Steven Prusakowski
When director Daniel Goldhaber‘s How to Blow Up a Pipeline premiered to audiences at the Toronto Film Festival the film lit the fuse for what quickly became one of the most acclaimed film of year. The thriller is an adaptation of Andreas Malm‘s book which covers the crucial subject of climate change by following a group of young adults who take the cause into their own hands, each for their own personal reasons.
As the title reveals the group goes well beyond signing petitions or picketing. Instead, they choose to make a much more explosive statement by sabotaging a portion of the massive pipeline supplying oil across the continent. The burning of these fuel releases endless carbon dioxide, greenhouse gasses and other pollutants into the environment, turning our climate into a ticking time bomb.
The film is a mix of hold-your-breath moments, eye-opening insight into this critical fight for our environment, and smaller, very personal stories. The mesmerizing combination has kept audiences’ hearts racing and minds thinking, all while remaining much more accessible on a human level than the title may anticipate.
To pull this off Goldhaber reached out to editor Daniel Garber to help tell this multifaceted story. While the writing, direction, and performances are a vital to the film, they all are for naught if the editing cannot retain viewer engagement as the film shifts from character to character, setting to setting, back and forth in time. The end results of Garber’s work makes quite the impact on several levels – an captivating eco-thriller that wears it heart on its sleeve.
Awards Radar spoke with Garber whose work on the film earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Editing. You can listen to the full interview below – which, like the film, is fascinating from beginning to end.
FULL INTERVIEW WITH EDITOR DANIEL GARBER
When I first heard the film’s title I thought it was a documentary. What drew you to the project?
“My background is really in documentary editing as well. I sort of jumped between documentary and narrative work. And so a lot of people who know me primarily as a documentary editor are like, ‘Hey, can’t wait to see your new documentary, How To Blow Up A Pipeline. It’s very much not that, but of course, having at least one foot in reality there is part of the appeal of the film.”
“At its heart, it’s a heist movie and it’s about a bunch of young people carrying out this radical action. You have to explain all of the political underpinnings, what’s going through their heads, all of the ideas that sort of animates Andreas Malm’s book. The question was, how do we integrate all those things into the film?”
“One scene in particular is this flashback scene in a library with Xochitl (Ariela Barer) and Shawn (Marcus Scribner) where you basically see them being radicalized and turning against their divestment activist friends on campus. Scenes like that were incredibly difficult because we were riding this fine line of trying not to make it too didactic and trying to ground all of the drama of the story and what was happening for these characters on an emotional level. It was a very tall order.”
What was your approach to building that tension and knowing when to say when?
“I think one thing that was very helpful for me in editing this film was actually that for the first assembly that I did, I didn’t use Gavin Brivik‘s excellent music. I cut the entire thing without any music and basically just tried to rely on what was sort of baked into the images, into the performances, and really not letting myself off the hook by just going for, I mean, this incredible tension increasing score. I think that Gavin did an incredible job with that, but it could have easily just become a crutch, I think, in the edit if I had relied too heavily on that.
So starting out from a place of wondering, OK, how do I structure each of these scenes to really maximize the tension without relying on outside devices? Basically, just what is it? What performances are going to maximize the tension? What can I leave on set that’s going to leave the audience with these unanswered questions?”
(In our conversation (above) Garber expands about the incredible and unique collaboration with the films composer Gavin Brivik. Be sure to listen.)
While the individual characters’ stories are so engaging the bigger picture is the political/environmental message. Is this a subject you feel very strongly about?
“Part of my background in making documentaries is also an interest in doing very political filmmaking, which is not to say that every film that I’ve worked on has been quite this political. But that’s sort of where my heart lies in a lot of ways. So the ability to make something that sort of blends entertainment and this real political sensibility, I think was something that was particularly important to me. There are so many issues that deserve our attention on screen – climate change is one of the most existentially threatening issues. And, for that reason, something that’s most present in my mind. A lot of other people of my generation and younger people who have sort of grown up with the knowledge that this is something that is going to seriously affect our futures.
The ending of the film, the epilogue, was one of my favorite “scenes” of the year. I was amazed how it cleverly added to the individual characters stories while also expanding the overall themes. Can you tell me about how this came together?
“It was challenging to figure out the ending in part because we weren’t sure what we could actually satisfyingly deliver. So there are versions of the ending where we were thinking about, ‘How would the media cover this action? Would these young activists be vilified? Would there be people protesting in the streets? Who knows?’ We tried to imagine what the ripple effects of this action would be and ultimately realized that it was kind of unsatisfying because there’s no real endpoint to that.”
“You can infinitely keep extrapolating future events based on what happens there. At the end of the day, we realized that we could basically only make a film that was about these characters. The only other effect outside of this ensemble that we could think of was that there’s going to be some sort of copycat action. Somebody else is going to carry out a similar action in the name of the same principles. So that was sort of the lens that we used to approach the ending. How do we wrap up each of the characters’ storylines and then gesture at the continuation of the movement without getting too far into the details of how the rest of the world is going to respond? I think that was actually one of the last things that we figured out in the film. We really solved that, I think, within a few days of locking the film and after we had already gotten into the Toronto International Film Festival.”
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