Today’s interview is with Harvey Rosenstock, ACE. We’re discussing his editing on multiple seasons of  Showtime’s long-running series, Homeland, which is currently in Season 8.

Rosenstock’s other credits include the feature films, Scent of a Woman, Tombstone, The Emperor’s Club, Stay Alive, and Kiss the Girls. He’s also worked on the TV series, Ray Donovan, Sneaky Pete, Justified, The Blacklist, and The Bridge.

This interview is available as a podcast.

(This interview was transcribed with SpeedScriber. Thanks to Martin Baker at Digital Heaven)

HULLFISH: I got an email from Alan Heim, ACE recently. I understand you two go way back.

ROSENSTOCK: Yeah, I was Alan Heim’s apprentice on a movie called The Twelve Chairs. We got along really well together and I was going to say with him, but I got a chance to work on a movie for Dennis Hopper called The Last Movie which was the movie he did after Easy Rider.

They gave him all this money and he went down to Peru to shoot this movie and ended up doing a lot of crazy stuff down there. I got called by this famous editor — Aram Avakian. He was the big rage in New York around back when Dede (Allen) was there, doing her thing. He was this Armenian guy who was phenomenal. He was Arthur Penn’s editor before Dede. Dennis called because the movie was in trouble and we flew down to Taos, New Mexico to work on that. I didn’t stay with Alan at that point, but I loved him. He was a great guy.

HULLFISH: That was my impression of Alan. Very sweet. Generous with his knowledge and time.

Hearing your accent and listening to you talk about some of the New York City editing crowd, do you think there’s a New York-style of editing or something that defines the New York editor?

ROSENSTOCK: It’s funny that you said that. The only thing I could say as a distinction is when I first moved out here — not Philadelphia — L.A., I remember that when I went to mixes or dubs or whatever you call them, everything out here in L.A. was always clean and beautiful, and it didn’t have that gritty sound. They would clean everything up to make it very antiseptic and very Hollywood. It didn’t feel like Dog Day Afternoon or Serpico or those kinds of movies that Dede worked on.

I remember when she came out here a friend of mine was assisting her and they went to the mix and she says, What are you guys doing? Why did you clean everything up? I don’t want it like that. I want my consonants to hit. I want my sound cuts to be jagged. I want you to feel uncomfortable. I don’t want it to be just like everything’s moving along you know, and that to me was a big difference.

When I worked for her, Sidney Lumet was the director. I worked on Serpico and Dog Day and he was a very simple performance-oriented director. Didn’t care too much about crazy camera moves and stuff like that, but he always got great stuff. It was very New York-style.

But as far as editors and them having their own styles, I think that’s just how you get trained and the stuff you work on. I’d say 50 percent of what I do, or what Alan does, or anybody does is based on the stuff you get to work with.

If you win awards — I’ve won a few — it’s usually the director or the DP who was really giving me stuff to make me look good or make IT look good, or make the editing look good.

I worked with a guy named Steven Gyllenhaal a long time ago — and his kids became super famous — and he was semi-famous at the time. We did a movie called A Killing in a Small Town which won the Eddie Award for me and got nominated for an Emmy.

I got up there and said, “I really have to thank Steven Gyllenhaal and Robert Elswit because they gave me great stuff to work with.” It was also a great script and a great performance by Barbara Hershey. It’s what you get and what you do with it, and I think L.A. guys are trained a little differently than New York guys but I don’t know if their styles are different.

I worked on one movie with two L.A. guys called Scent of a Woman and that was Billy Steinkamp whose father was a famous editor — and Billy became pretty hot in his own way — and Michael Tronick was also a great guy.

We did have different styles and (producer) Marty Brest noticed it because he was a New York guy. I think he gave us scenes in that movie based on our different attacking of the film — the way we went about it. That was the only time I ever gave any thought to the difference of style. I can’t really describe it to you it’s just the way you approach the film and how you’ve been trained.

HULLFISH: You mentioned training, which makes me think of assistants. Do the assistants have a different style or approach in New York? Do they learn to organize projects differently or do they have different responsibilities?

ROSENSTOCK: That’s a multifaceted question because when you’re trained on film — which I was — classically trained, let’s say. You’re in the room with the editor giving him or her stuff. That’s the first assistant, so you’re getting trained by that editor.

When I came out here, it didn’t seem — and it could just be the time I came out, in the early 80s — it didn’t seem like the assistants were in the room as much as they were in New York. They weren’t quite as involved. But that was just my experience coming out here because it seemed like the editors were more on their own and had a higher esteem of themselves than the New York editors who would all say to an assistant, “Hey come look at this.”

When I worked for Dede, she wanted everybody to look at stuff. Steve Rotter is another editor who I worked with. Same thing. I try to do that too, but now with the digital age coming in its kind of hard to have your assistant in the room because they’re so busy getting dailies ready and getting all the stuff we do now — sound and the music and all that — that for them to be in the room the whole time would be great for them, but with the schedules that we have — especially in cable TV.

I’ve only worked in broadcast episodic on The Blacklist. That was the only time I switched over from film to television. It’s not as good of a mentoring system because you don’t have time to sit. But I’m working on something here in Philadelphia called Servant. It’s an Apple+ show for M. Night Shyamalan and what I like about it is he treats it like a movie. Right now we’re COVIDed out, so we’re all hovering in our own apartments.

