11 Simona Paggi
One of Italy’s leading editors, Simona, has worked several times with Gianni Amelio, the award-winning director of ‘Lamerica’ and other superb films. Simona also cut the Oscar-winning ‘Life is Beautiful’ for Roberto Begnini. Her passion and commitment clearly spring from her background and upbringing, which comes across very strongly in her response to my questions.
I was born in Milan. My parents are Tuscan, from Pisa. At the end of the 1950s they moved to Milan to work there. My father is Jewish. His father was a surgeon who emigrated to Venezuela in the 1930s to escape the racial laws in Italy, while his mother fled to Switzerland with their six children and stayed there until the end of the war.
Simona Paggi with her world map which always adorns the wall of her edit suite (Courtesy of Simona Paggi)
The difficulties created by the war forced my father to abandon his studies and go to work in the textile trade. With the help of some relatives, he moved to Milan with my mother.
My mother’s father died when she was five-year old, struck down by tuberculosis, which in those years was an illness with a high mortality rate. She was brought up by an aunt and uncle who she lived with until the early post-war years. She studied bookkeeping. After her marriage with my father and the birth of my sisters and myself she followed a course in design and soon afterwards started to work as a stylist and designer. She set up a small dressmakers shop, for little girls clothing in fact, often subjecting us to agonising ‘costume fittings’.
My father, who had to give up his studies, would have liked to become a journalist. He loved history and politics, maybe that’s why he developed a passion for shooting in eight millimetres and he still has films of my mother, of our family and of the great political demonstrations, which date back to the early 1950s. He also has a magnificent collection of comic films starring Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
I went to an experimental high school on a full-time basis to study photography and graphics. After graduating from school, I went to film school in Milan and specialised in editing. During my early teens I studied the piano, the guitar and the flute a little, as well as doing ballet dancing and acrobatic gymnastics. What I really loved was putting on shows with my friends in the neighbourhood.
I spent my time at secondary school surrounded by political demonstrations, by strikes, in the darkness of those years that saw the emergence of terrorism in Italy. I experienced a school that was at the mercy of political demonstrations, that at the time definitely involved the students. Lessons were continuously interrupted and this made it impossible to follow a real school syllabus.
So photography became the only school subject I had that offered a safe harbour. I would try to ‘stop’ something through the images, to focus on the stories of individual people and the political chaos.
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With regard to literature, amongst my favourite writers have been Morante, Calvino, Pasolini, Queneau, Salinger, Kafka, Hesse, Balzac, Bulgakov, Dostoyevsky, Stevenson, Hemingway, Marquez and Amado.1 Musically, amongst the most famous rock groups and singers, I liked the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Lou Reed, P. Smith, K. Jarrett, Joni Mitchell. In jazz, Miles Davis, Dizzie Gillespie, John Coltrane, Count Basie. As far as classical music was concerned, Mozart was one of my favourites including some of his operas (Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute). Also Handel, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and Gershwin.
I have never been much of a theatregoer, and perhaps that is why the theatre has rarely filled me with enthusiasm. I have always found it hard to find a centre of attraction. The stage always seemed so far away, the actors style inevitably ‘emphatic’ and their voices ‘projected’ because of the need to be heard by the audience, to the extent that it has never managed to involve me emotionally as much as the cinema. It has always made me feel detached and maybe, in actual fact, I missed the closeups. On the other hand I like reading theatre – Brecht, Ibsen, Schnitzler2 and Tennessee Williams are amongst my favourites.
As my great friend and teacher, Italian Director, Gianni Amelio3 says, being born in the 1960s, I am a child of TV. It’s true, I discovered the cinema through TV, apart from the endless Chaplin films that my father would project on the wall at home. Thanks to TV I discovered the great cinema of De Sica, Rossellini, Fellini, Visconti, Renoir, Carné, Godard, Bun˜uel, Bergman, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Lubitsch, Wilder, Capra, Houston, Kazan and Sirk.
But I was what you might call an eager spectator, wanting to see new stories set in epochs that I hadn’t known, who waited for Monday night to come round – the only chance to see the great cinema on TV and it was also the only occasion when my parents would let us stay up late. I was, so to speak, just a spectator.
I would never have imagined that when I grew up I would have worked in films. I had no plans about what I would do when I was older. I was interested in everything – I thought that school was very important and that everyone needed to learn, to study in order to mature, to be able to have the means to understand things, not to be overwhelmed by life, by ourselves and by other people.
