Director Alexander Payne regularly coaxes acclaimed performances from his actors. Are you a multi-take type of person? “Yes, but not crazy,” says editor Kevin Tent. “I'd say it's four to six.” Tent would know. He has edited each of Payne's eight films, including “Sideways,” “The Descendants” and “Nebraska.”
This year, Payne's high school comedy-drama “The Holdovers” earned five Academy Award nominations, including acting nominations for Da'Vine Joy Randolph and Paul Giamatti. “Some actors don't really warm up until the fifth or sixth take,” says Oscar nominee Tent, “but in 'The Holdovers,' all of our actors were on fire.”
Over the decades, Tent and Payne have established a sensible rhythm of collaboration: Payne photographs and Tent edits the journals. When “The Holdovers” wrapped production in Massachusetts in the winter of 2022, Tent, working from his home studio in Los Feliz, had put together a rough cut that lasted approximately two hours and 45 minutes. Payne took a break to recharge and then reunited with Tent for about seven months. Together, they rearranged, tweaked, and trimmed the footage into a sleek but still evocative two-hour, 13-minute feature film.
“One of the hardest things about Alexander's films is keeping them moving, just because on set he gives his actors the time and space to do their thing,” Tent notes. “He doesn't want to rush them. It's our job to condense and sometimes it's like, 'We have to figure out how to get this baby down.'”
Tent absorbed the art and craft of Roger Corman's tight editing. Originally from Buffalo, Tent moved west to attend Los Angeles City College, where he cut his own short films. He then worked on exploitation films like “Frankenhooker” before undergoing a fast and furious apprenticeship with the legendary and efficient low-budget producer.
Tent recalls: “Roger Corman could be very brutal in the editing room if he thought something was too slow. I had to be preemptive and cut hard before Roger saw it, or else he'd probably delete it while you're like, 'No, we need that scene!'
In 1996, Tent recorded Payne's first feature film, “Citizen Ruth.” “The studio put all kinds of big editors in front of him, but Alexander said he wanted someone he could grow with. He liked my reel, we were about the same age, we just clicked.”
Tent and Payne share a penchant for examining the nuances of a scene, no matter how long it takes. “We watched every take, over and over again. “It’s about what performances affect us emotionally, including reaction shots.” Tent cites Randolph's portrayal of Mary, whose son died in Vietnam, as a master class in subtlety.
Dominic Sessa, Da'Vine Joy Randolph and Paul Giamatti star in “The Holdovers.” Randolph, says film editor Kevin Tent, “has an incredibly expressive face,” giving him plenty of options in the editing suite.
(Seacia Pavao / Focus Features)
“Da'Vine has an incredibly expressive face,” he says. “There's an early scene where they talk about his son in church. When we stack the shots of him on the Avid , we had five reactions that were all incredible. One is anger. Another one, super crushed. But at the time, angry Mary wasn't what we wanted to present from the beginning, so we decided to go with one where you see her going through these transitions. She's angry, she's hurt, you see? [emotional] “things that hit her.”
Like most of Payne's character films, “The Holdovers” reflects a 1970s cinematic aesthetic. Hal Ashby and Jack Nicholson's 1973 bittersweet drama, “The Last Detail,” was especially inspiring in its use of “ Transitional “fades” that slowly fade from one scene to the next. “I love solvents,” says Tent, “they're dreamy.”
One such sequence in “Holdovers” begins when student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) encounters his seriously ill father. “Then we put Dom in a car and broke up with him over dinner. It was just magical, because you don't know if the colors are going to work or if the eyes are going to line up. But we tinkered around in the editing room until we got the crossfade just the way we wanted.”
The “Holdovers” editing suite generated a series of fruitful experiments. A cappella Christmas music emerged as a signature motif after Tent associate editor Mindy Elliott added a song by the Swingles singers. And Tent developed a sequence that elegantly changed the tone from comedy to drama in a matter of seconds.
“We had this funny montage where Tully stays up all night running around campus smoking pot, drinking wine, and eating ice cream,” Tent says. “But then we added this beat where she's in church in the morning looking at this photo of Mary's son. That was actually a [separate] scene of the day, but I thought it would be cool to undercut that happy montage with a serious beat at the end. To me, that's what editing is all about. You try things and see what works emotionally.”
