[Editor’s note: This interview contains spoilers for “The Drama.”]
“The Drama” writer/director Kristoffer Borgli usually also edits his work. But this time, he brought on editor Joshua Raymond Lee early into pre-production to help construct a life for loving engaged couple Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya) and then rip it to cinematic shreds with the revelation — seriously, spoilers — that as a troubled, lonely teenager, Emma planned to carry out a school shooting. She never ended up going through with it.
Your mileage with how “The Drama” engages with gun violence, the alluring and alienating power of American culture, and the socioeconomic and racial underpinnings of both will vary. But even more than engaging the big ideas that Emma’s revelation triggers — pun somewhat intended — Lee and Borli wanted to craft an experience that would mimic its main characters’ bewildering interiority.
“I was always repeating the mantra that this edit should move at the speed of thought,” Lee told IndieWire. “We had a few mantras during the edit. One was that we should try to have 10 editing ideas per minute; to think of the edit, of how we could be innovative, in addition to the story we’re telling.”
A breezy edit that playfully cuts at the moment before an audience expects it to is always a great fit for a comedy — Borgli and Lee relished abruptly cutting off the dance instructor in the opening wedding prep sequence at her angriest, for instance, rather than letting the scene conclude.“
There’s a phrase that Deborah Treisman, in the New Yorker fiction podcast, used to describe a short story recently that I really liked. She said it’s important that you ventilate certainty in your writing. I thought that was a really good way of expressing it. Flashbacks in film can be an accurate representation of the past, but we wanted to treat them, in the edit, more like the way we move in and out of memories.”
By doing so, Lee and Borgli craft the editing equivalent of a slightly ADHD anxiety spiral. But they make the structure of “The Drama” even more complex by blurring past, present, and fantasy. “ Sometimes we go into a fantasy with Charlie and come out of it with Emma, and we’re not sure whether it was a memory or a fantasy because of that construction,” Lee said. “Our philosophy was to give the audience as much credit for their intelligence as possible, assume as much intelligence as possible, and move at a speed that would both excite them and require them to lean forward.”
Spurning a strict chronological order for a more emotional, anxious one helped Lee and Borgli animate sequences they were struggling with, and let Charlie’s turmoil bleed across scenes in the same way he can’t get the image of Emma as a violent school shooter out of his head.
For instance, later in the film, the editing team had stood up both the scene of the couple confronting their DJ (Sydney Lemmon) about potential drug use and the scene of Charlie giving his coworker, Misha (Hailey Benton Gates), Emma’s story as a hypothetical. Both worked alright as a handoff from one to the other, but felt a little slow. Even if Charlie and Emma didn’t, Lee and Borgli wanted to get to the wedding day that much faster.
“We started experimenting with intercutting those scenes, and it became this really interesting construction. You saw Charlie storm off from his lunch, then you went to the venue, then you came back and saw him breaking down in his office. You saw Misha come in and try to console him. You cut away, and you start feeling like something is developing there, but you don’t know what it is. At the same time, you see him starting to break down as he’s trying to confront the DJ, and he’s unraveling before you know why,” Lee said. “It makes you really want to know what happens in the spaces between, and when you see him cheat, it’s a gut punch.”
The hopscotch leaps between places and times to heighten the comedy in the film, but when it came to the drama of “The Drama,” Lee said that he and Borgli had a whole other set of references for how to create naturalism and discipline that still felt like the same language as the rest of the movie. Instead of being inspired by gloriously bizarre 2010s Salem mixtapes or the most brutal cuts in “I Think You Should Leave,” Lee edited the sequence where Emma, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), Rachel (Alana Haim), and Charlie admit to the worst thing they’ve ever done in the spirit of Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher.”
“They shot that scene, I think, for like two long days with two cameras the whole time. There was an enormous amount of footage and a lot of different kinds of coverage. We really only used the close-up singles and then these two shots that are locked on either side of the table. Those ended up feeling the most mature, measured, confident frames, and they got so intimate,” Lee said. “There’s little slow zooms happening as the scene progresses, and Alana starts getting mad at Zendaya, and they just get so tight. The face kind of becomes a location.”
The slowdown of the editing rhythm is all the more noticeable because of how playful Lee and Borgli are at the top. They traded off scenes but treated everything before the opening credits as one montage, constructing it together using Adobe Productions. The more they could make the world of the film feel open, the more trapped the audience would feel in the film’s most wrenching moments.
“There’s no hiding,” Lee said.
“The Drama” is now playing in theaters.