Maybe I wanted to become a primary school teacher … when I was ten I had tried to win a place in the corps de ballet of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Luckily, I was sent away after a month’s trial, because I was too conditioned by the previous years spent studying ballet.
During high school I thought that photography would become my profession. I used to spend hours in the dark room first at school and then in the cellar at home. I experimented with developing and printing, re-framing and overlaying. I liked photography, but I couldn’t visualise myself as a professional photographer. I didn’t like photography in advertising because I couldn’t stand consumerism. I couldn’t see myself as a professional wedding photographer. Perhaps as a way of following my father’s aspirations I could have tried to become a news photographer, but I didn’t have enough cheek, as they say, I would never have had the courage to snatch people’s moments of intimate happiness or pain – shoving a camera in their faces.
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Then, during my last year of high school, as part of the preparation for the school-leaving exams, we had to shoot a film as an exam test. It was a commercial for Milan to be shot in super 8mm film or on video and so I dedicated myself to this little project, writing the screenplay, shooting and eventually editing the super 8 on a ‘real’ Prevost editing machine. It was an almost unique model created for work in super 8 and 16mm. It was a real revelation.
In that same year an entrance exam was announced to admit 25 young people from all over Italy into a school specialised in the teaching of film direction, photography, editing and sound. The course had to be attended full-time and a grant was assigned to each student. I sat for the entrance exam and in spite of my ignorance about the subject, I was admitted and that’s how my new life began.
Film school was a fundamental experience. Apart from being the place where my basic cinematographic training took place, it was above all the revelation of a microcosm that anticipated everything I would come across in my future working relationships. I realised that making a film is the result of teamwork, of close co-operation between different departments and that editing in particular, would be influenced to a certain extent by acting, by photography, by sound, by the production design, by the production and lastly without any doubt by the direction.
Film school was where I met those who would become my teachers, who would contribute to my education – and not only in professional terms: Anna Napoli4 and Roberto Perpignani. I remember Roberto when he used to come and teach us – Eisenstein and Orson Welles were his forte. He had worked with the greatest Italian directors – he was a kind of guru for all of us – after the screenings we would go into the cutting room to analyse and examine the structure of the film through the editing.
I studied, listened, tried to understand, but it was still early days for me. The real nature of editing I would have to deal with when faced with nothing but rushes in all their stark reality. It is something I understood only a few years later. His lessons returned to my mind, clear and comprehensible, when I started to put myself to the test on my own – to edit. Roberto had an extraordinary method: he would select everything that he thought could be used from every take – he discarded very little. He would make a big rough cut repeating actions and dialogues, with different shots of every sequence from which he would eliminate and reduce until he achieved the result he wanted to present.
Anna Napoli introduced us to the technical part of editing.
After finishing film school I worked for her for a few years. I can say that Anna has a great instinctive almost visceral talent. She would attack the dailies, looking at them again and again. In the end she would mark them in pencil, and hand me giant reels to assemble and add sound to. Anna liked to edit without sound – she started her career in the years when dubbing predominated in Italy over live recording. The sound was just a guide track which had no influence on the cuts, so therefore the definition of the final cut took place after the dubbing had been completed.
But the films Anna edited belonged by that time to the era of live recording and when she passed me the reels I had to add the sound to I discovered how sound could be astonishingly creative. I would polish the actors lines, shift the pauses in the off screen dialogue, add sound effects – in other words in my own little way I enjoyed suggesting almost a final version to her. For years I worked exclusively on sound editing and even now – when I’m editing a scene – I look for the best acted parts of the dialogue, the footsteps, the pauses, which in the context of a completely edited scene, can change and enrich the pace and the emotion of the scene itself.
Gianni Amelio is the person who introduced me to the cinema. He had come to the school in Milan, above all to prepare his film ‘Colpire al cuore’ (Blow to the Heart)5 and all us students took part in one way or another in the preparation, doing a bit of everything to help out. We were able to follow the developments and changes of the film from the sets to the actors. For many of us it was a unique and extraordinary training.
Amelio was and is a demanding director, every small detail is fundamentally vital. He has taught me above all never to be satisfied with an idea, but to insist to the point of exhaustion, to keep asking oneself questions, trying out extreme solutions. He has taught me that one has to be ruthless, able to give up entire sequences in order to privilege the story and the emotions. I have learnt not to cut with the intention of speeding up the film to favour a superficial pace and perhaps losing something in terms of dramatic truth.
It is always difficult to judge oneself and one’s own work, to see oneself from the outside. What we are is the continuously evolving result of a long process, in which, in addition to one’s own individual experiences, what has also counted enormously are the people we have known, with whom we have exchanged ideas – in order to compare them or perhaps even to discuss them. There is no point in denying it, each of us has had some ‘teachers’ in the profession, or rather some personalities who have predominated over the others, who have influenced us more than the others.
