Interview: Editor Úna Ní Dhonghaíle Discusses ‘Young Woman and the Sea’

For editor Úna Ní Dhonghaíle, the story of Trudy Ederle was unknown to her before working on Young Woman and the Sea, which is adapted from Glenn Stout’s book of the same name and stars Daisy Ridley as the first woman who accomplished the feat of swimming the English Channel. However, by bringing her name back to the forefront and finally ensuring Ederle gets the recognition she deserves, the editor expressed great pride in working on the movie, as she explains to Awards Radar on Zoom:

“I’m very proud of it and everyone involved in it. Glenn Stout wrote the book on which the film is based, which Jeff Nathanson found and wrote the script. He, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Joachim Rønning spent about eight years bringing it to fruition. Trudy was celebrated at that moment in time, over 100 years ago, but she’s since been lost to the annals of history. I feel very proud to be involved in something that brought her name back to the forefront and gave her the recognition she deserved.”

In working with director Joachim Rønning on bringing Trudy’s story to life, Úna praised him for not only being “a great filmmaker, but he’s also very funny, open, and collaborative. I think when you work with people who are strong and confident in their own ability, they’re very generous as a result, and because they’re not frightened if you suggest anything. We were sympathetically inclined towards the visuals and how we could do it, and was very open to working together. If I had an idea, he would always watch, listen, and have a play. It was really important on day one of principal photography that I edited and then sent the cuts to Joachim and Jerry for them to review. 

I would edit very quickly. I would give it to my team, and they would start building the sound design. At that time, I used temp music. That meant that by the end of the first day of editing, I had something really strong that I could send to Joachim and Jerry and give them assurances because they had never worked with me before and so did not know if we were on the right path. 

But they gave me lovely feedback, and they liked what they saw. The performances and the cinematography were so beautiful that it was a joy for me to do. We worked remotely with Joachim during the shoot. Once he finished the shoot, he came to London, and we began going through the film and interrogating the storytelling, finding ways to be more with Trudy.”

The first cut of Young Woman and the Sea lasted much longer than the finished product, which led to several scenes of Trudy’s early life and successes being trimmed down. However, instead of deleting them altogether, montage sequences were constructed to chronicle Trudy’s rise in an emotionally investing way before she attempted to swim the channel: 

“Jeff Nathanson’s script was beautiful, but there was a lot in it. Our first cut was about two hours and thirty-five minutes, and we realized it took a long time to get to the channel. If you look at the film again with a critical eye, you might notice a lot of montage sequences, which have now become my forte. 

We might have had three or four scenes in real-time, but we were able to take moments from them and make it into a sequence that, if you look at the film again, when Trudy is beginning to rise in her power, we juxtaposed it with Meg [Tilda Cobham-Hervey] falling from grace. Her sister was a better champion swimmer. That little sequence was great because, in a very effortless way, you could keep showing Trudy winning, and you could just see Meg, her sister, becoming second place, third place, and not even placed at all in the end. It was that type of visual storytelling that I just loved and thought was a good way of keeping the best of everything and being able to collapse it into a montage.”

During our video interview, seen below, we also discussed some of the challenges that arose in the editing process, cuttting the Jellyfish scene without any visual effects, finding the right rhythm to match the photography and score, and how important it was to cross-cut from Trudy’s English channel swim to her family in New York during its climax. 

You can watch my full interview with Úna below and stream Young Woman and the Sea on Disney+ today: 

[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]