The Iron Claw is a heartbreaking exploration of brotherhood and the power to survive. One of the late breaking films of the year headed into the award season, but a true stand out for the year. Matthew Hannam, the editor spoke with us about collaborating with writer-director Sean Durkin, approaching a true story, and the meaning behind that incredible dissolving sequence.

Jillian Chilingerian: Hi, Matt. It’s so nice to meet you over the phone and talk about Iron Claw. I love the film and I’ve seen it three times. Were you already familiar with the story of the family?
Matthew Hannam: I knew about it for a while though because Sean [Durkin] and I talked about this project not too long after we finished The Nest. He said that he was thinking about this as the next one and I read an early draft, it’s pretty unbelievable. I’ve noticed that a lot of the press is sort of picking up this thing that they didn’t do it exactly the way that it happened. It was a fascinating project, watching it develop over time because it’s real people, but it’s also a movie. Like Sean, I grew up being into wrestling, so it wasn’t like a big leap for me to get on board with the idea. It was certainly a thing to come to understand exactly how it all happened and figure out the best way to tell the story.

Jillian Chilingerian: It keeps you on the edge of your seat the entire time. I love the way that Sean approached this making it about the emotional core versus hitting beat by beat that might be listed on the Wikipedia page. This dynamic between these brothers and their father and that impact on their lives spoke to a lot of audiences.
Matthew Hannam: That’s the thing about the editorial process; it’s the last step where you have to decide, okay, are we going to show this to people now and how much of it is the line between telling the truth and, you know, even with an entirely fictional movie, this is what we wrote and this is what we shot but then how does it work best. The funny thing about movies is that their only destination is the audience and the biggest challenge in our job as film editors is making sure that the movie is as good as it can be. If you don’t do that work, then people aren’t going to see it. That’s always Sean’s thing, following the emotion and trying to create drama out of things that you might not always see. The model that he designed this after was a Greek tragedy, the idea that a lot of the trauma happens off camera and it’s the family and the emotional stuff that we engage in with the characters, which is more effective often than just watching an action sequence or more wrestling. That is the other thing, how much wrestling you want to watch because not really about wrestling. It’s a really interesting balance.

Jillian Chilingerian: When the characters are developed that well, you care for them, even though you know this character is going to be gone at this point of the movie.
Matthew Hannam: Ultimately, that was something that we focused on when we were making this movie to have it feel like a movie we would have watched when we were younger. We wanted to honor the lifestyle that they were living and try to make it feel authentic and feel like a real family with brothers that have things that they do together and not make it like all exposition, it was an interesting cutting experience because just making the movie happened to these guys and having the consequences play out in this natural timeline that feels as you’re saying, you’re living with them was important because it felt like the movie was getting ahead of them. I mean, that’s the challenge with something where you can easily figure out how it ends on the internet, you can look it up and be like, Oh, look at this guy who lost his leg or whatever, but the trick is making you feel it when he does lose his leg and that was the big that was the thing that we focused on was making it feel like people were experiencing these things.

Jillian Chilingerian: In that scene, you see him make these decisions and it’s not going to turn out well for him, something’s gonna go wrong. It is building, he wakes up the next morning the scratches, he goes to the kitchen, and then as like revealed, you know, he lost his leg and I like how there is such like the room to almost digest how sad these moments are with each brother.
Matthew Hannam: Sean and I looked at a lot of boxing movies because I was trying to think, Okay, how did these things build and boxing movies that stand out, Raging Bull and Rocky? The thing that you realize about those movies is they’re they’re also about personal relationships. The first Rocky movie doesn’t have that much boxing and it’s about him trying to date this woman. In this movie, the love affair is between the brothers, and that’s something we knew going through the movie, it was a guiding principle for us just to make sure that was clear. The curse embodied in the family story and having it hanging over was the real trick of the cut keeping track of it, but not over-focusing on it. We did that with music where you hear the sound coming up and as we develop the score, we wanted to have really strong themes and we wanted them to be heard in different ways, like the music that plays at the beginning as sort of a curse overture you don’t notice it. It’s not explicit, but that same music is played with different instruments. When, for instance, hearing the news that the Olympics are being canceled, we tried to sort of blend this feeling with the wave of the curse coming over this family throughout the movie. It feels like it’s piling up.

Jillian Chilingerian: At one point in the locker room, one of them is putting a needle in his leg, and then it is almost a bleeding frame of the three of them overlapping on each other.
Matthew Hannam: I’ll admit that I think it’s cool I’m proud of that triple dissolve of their heads. That was something that I believe was honestly a product, of the partnership that Mátyás [Erdély], Sean, and I formed during The Nest. They shot three close-ups of the boys and one day, Sean and I were just in the editing room and we love to dissolve, that’s part of the language of the film. In advance, we talked about wanting to develop that language in this movie too, and try to have dissolves in the film that that feel like they mean something that they’re not just transitions but the sum of the images adds a new value and a new meaning to the material. I loved those shots, and I saw them as one thing in a way and I thought, Oh, how can we do this Sean and I were just sitting there and I started dissolving the heads together. He was like looking at something and he looked up and he just said, Yes. It always just felt like an anchor for this moment when these three boys became one thing to their dad. He is using them to get the the championship belt that he wants, but they’re all the same to him, and you’ve just seen them exchange places, it doesn’t matter anymore.

Jillian Chilingerian: It’s where you feel the weight of the pressure Fritz is putting on all of them. Their pain that they’re never going to like to say out loud as you watch that dissolve of the three of them. Something negative is going to come from this treatment that they are all experiencing.
Matthew Hannam: It’s exciting to have an opportunity to work on a film where you can make a scene out of material that was generated during the shoot with the music and an editorial idea that compounds the effect of the previous scene, but it’s visually captivating enough. To multiply the feeling explicitly, but also give the viewer a moment to think about what they just heard, because sometimes you don’t want to separate the scenes, the next thing that happens is Kevin gets married, and David dies, so creating this bond, that is splitting them apart and making them into one thing like the tool of their father but also splitting them into various separate pieces of the puzzle. It lets the viewer sit in that moment and think about what just happened and then be catapulted into something positive that turns into something devastating. I think giving an audience time to be engaged in the story but not being told any new information is a powerful tool.

Jillian Chilingerian: Kevin is the last person that talks to them all and it is piling up on him when he’s the last person, you can feel the regret he has. Then he finally confronts his father and I feel like that speaks to giving that space of like, we’re gonna sit here and breathe with it. This film deals with so much tragedy but is just so perfectly paced to give each brother their own little introduction and send-off. You feel the weight of what Kevin has to continue to go through till the end.
Matthew Hannam: The gun has to be loaded for that to work and that was a real challenge balancing the amount the length of time that ending takes. The thing that we struggled with was the movie would sometimes when we’re cutting it would feel like it was ending and then there was more movie and one of the challenges of cutting was to let all the ingredients come together in a way that felt potent and then to sail into the ending which is sometimes hard to do. or

Jillian Chilingerian: Thank you so much for time to dive into all this, the story is so compelling, and like walking out of the film I took away the editing was powerful adding to Sean’s writing.
Matthew Hannam: I’m really happy with the premiere in Dallas was an interesting experience because we got to show it in the hometown and it was great. Thanks for being interested.

The Iron Claw is currently in theaters.
You can find our review of The Iron Claw here.