Having an aesthetic sensibility is part of a person’s individual talent, but not everyone has an artistic vision. By artistic vision I mean an unmistakable way of expressing oneself, the capacity to interpret, that almost psychic ability of seeing what others don’t see. This is what I think an editor should be. In the exchange with the director, with the original point of view, sometimes one can find oneself so close that you are actually a part of it.
How can one possibly not be influenced by this? Especially when that point of view appeals to you, when you feel it is congenial to you too. Assisting a director in the editing of a film is a complex and delicate operation. Apart from human sensibility and professional competence, what really counts is character. If there is a reason for the editor to be there, it is in order that he may look at the film with an independent gaze, external to the director’s.
Unlike the shooting process, when it is necessary to seize a moment in time and act quickly, in the editing process there is time to think things over, which implies, – precisely – being patient. Everything can be seen from the opposite point of view. The time that one has in the editing stage is on our side and works in our favour. Little by little ideas emerge, things that before were invisible now become apparent and the solutions that are attempted reveal solutions that had previously not been seen. The most exciting moment occurs when one suddenly has an intuition; for example, by moving a shot or changing a fragment of dialogue, and the meaning or the pace of an entire sequence changes completely. And that seems to be the only possible choice which you hadn’t seen before.
There is no doubt that my selection in editing is guided by the acting, the timing and the facial expression of the actors. The choice in the editing and the pace of the film are determined solely by the truth of their performances. The virtuoso feats of the camera leave me cold, except when it moves in an invisible way, drawing one into the story.
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I don’t think one can talk in terms of a European cinema. Europe is made up of many different countries divided by different languages and cultures. Consequently Europe is the combination of many cinematographies, each of which expresses themselves in their own language and their own culture and which are difficult to consider as the expression of a single continent and especially difficult, for the same reasons, to export.
There has never been in Europe the slightest form of organisation able to compete with the United States Majors, or capable of making films all in the same language for every type of audience. In the early years of silent films Italian cinematography developed a strong competitiveness with the United States, creating big epic films and giving nourishment to the American cinema.
After the Second World War the neo-realist revolution imposed expressive forms in direct antithesis with the American star system, that had instead created stars and screenplays with an industrial philosophy of entertainment. In this way the United States, strong and united by a language and with a large internal market, has also succeeded to export and to impose its cinematography all over the world.
The European cinema failing to create an industrial form that is strong and powerful has though had space to express itself in a different way. In Europe openings emerged for the growth of the so-called power of the author. It has developed local cinematographies like Dreyer in Denmark, Bergman in Sweden and Bun˜uel in Spain.6 That is why I think being an editor in Europe or in the United States is profoundly different.
The American editor is inserted in a production system in which he himself is a pawn – he is first and foremost a great technician at the service of the production of the film. While in Europe the editor is like the alter ego of the director, a watchful eye, a critical eye, the armed hand of the cutting room. He has to combine a rich technical knowledge with an open mind to be at the height of a day-by-day experimentation with new things.
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I think I’m very lucky to belong to that generation that has learned and worked with the traditional system of film. When I started to work with the new technologies, I could boast an experience and a professional background which had been essential and unique.
I edited the first Italian film assembled with the non-linear system – it was a technical experience at every kind of level. I worked day and night, helped by an assistant and by a sound editor, to fully understand the new organisation of the footage. While with film footage we were surrounded by dozens of metal boxes divided according to scenes and tracks, nowadays everything is ‘hidden’ in a magic box that can swallow everything up and not give you back a thing … A real nightmare. I wanted to understand how all the procedures worked, before deciding on the real effectiveness of the new system. After various updates it is possible to say that it is extraordinarily effective.
I do not believe that the digital system has changed the way of editing a film. A revolution has undoubtedly taken place for so-called video editors, for whom it was impossible to cut, shift images, or to insert sequences after a rough cut – they could only copy or transcribe until they obtained a final cut. In the film-editing room however this has always been done.
The great advantage of digital editing in cinema is the opportunity to devote more time to creative work. Rushes appear in a split second, you can use the same shots for different possible editing versions, you can see the whole film in sequence. Without interruptions, without blemishes, without jumps in the splices, with a very high-quality provisional sound you can try out dissolves and fades in real time.
