was shot at night in all that rain and it was so stylized, it almost needed that stylization pushed further to make it believable. Sometimes if you don’t take shots like that to their limit, they backfire on you.”

Because film editors work so closely with directors, a club that is predominantly male, many people assume Bilcock is an exception as a female film editor. But she’s part of a boisterous club of successful film editors who have been excelling at the trade for decades.

Among the most renowned film editors are Thelma Schoonmaker, who cut Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” in 1980 and now is working on his big-budget Miramax film, “The Gangs of New York”; Anne V. Coates, whose first big film was “Lawrence of Arabia” in 1962, but who most recently cut “Erin Brockovich” (2000) and this year’s “Unfaithful”; and Sally Menke, who was nominated for an Oscar in 1995 for “Pulp Fiction.”

“There have always been a lot of women editors,” said Coates. “Women have a lot of patience, and they deal with problems between directors and producers a lot more tactfully. Because we’re mothers, we can handle directors well, who are really like little children.”

Menke, who is also back in the editing room this summer--for Quentin Tarantino’s film, “Kill Bill,” starring Uma Thurman, Daryl Hannah and Lucy Liu--said some directors even suspect that women bring a certain facile touch to what is typically considered “a rough-and-tumble scene.”

There is also an infinite amount of patience and tenacity. For the most critical and difficult scene in “Road to Perdition,” where Hanks’ character confronts Newman’s character in the pouring rain, it took a long time before Bilcock and Mendes were able to make it feel right.

“Compatibility is essential with the director,” Bilcock said, “because everyone is at their most fragile before they screen it to anyone. You have to have that ability to make someone feel safe enough to try anything.”

Finally, Mendes asked her to pull the sound out of the climactic scene, a decision that Mendes felt made it less “literal.”

The time and emotional toll of getting to that point? Bilcock had recut the scene hundreds of times over the course of 15 weeks.