All of Us Strangers tells a story through all of its crafts from cinematography to its score to its unique film editing. Our Awards Editor, Jillian Chilingerian, was lucky enough to speak to Editor, Jonathan Alberts, about his work on the film. Alberts spoke about how the film editing was used to truly complement the story Andrew Haigh was bringing to the screen.

Jillian Chilingerian: I’m so happy and excited to talk to you today. I just think this film, All of Us Strangers, is such a special one. And I think it’s one that’s going to stick with a lot of people through its storytelling. And I think specifically, its editing to me was really intriguing. So I can’t wait to dive in. I want to start off with when you got the script and kind of ingesting that and what really stood out to you. And then talking to the director Andrew Haigh, what you guys were kind of envisioning for how this story to come together through the edit.
Jonathan Alberts: Sure. So, you know, Andrew and I’ve been working together for about 10 years. So when I’m cutting something, he’s usually tapping away in the background, like busy writing, because it hits him kind of always in the cutting room. So he was working on this script, while we were cutting a show, a TV show called and ‘The North Water’ that he directed. And he said that was he was writing a really personal story. And a few months later, he shared the script. And it was I was pretty blown away by the script. And it was a beautifully written script. It felt like a page turner. And I was so shocked that this has come out of him. I mean, obviously, it was based on a novel, but it’s very loosely based on that novel. And I think we immediately started talking about the editing and what the plans are when he was thinking about the music and the sound design, and you know, what he was thinking about in terms of just how it would look, we talked a lot about how it would feel, I mean, I was just absolutely floored. It was such an emotional read. And I thought if we can just get like, you know, 10% of that, I think we’ll begin be in good shape. So it was a pretty, pretty great first experience, it’s not one you have on most films, for sure.

Jillian Chilingerian: Oh, I love hearing that. I just love a good collaborative nature of everyone getting the vision before going into it. And then you can really tell him and the outcome of everyone shared the same vision. And you’re working with such great actors, I love Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, and then Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, it’s such a good collaboration of these four that I would have never pictured to be on screen together. But they all work so well. I love in the edit that I that I feel the emotions, which are so strong in this film, are all so seamless. So, that task of matching those different takes up to make that through line in the film for each character.
Jonathan Alberts: I think people often think that you have great performances, and then you just put them in, and they just sit there, but as an editor, you’re so constantly thinking about performance and how it works within a take and how it works within a scene and how it works within the act of the film, and how it works over the entire film. And all the actors were great. I mean, they really are, this was not about constructing a performance. But what it is about is about calibrating performance, because they would all give such good performance over all of their tapes, and you have all of their takes over five setups, I mean, there’s a lot of different material, and you have a lot of different ways they’re delivering that stuff, because oftentimes great actors that feel like give you a range of performance within a kind of very nuanced, I mean, I don’t know, I don’t really call it but it’s basically they give you a strong palette to work from, and you can’t put all the best material in when we have, you know, Andrew Scott and Claire Foy at a table talking about Adam’s coming out to her. I mean, there was so much interesting stuff. And you could have played Claire’s performance and much angrier way or you could have pushed it in a way that felt, you know, a lot lighter, and all of that performance is all really good and really interesting and very useful. But it’s about trying to calibrate the performance so that it works within the whole of that scene. And that’s what you’re doing constantly as an editor, and it’s really challenged, but it’s such a privilege, doing it with four amazing actors that give great performance.