In spite of all these possibilities, I hardly ever keep several possible cuts of the sequence – in the end one choice only is the one that counts for me and allows me to proceed with my work. I really think this speed and easy access to the footage, calls for longer periods of reflection, it requires a more detached attitude. Also the electronic image itself is unfortunately ‘cold’ and the telecine machine does not transmit the ‘warmth’ of film, to the extent that at times, it makes you regret the passing of the old flawed optical projection of the editing machine.
As long as the cinema exists there will be editors – I don’t think it will ever be possible to do without an editor. Maybe it’s precisely the digital era, which has introduced the apparent ease with which the film seems to assemble itself on its own, that highlights the crucial role of the editor. More than ever faced with the ‘endless’ editing possibilities, directors discover the importance of the relationship with the editor, with whom they exchange proposals and counterproposals. Or even perhaps, just because the editor can represent the audience, have that first innocent and critical gaze which no director should do without. That is why I think the editor will always be needed.
When I start doing the rough cut of a film during the shooting, when I work on my own without the director, I love starting early in the morning. I create a semi-darkness effect that reminds me of the cutting room and send away my unique and irreplaceable assistant to be able to see the dailies on my own and start the editing with my mind fully concentrated. The more concentrated I am, the more I immerse myself in the footage the better I select. A small light behind the monitor helps me to avoid destroying my eyesight, which unfortunately – contrary to what used to happen with the film-editing machine – tends to tire considerably. On good days I manage to stay seated, working on the film for many hours at a stretch. I never get up from my chair.
When I don’t work I have to start all over again, to go back to the normal way of living, do the shopping, go to the cinema, read and get around. Perhaps people who work in the film industry always have to make an effort to regain an everyday way of living – artistic and production demands wipe out Saturdays and Sundays, Easter and Christmas holidays, there is no more time for friends. The film determines your new way of living.
The people you see are so often linked to the film that when the film finishes, I always experience an empty feeling, as if I have lost something – a little family perhaps that for months has enveloped you in a common fate that at a certain point no longer has any purpose. The film is finished and only the public will give you something back. Maybe that’s why I tend to remain close to the directors and fellow professionals I have worked with. But when things go badly … everyone says, well, sooner or later all films come to an end.
To be able to excel in your work, you have to have ideas. The same goes for everyone – you have to have ideas, intuitions, imagination, you need to question what you’re doing all the time and sometimes even to know how to wait. You must know how to listen, how to look, never be satisfied, to take risks. And in editing, which forces you to be in a state of constant evolution, this ought to be a dogma.
Frankly, I don’t know whether anyone with all these qualities exists, but there is no doubt that experience, lived with a heavy dose of curiosity for life, can help you excel in your work, see further ahead and even to explain to others when your vision is the right one.
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If I could always choose which film to cut the target of my choice would be the director. I have so often had the experience of reading weak screenplays that have subsequently become great films, transformed by great direction. Conversely I have also seen great screenplays crushed by weak direction or even worse, by the wrong actors.
I always try to read the screenplay months before the making of the film, and the first reading is never sufficient. Normally I read it again making a sort of personal outline that I need in order to highlight the story – the story of the characters, the places and the passages of time. On this outline I jot down my queries and concerns and I discuss them with the director – sometimes with the screenwriters. The screenplay is the intermediary between the idea and the making of the film, it’s a temporary instrument that often changes during the shooting and is often adjusted to suit the actors and the settings. In the end editing is a writing process too, basically it’s the last chance to rewrite the film.
Once I have read the screenplay, only the film counts for me, the one that emerges from the rushes. I never read my old notes, the screenplay disappears, the only thing that exists is the film. For a time I thought I would like to edit a film without knowing anything about the story, but discovering along the way what the rushes proposed and subsequently editing to see whether – without knowing anything at all, without any influence whatsoever – I would have assembled a story that made sense.
I have started working with the Avid Media Composer and for the time being it’s the system I like best. I am so automatic it would be an effort to change systems. In terms of editing I’m not very interested in using special video effects or graphics, they’re not very important. The basic Avid model is enough for me. I have heard people talk though about Final Cut Pro,7 which many say is cheaper and inter-relates better with external software programs in situations in which Avid is less flexible.
Having to spend many hours in the same place, I like the room to be clean and above all as empty as possible. For there to be a window, even though in the end it is darkness that I am looking for. For a few years now, I have always taken with me a big geographical map of the world which is like a second window for me.
