Interview: Oscar-Nominated Editor Laurent Sénéchal Discusses ‘Anatomy of a Fall’

Anatomy of a Fall has been on a roll since it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, now nominated for eleven categories at the César Awards and five at the Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Editor for Laurent Sénéchal. 

Sénéchal had previously collaborated with director Justine Triet for 2016’s In Bed with Victoria and 2019’s Sibyl, which both starred Virginie Efira (the latter film starred Oscar-nominated Sandra Hüller in a supporting role). Discussing with Awards Radar on his Oscar nomination and work on the movie, Sénéchal said that the overall recognition for his work was unexpected, but is happy to be following Triet’s lead. 

We mostly discussed his continued collaboration with Triet, the process that went into designing key elements of the narrative, and several important sequences, alongside how the concept of ambiguity shaped the overall edit of the movie. 

Read the full conversation about Anatomy of a Fall below: 

Previously, you worked with Justine Triet on In Bed with Victoria and Sibyl. Can you discuss how your collaboration with her has evolved from the first film you worked with her to Anatomy of a Fall?

What was new for Anatomy of a Fall was that we didn’t have the assembly step. We experimented with it twice on Victoria and Sibyl, but she couldn’t work like that. Not having that was useful for me and for her to work on the structure of [Anatomy of a Fall] because the script was very straightforward. It was easy to know where we were in the story, even if we redesigned many things. Because of this, we didn’t need an assembly for the structure. It’s amazing to work with Justine. Her relationship with the actors is so amazing and instinctive. She does not begin each scene with an idea of what it should be or what it should show, but always from the material. As an editor, I have to adapt to this method. You never know where you’ll be at the end of the day. We like to explore what we can do with good material; choosing it is a lot of work. It’s like digging galleries, where we find a code for each scene. It’s quite an artisanal approach if that makes sense. 

It definitely does. How challenging is it to shape this story through the edit because, as I watch the movie, the aesthetic slightly changes as the audience learns more about Sandra and Samuel?

It was really something because as soon as we had scenes in a certain order or scenes showing some things of her and her husband, you could have a total derailment. We could derail the main contract between the audience and the movie because we edited some scenes in a certain way, where we felt like Sandra [Sandra Hüller] was being manipulative towards Samuel [Samuel Theis]. As soon as you have this feeling, you cannot see her having those strong emotions in the courtroom. And that’s not interesting at all now, so we had to rethink, screen the movie, and redesign some scenes, to make sure that we find her endearing, even if we have doubts about her. It was really hard to build the path of the audience. Justine is never pushing ideas to the audience. You are free as an audience to make up your own mind about what you see. My job as an editor is to build very wide roads for the audience to make their own journey into the movie. Of course, we have to lead a little, but Justine is really elegant in how she shows a very complex female character, where you, as an audience member, are never asked to think one way about her. She is never giving messages and really lets the audience be free to think and see life as complex as she sees it. 

Interestingly, you mention that because one of my favorite scenes in the movie is when Daniel gets interrogated. He says very clearly that he hears calm voices but does not hear anything when they recreate that moment based on his recollection of the events. Can you talk about the process of editing such a scene like this, where doubt lingers on what Daniel said to what he is hearing in the moment where they recreate it?

Yes, this also was challenging because, what we wanted to have with Daniel [Milo Machado Graner] is that we had to build him as a boy who, at first, wants to protect his mother. But we also want him to be complex. We want to ask questions about him: Is it true that he was shocked ot he had this false memory? We don’t even know ourselves. We do try to put the audience in front of this complexity, as we follow the boy in his journey. We don’t want them to think he is like a mastermind, but we do want to have some complexity without taking all of the space of the story. 

When the verdict is reached in the case at the end, there’s this lingering sense of ambiguity through the audience as the film ends, no matter what the official verdict has said. Was that an important element of how the edit shaped the movie to have that line of ambiguity and let the audience decide what really happened?

What we wanted to show is the arc of a boy who is growing up. And growing up in the movie is like being an active character. The movie shows how you must stop thinking of life as straight, simple, and compact. Becoming a grown-up for him is becoming opaque, too, because at the end, when he is doing his second testimony, we see him calling on memories, but it feels like an invention. We don’t know how much he is inventing. We want the audience to feel that when we have these images, who do we ultimately suspect? You have images in your mind, but are they are they true? Yes, these are our images, but we wanted to use images as more doubts than concrete proofs for this last scene of the testimony. There is a tension between truth and doubts and what is on screen. We don’t have access to everything he’s thinking, and he may become like his mother, someone we don’t know. But it’s our condition to listen to them and make up our minds about what is on screen. 

I still have doubts about what actually happened, which is, in my opinion, the mark of a truly fantastic movie. 

About this, what was really hard to shape in the edit is that we, of course, wanted some emotions to be there. And it’s really hard to create some emotions within the audience when you are saying that everyone is complex. You still don’t know the mother, you are starting not to know how the boy is feeling. When they’re reconnecting in the house, everything is so complicated. That’s why Sandra fears coming back, and it’s a bit hard when they are reconnecting. It’s great that we managed to end the movie like this, but I don’t really know how we did it. We did it through the craft, working a lot, killing some lines, and reshaping many things, but I still don’t know how we have this big emotion at the end while keeping a huge sense of ambiguity. But that is really what Justine wanted to do. And for that, she’s a genius. 

Anatomy of a Fall is now available to rent or buy on video-on-demand.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]