Jillian Chilingerian: Yeah, I cannot imagine having that role of, you know, one difference of the take in the whole movie can have a different you know, tone and how this comes off and then like the characters journey, so that’s very, sounds daunting, but I think it worked in this way. of how of this shows. And then and then we kind of have this drama, but then we have some supernatural elements, the more that we are spending time with Adam and kind of understanding his psyche. I almost feel like we’re in his psyche of how he kind of thinks and operates. So from your perspective of balancing those tones where it never feels as if it leans into one thing, or to the other that could possibly lose the tracking of this journey. So how was it kind of dealing with those jobs?
Jonathan Alberts: It’s a good question, because it’s something that we had to experiment a lot with, you know, I think the parallel stories that are unfolding between Adam and Harry, and then Adam and his parents, they’re also different time periods. And your work, you know, there’s transitions between those time periods. And, you know, it’s a delicate one. And it’s one that we talked about early on, and we thought, like, can we pull this off? And how do we pull this up, and we weren’t using a bunch of tropes to kind of make an audience understand that we’re going back in time, you know. So there was, in a way, a sense of, we wanted the audience to feel dislocated, but all but anchored and not mired in a certain kind of confusion. But we want them to be consistently questioning what was real. So it’s a real challenge in the editing room to kind of understand, are we doing it? Are we not doing it? And we spent about a year cutting the film. Which, yeah, so it was a it was a long and deep exploration of trying to get that right tonally performance wise, transitionally, across the hole, and even story wise, you know, it’s, it’s complicated when you’re trying to do something in a way that an audience maybe isn’t used to seeing it. So that confusion may be that they have at the very beginning, you don’t want them to stay in that and get annoyed because an audience will get annoyed by that. But you want them to be active and engaging in the story. And that sounds much easier than it is actually when you’re at month eight, and you’re in the edit and you’re a bit like, Is this better than now than five versions ago when we’re doing this? And you’re changing a bunch of things around? I mean, it’s a constant evolution and understanding of how best to tell the story.

Jillian Chilingerian: Yeah, I’m an audience viewer where I like that activeness thinking like, ‘Where am I? Can I trust this,’ as we’re cycling, and I feel that with this one, I was definitely in those positions. That engagement of where you want to place the audience in proximity to the characters that they’re watching.
Jonathan Alberts: Yeah, it’s always that, you know, as an editor, you always want to keep an audience engaged. I mean, because with movies that don’t work, and this isn’t always the problem with them. But so often, when it just feels obvious, or it feels boring, you kind of tune out, it’s because you’re not engaged in trying to understand the story with the character. And part of that is about introducing a certain amount of dislocation. And it’s a really delicate balance of having that dislocation, but not tipping into the part of complete confusion. Because when you do that an audience is like, I don’t like I don’t even know what’s happening. And they want to basically, like, turn it off. So on the other side, if you give too much information, and everything becomes information, and not kind of an emotional, peeling back, people just, you know, end up feeling really bored. So that’s always a crazy thing without knowing it’s just something that the audience never ceases, but that can feel. So when you’re actively engaged in something, you feel it, and you understand it, because you’re trying to understand what’s happening. So it’s that balance of that anchoring and that dislocation, you know, and I’m hoping we got it right in this film, and it feels like, what I’ve been hearing is that audiences feel that and they feel quite engaged. So I was relieved.

Jillian Chilingerian: I felt it. And then, you mentioned you were editing for a year, were you getting the footage as it was coming in? Or at what point did you start your whole process?
Jonathan Alberts: Yeah, I started basically about a week before we started shooting. And, you know, typically, as an editor, this was no different. They shoot the material one day and you get that material the next day, so it was a constant. You spend the entire shoot getting the footage from the day before. So I was right in there. I was on location during the entire shoot. And it was rate being with production and putting it together while stuff was going on the director come visit and was on set at certain times not seeing too much. I don’t like to be on set too often. But, you know, you get a sense of the energy, which is quite nice. And executives around and talking about stuff and talking about the problems, talking about the issues that are coming up with the director every morning talking about performance, what I cut the day before, so, yeah, that was a really great experience on this, you know, really digging into those kinds of kinds of conversations.

