Alumnus Alex O’Flinn receives fellowship for movie editing

Alex O’Flinn has seen “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” over 50 times since he started editing it, yet he was never the same person for each viewing.

At times O’Flinn said he watched the film as an editor, rearranging the flow of scenes and other times as an audience member, looking to make each scene as worthwhile as the next.

“There are certain lenses I feel I have to watch the movie in at different stages of the editing process,” O’Flinn said. “It never loses (my) interest.”

In April, UCLA alumnus O’Flinn received the 2014 Sally Menke Memorial Editing Fellowship, which is in memoriam of the editor of many Quentin Tarantino films, such as “Reservoir Dogs.” The award is for O’Flinn’s work editing “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” a black and white vampire Western set in the slummy, fictitious Iranian town Bad City, directed by Ana Lily Amirpour.

As a part of the fellowship, O’Flinn attended the Sundance Directors Lab in June, a retreat at the secluded Sundance Resort in Utah. He workshopped with directors Johnny Ma and Jordana Spiro, editing select scenes from their features in development.

After the lab, O’Flinn was mentored by editing veterans Dylan Tichenor (“There Will Be Blood”), Stephen Mirrione (“The Hunger Games”) and Douglas Crise (“Spring Breakers”), from whom he sought advice on current projects and observed them working in the cutting room.

O’Flinn said finishing the film that won him the mentorship was not easy. His job was to scour several hours of Amirpour’s footage, find what was most essential to her vision and expunge the rest. Often given over three hours of footage, he said editors must condense it into half of that, while still maintaining coherence and the heart and soul of the script.

“Edits are rewriting the movie with what has already been shot,” O’Flinn said.

To do this, O’Flinn said he and Amirpour had to cut out some of their favorite scenes because they did not advance the main storyline, the love story of the protagonist Arash and the vampire. For example, the film had a storyline centered on The Boss, the overlord of Bad City, that doesn’t appear in the final film.

In order to decide what was most important, Amirpour said she and O’Flinn would go over film dailies, or unedited film footage, for hours every day. She said the most important part of a director-editor relationship is chemistry and being able to work creatively together.

“(O’Flinn) was my spiritual warrior in cinema,” Amirpour said.

During one three-month period of editing, Amirpour said they were so focused on making “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” that she could not talk to anyone else but O’Flinn.

“We were cut off from the normal world’s time schedule, eating, sleeping, breathing and dreaming the film,” Amirpour said.

Matt Fuller, a director who worked with O’Flinn on the documentary “Autism in Love,” said one of O’Flinn’s greatest contributions to the editing process was his ability to maintain a calming environment.

“A director needs freedom to explore options without feeling (they) might fail,” Fuller said. “In high-anxiety editing rooms, nobody does their best work because they are trying not to fail rather than trying to do their best.”

In addition to reducing and restructuring “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” O’Flinn said another of his responsibilities as editor was to enhance the film’s frightening tone. In one of the vampire’s kill scenes, O’Flinn said they added in a heartbeat and cut intermittently from the vampire to a black screen, creating a feeling of anxiety and dreaminess.

“It elevates the scene by 200 percent,” O’Flinn said.

O’Flinn said even though editors do not write or direct a script, they are still a storyteller, deciding how best to draw in the audience and make the film emotionally resonate with viewers.

“When (the audience) is not feeling that visceral human feeling when watching it, that’s when an editor comes in,” O’Flinn said. “You make the audience feel whatever the scene is meant to make them feel.”