Interview: Talking About ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ with Editors Cedric Nairn-Smith, Stephanie Filo and Melissa Lawson Cheung

Before Daredevil: Born Again underwent a creative overhaul during the strikes, the show’s original intention was to move away from anything related to the Netflix television series, with the exception of Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio returning to reprise their respective roles as Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk. 

This was also reflected in the editing of the series before the overhaul, according to editor Stephanie Filo, who spoke to Awards Radar on Zoom, and explained that “the original take on it was to lean away from the Netflix Daredevil show. They actually told us not to watch the Netflix show, because they didn’t want to affect how we were editing it. Once we restructured everything and figured out we would do a different take on it, we dove back into the Netflix side of things. We were able to use temp music from that Netflix series, and get back to that darker vibe.” 

When the show was eventually reworked, editor Cedric Nairn-Smith explained that a central theme the team wanted to lean into was how Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk’s stories paralleled each other, especially when figuring out how the overhauled version of the series would work: 

“Sometimes, we would iterate these episodes, and would be asked at times to intercut these scenes. We thought intercuts would not work because they weren’t intended to be intercut. However, once we started intercutting, we found out that there were common threads here. It felt like it was a happy accident that these inner cuts worked, and that you would find these connections. A lot of it was trial and error trying to find those threads, but some of it was also planned.”

There were many examples of intercutting that ultimately worked in favor of the series, according to editor Melissa Lawson Cheung, such as a moment where “we’re seeing Matt with bloody knuckles, and we know that Fisk will also have them. We tied those two together because they were still shooting and were able to grab a close-up of that. We could then tie these shots together, which had a bigger impact. That happened in other places as well. Instead of having transitions that would flow nicely into some establishing shots, you would have Fisk and Matt cut together so that you would have them and their story be part of the transition instead, which was emotionally more impactful.”

Of course, with such a series like Daredevil: Born Again, there was much more to talk about on the process that went into editing a show like this one, and you can listen to our full conversation below:

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