Maxance Vincent
Editor Esther Sokolow previously collaborated with director Andy Muschietti as an assistant editor on his last two films, It: Chapter Two and The Flash. During her time working on the latter movie, producer Barbara Muschietti told her they had been developing a prequel series set in Stephen King’s It world and asked whether she was interested in serving as one of its main editors.
While speaking to Awards Radar on Zoom, Sokolow stated that, before diving into It: Welcome to Derry, her career was entirely feature-film based, “but all I want to do is cut, tell stories, and be an editor. I’ve been working my way up in my career through the assistant path, so it was an enormous gift that Andy and Barbara gave me by inviting me to tell this story with them.”
While It: Welcome to Derry is a television show, it follows the aesthetic DNA Muschietti has built in his two-part adaptation of King’s novel. Approaching the show, the editor discussed that “There were a lot of tonal similarities that Andy wanted to make sure we’re in the texture and the DNA of the TV show. Inherently, because the television format is longer, it allows us more freedom to linger on nuances and explore characters, relationships, and textures that you don’t have the real estate for in a feature film.
One of the things I’m so proud of in the texture of our show is that we really get to explore the underbelly of racism in Derry. That’s something inherent in the Stephen King novel and is very much the impetus for the allegory he was trying to convey in It. Those details, those larger thematic pictures, are hard to get across in a feature-length film. That was something I was really excited to tell in the TV show format: the Black and Native American perspective of coming to Derry. There are so many different stories and avenues we were able to explore in much greater depth.
On a horror level, one of the things we really played around with was the idea of Pennywise as an entity, both when he’s physically there and when he’s still trying to find his essence. With the score, we had Benjamin Wallfisch come back to do the music composition for the TV show. He and Andy were really interested in exploring how to deconstruct certain thematic elements so that they would still sound like Pennywise’s theme, but the instrumentation hadn’t been fully realized yet. All of those were avenues where we got to play in the sandbox in a little bit of a different fashion.”
Of course, there was so much more to dive into, especially when it came to breaking down the episodes she edited, which range from the pilot’s opening sequence, how that episode was shaped in building a core group of characters where most of them would die at the end and starting anew on episode two, the process of cutting Pennywise, and so much more.
Listen to the full conversation below:
[Some of the quotes in this article were edited for length and clarity]
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