I’ll never forget my initial reaction to Michael Bay‘s Armageddon after an Academy screening in June of 1998. It gave me a headache because of the machine-gun-like cutting. As Variety‘s Todd McCarthy famously said at the time, the pace felt like that of “a machine gun locked in the firing position.”
This over-accelerated editing, I was later told, was a result of a deliberate Michael Bay-Jerry Bruckheimer strategy of cutting out as many frames as possible in each scene order to make the film play as fast, hard and compressed as possible — i.e., “frame-fucked.”
I’m not saying that F1 plays exactly like Armageddon in this respect, but in F1‘s racing sequences the editing style feels at the very least similar to Armageddon‘s, as in quite aggressive…giving you very little room to breathe or even pause…very little opportunity to sink into anything…no time to reflect or meditate.
A little more than 18 years ago (4.28.07) I wrote about an evening with Walter Murch, one of the most renowned film and sound editors of our time, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Halfway through I stood up and asked Murch about machine-gun cutting in action movies, and at what point does it get to be too much? I was thinking at the time of the editing in 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, portions of which had driven me crazy.
Murch said audiences do indeed start to go nuts if you use more than 14 set-ups per minute.
One can obviously cut back to the same set-up — a visual point of view — within a given minute, so Murch wasn’t necessarily saying only 14 cuts every 60 seconds. Nor was he necessarily putting a limit on the number of cuts per set-up.
But let’s say for the sake of simplicity that during an action sequence you use two cuts per set-up — by Murch’s rule that would mean no more than 28 cuts per minute, or a little more than two seconds per cut. That sounds too frenzied, doesn’t it?
All I can say is that while watching F1 last night, I started thinking about Murch’s 14-set-ups-per-minute rule.
And then I started counting the length of various cuts during F1‘s balls-out racing sequences (“one thousand, two thousand”, etc.) and a lot of the cuts, it seemed, were between two and three seconds long.
I’m not saying that F1 (which was edited by Stephen Mirrione) necessarily violates Murch’s rule, but it sure seems to at times.
Here’s a portion of Murch’s observations during that 4.28.07 master class.