Maxance Vincent
Film editor Olivier Bugge Coutté has had a very close working relationship and personal friendship with director Joachim Trier long before the two collaborated on his first feature film, Reprise.
As he explains to Awards Radar during a Zoom press day for their latest film, Sentimental Value, the editor knew Trier since the 1990s, where they “bonded over watching films together and being inspired by directors. We often said, “Oh, how can we do something like this? This is great!” We don’t do that so much anymore. It’s living inside of us.
We still watch films, of course, and we discuss them, but we don’t take a film up and say, “Oh, should we use this as a reference?” However, I think that, over the years, through watching films, working with Joachim, listening to music, being friends, and talking about a lot of things other than film, we have similar tastes. We now know how to approach the films, what a great montage is, how a film should be shaped, and how fast it should be cut, to what music. It lives inside of us.
We discuss further when I read the script, but I read it at the very last moment. I don’t follow the script in the process, just to be completely clean when I’m getting to the edit. Then we discuss each scene. What is the purpose of this? How does it move? How can we make this? How can we elevate this and make it something different or bigger, funnier, faster, shorter, and so on and so forth?”
Having developed this close relationship together, Bugge Coutté also states that “the most important thing is the trust between you and the director. If you don’t have the trust, you don’t have the ability or the freedom to fail. When you edit, many failures can occur. You have to try to edit a scene in a particular way, maybe reshape the structure, and you might be making a mistake. Maybe “mistake” is the wrong word, but you have to take a chance. If you don’t do that, you will not find a better way to do it. All of that is based on trust.”
We, of course, broke down many of the key formal elements in Sentimental Value, which garnered Olivier Bugge Coutté’s first Academy Award nomination. You can listen to the full conversation below:
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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