Jillian Chilingerian: One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when Adam is with his parents in the diner booth when they’re eating together, I feel that’s a very pivotal part of the film. So I kind of want to hear more about what putting together that scene.
Jonathan Alberts: Yeah, I mean it’s interesting, actually, with that scene, because I think the thing that we didn’t really understand until we started cutting, and really working with the material was that it’s the scene before he’s in the diner, he’s in the bedroom with the parents, and they’re talking about going to the diner. And they’re talking about a bunch of other things, and I don’t want to spoil anything. But the tricky part was that there were times that we had built that section, that sequence, if we think about that sequence, as you know, Adam coming through as Adam and Harry visiting the house, being in the bedroom with his parents, and then then going to the diner. Sometimes that scene before in the bedroom was one where people were like, crazy emotional in the early previews that we had. And we were kind of like, that’s not right, because we want the emotion to be hitting the diner, and there was still emotion there. But you can’t give it all the way before you get to that scene. So it was figuring out if the diner is the ultimate scene, and you know, and the bedroom is the penultimate scene, how do we actually calibrate that? So it feels that the emotion is hitting, and we I think a lot of the way that diner scene, why that diner scene actually works as well as it does, is because yes, the way it’s in the way, you know, the way it’s working in the performance, and all of those variables are contributing factors. But a huge part of that is also what we did in the scene before in the bedroom, which we literally, we cut it 80 or 90 different ways. And it seems like such a simple scene. It’s three people in a bedroom and we don’t even cut that up much in the scene. I think there’s like, four or five cuts total in that scene. So it seems so seamless and so simple. But for a lot of different reasons. It was super complicated. And that’s I think, why the diner scene, when you get to it it’s building that emotion, so that when you get there, you’re keyed up for it and you’re in it allows kind of an audience and plus what’s going on the scene obviously is a huge factor. But it’s kind of an interesting aspect about it editorially.

Jillian Chilingerian: Yeah, that’s so fascinating. Because I would not assume that there are many different versions, because you watch this, and it kind of feels almost like a stage play and how we’re with these characters. And going into that, in your role, because I feel like a lot of people don’t really think about that part of building up this emotion and figuring out, you know, is this scene too long? Is this going to do what it needs to do? Is this too short? And there’s a lot of emotion going on in this movie. So, from that of figuring out where you want that emotion to hit throughout this journey for the audience.
Jonathan Alberts: That’s complicated, actually. Because it’s not typically with films, it’s like you in between first act, second act and third act, that kind of emotion is rising, and you might have little blips on the way, but by the time you get to the third act, you’re at a place where, you know, okay, you’re pushing all the emotion and saving that and what we found, and I think we didn’t fully realize that we knew there were possibilities of that, but the emotion of this film is so I mean, it hits so many parts along the way. And of course, we were worried, you know, early on, like, is that going to take away from the end? Is that going to take away from the point when you really want to feel like the biggest part of that emotion hitting and that just comes with a lot of trial and error because of a lot of conversations. It comes with really, really working with the footage and watching the film and watched it a couple 100 times. I’m sure just with so many different variations of those scenes. Just to see, is this the best thing? And I mean, I think the goal with an editor, it’s like you want it to feel simple. You want it to feel so natural that, well, of course, the movie, this is what it’s doing, because that’s what feels right. And that right feeling is an emotional through line, right. And it’s one of the most complicated things, because when it doesn’t work, everybody knows it, too. They don’t maybe don’t know why it’s not working. Sometimes you do. But when you don’t know when it’s not working, it really doesn’t, you really don’t feel it. And it’s just like nails on a chalkboard in a way, because you just kind of draw away from it. Where it’s so tough to make a film that emotionally, that through line really, really worked and it’s experimentation, you’re just constantly experimenting. And that’s why it takes a lot because to really get the most out of the footage, you have to try so many different things in combination with so many other things to, you know, to really find the balance, and it’s super delicate. And for an intimate film like this. It is like threading a very small needle, I suppose.

Jillian Chilingerian: I definitely agree with that. I think the way that this film was constructed with that emotional through line and balancing so many things like I never felt like there was a moment where I felt taken out like, oh, this seems like we shifted somewhere. I don’t know what we’re doing here. But you get to follow this journey, while also having those moments of being very engaged in thinking about things like, where’s this gonna go? Where there is that payoff at the end? And I feel like that has to do a lot with your work.
Jonathan Alberts: Thank you. It’s good to know. I’m so happy that people seem to be liking the movie, you know, I couldn’t be more excited.

Jillian Chilingerian: Well, thank you so much. And it was so nice to meet you. And congratulations on the film and I can’t wait to see what everyone says when it comes out.
Jonathan Alberts: Thank you, Jillian! Appreciate it.

All of Us Strangers will be in select theaters December 22, 2023.