My approach to the material is identical for every film. The aim is to achieve the maximum result that the material suggests, to reach the heart of the story, the best part. In the first cut I like leaving excerpts that are still not final, I leave some exaggerated pauses, I put together a first draft without looking it over. When I’ve finished a scene I look at it, correct it, and continue to leave some faults in it, perhaps because I’m not entirely sure yet and I leave my options open to having another view, another idea, maybe even to completely re-cut the sequence from the beginning. Ideas have to mature – if I perfectly defined every match cut I would stop thinking.
So I leave myself time to decide, to look over it the next day even, or at the end of the editing of the film. Working alone without the director is very important, because the tests I carry out will help me later in the work I do with him to rapidly demonstrate the course I have taken alone, without his influence. Proposing to him in this way an external view. I must have had the time to find the pace of the film in the pace of the actors, of the dialogues, of the gestures and of the internal pace of the takes. I must have the time to memorise all the material, to metabolise …
The sound, as I always say, is seventy per cent at the service of the scene. By sound I mean dialogues, rustling creaking doors, stones, footsteps, ambiences, music, silences – the pace of the scene changes completely according to the speed or the slowness of a sound that accompanies it, whether it is a line of dialogue or a noise – not to speak of the music which as well as changing the pace of the editing interprets and gives life to (or kills) entire sequences.
During the first stage of my work, especially when I select, even before doing the rough cut, I tend to memorise all the sound I could possibly use from the various takes to be able to enrich or even replace – dialogues, background noises and sound effects in the material that is eventually cut.
It is natural that the moment I focus on the sound occurs when I am fairly close to a convincing cut. In the first stage I only work on the original live sound tracks, choosing and editing everything that is necessary to the scene even subsequently as a guideline (an almost obligatory one, since I substitute words choosing from all the takes, not only from those printed by the director) for the sound editor. I very rarely use just any archive music, I prefer to work on the edited footage only with the original sounds. In a subsequent stage I start to think about where I should use music and where to create the sound atmospheres that serve to enrich and improve.
I think I have a feeling for music that derives specifically from the understanding of how much it can influence not just the overall pace of the film, but also the emotion of whole scenes. I don’t particularly like the use of ‘continuous’ music except in the case of some 1930s cinema, in which the music track was almost a part of the acting. I don’t like finding music loops prepared in advance estimated to the exact centimetre. I like knowing that even the music, after being recorded, will experience another moment of creative development during the editing.
Unfortunately, at least in Italy, technological changes have conspired against the training of fully qualified assistants. Initially most producers looked on the new technology as a major way of economising: they stopped printing the dailies and imposed the telecine of the footage directly from the negative, putting not only the negative at risk, but also the control of the quality of the shooting that for a certain period had been assigned to the laboratory. In this way they managed to eliminate the second assistant, leaving the unfortunate first assistant to carry the entire workload. Today, after various union campaigns, the second assistant has been reinstated, even though he or she comes rarely into physical contact with the film footage, leaving enormous gaps in their personal training as a result.
The new technologies haven’t changed a lot in my way of editing or in my mental approach to the way I work. In a certain sense, when I worked with film footage, the decision to cut was more determined and well thought out. While nowadays I find myself working on the first cut never defining the match cuts one hundred per cent, the image on video seems less exciting to me and maybe this makes me regret the loss of the old editing machine a little. For this reason my dream would be to edit on the big screen. Luckily there’s the sound editing to make up for it – however provisional, it has nothing to do with the old magnetic with which if you got a splice wrong, every time you ran it would cause a disturbance.
My personality is always at the service of the film. My cutting style varies because every film I edit is different. I would always like my style to be recognisable by the commitment and sensibility I put into my work to reach the heart that film may have. I have always dreamed of editing a musical, but perhaps I should have been born in America in the 1950s since in Italy unfortunately there has never been any tradition in that sense. There is no genre I prefer in particular: I would always like to have the chance to test my skills on films in which my contribution can always be more creative than technical.
Notes
1. Writers – Most are familiar: Elsa Morante (1912–85) author of ‘Arturo’s Island’, was married to Alberto Moravia. Jorge Amado, eminent Brazilian writer, translated into more than forty languages.
2. Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) – Viennese novelist and dramatist his ‘La Ronde’ was filmed by Max Ophuls in 1950.
3. Gianni Amelio – Born in Calabria in 1945. Also made ‘The Cinema According to Bertolucci “a documentary about the making of” 1900’.
4. Anna Napoli – Editor since 1980.
5. Blow to the Heart – Gianni Amelio, 1982.
6. Dreyer, Bergman and Bun˜uel – An impressive trio whose ‘cinematography’ is very individual rather than setting a style for others.
7. Final Cut Pro – Becoming the system of choice for many leading editors.