I’m in the editing room right now which is across the hall from my apartment, but before that, we would all have dailies every day. So if it was my episode and he was directing, we’d all go to dailies every day. Production design, the DP, whoever else wanted to come who was invited, who were working on the project and I thought that was great. It was great because you take notes and you look at stuff differently than when you just get it in the Avid and just start banging away.

I still keep my stuff in KEM rolls — so to speak. When my assistant builds it, he builds it or she builds it in a way that I can just view everything in a row instead of just in tiles (thumbnails) which breaks it up.

Going to dailies — like in the old days when we used to do it on film — I felt like that’s when I used to make most of my decisions about editing. I’d sit in a room at Warner Brothers and we’d run the dailies. When I was doing that I would sit next to my assistant — Julie Rogers, for years — and I would say, “That’s good for this.” “That’s good for that.”

When I used to do it for Dede I would always say, “How am I going to ever do this? How am I ever gonna remember all these things? Call them into play when it’s time?” But after constantly doing it with her I do it now as second nature.

I find the dailies experience — which is pretty much gone — a really good way of bonding with the film, the director, and whoever else is there.

HULLFISH: All of the editors that I’ve talked to who used to cut on film lament the loss of watching dailies with the director and the heads of department in a theater.

ROSENSTOCK: There’s a reason for that. It’s a way to be separate from it and yet get into it and find the performances before they’re all cut together. Very often I would take copious notes and then I’d start cutting and the notes would almost go out the window because when I was putting it all together it didn’t really go that way, but then I come back to that take later for something else because it had some magic in it that I saw.

I could see everybody lamenting on that because it’s a shared experience and it’s also a way to look at it from afar instead of just right in your Avid and making decisions quickly.

I think that’s the part of the business now that I find: how quick things have to get done and there’s not really a lot of time for reflection.

You asked me — when you sent me the e-mail about Homeland — which is a very unique experience to me in film editing because I came on there in year four. I always say, “I came in after the good Homeland.” When Brody died, everybody said, “That’s it! The show’s gonna be over.”

I wasn’t thinking about doing television. I did a show called The Bridge and one of the people on The Bridge — the producer — said, “Wow. I love you. You’re great. I want to bring you on to another show.”

I said, “No. I got a movie to do. Thank you.” And they called me to do one episode of Homeland with this lady, Charlotte Seiling. She was a great director from Denmark. She did the original Bridge which was a great show.

I came on and my wife said, “It’s the greatest show on television. I love it.” I just fell in love with Alex Gansa — the guy who runs the show — and he invited me to stay, so I had to get out of my previous commitments, which I did.

That show was was so careful with what they do with the film. You sit with the producers, the writers and they have a pass. The director, of course, has a pass, and then Alex comes in the room and he has a pass, and he really makes it Homeland. Even if you’ve done something really good or different, he kind of puts the Homeland stamp on it and since then I’ve never been on a show where it’s that many cooks to make it right.

Here on Servant, it’s pretty much M. Night and that’s the end of the game, which is fine, but I think that the writers had something to say on Homeland and they got it to a certain space before Alex came in because he was so busy. These writers are also producers. The care that was taken in every single episode — it was impeccable. It’s a well-run machine.

HULLFISH: You mentioned that when those notes were given, that’s what made it Homeland. What was it that those notes did?

ROSENSTOCK: He makes it real to what’s going on today and what the show is. If something’s a little flashy, if something’s maybe sped-up or just done in a different way than he’s used to, he’ll do something with that to make it more in the style of the show, so it always feels like there’s one person telling the story. It could be dialogue. You could be cutting a scene and he’d say, “We don’t need that dialogue.” And I’d say, “Well, how do you know?” And he’d say, “Well, you’ll know in the next episode.” So he has the overall picture and he has the stamp of the show. He’s very excellent in the edit room.

The show that I asked you to watch — Season 8, Episode 10 “Designated Driver” — that show was really well done by the director, Michael Offer and Alex came in and only spent a few days on it but made it better. Alex will call me and say, Did I make it better, or is that a lateral move? I’ll be very honest with him and tell him. He listens.

Something about being on the show for so long and writing the show and knowing where it’s going and knowing all the nuances of Claire’s performance and Saul’s performance. He knows how it’s all going to work out, so it has a seamless pattern to the season.

HULLFISH: What was it about that episode that made you call it out?

ROSENSTOCK: You get ‘em as you get ‘em. Nobody picks episodes. That’s not quite true. There was a guy — Chip Johannessen — who would always want to give me the action episodes, I don’t know why. I’m a performance guy.

I did an episode a couple of years ago that got nominated for an Emmy and then Eddie and Lesli Linka Glatter got a DGA Award (Homeland: The Tradition of Hospitality.) It was an actiony episode and this one, episode 10, had a really big finale, and leading up to it we created this tension.

So the suicide bomber is talking to his family and he’s going to go and do the ultimate task to save his family by giving his life. And the way Michael Offer shot it, I was able to make it cool and make it different than Homeland. I really tried to fuck around with the different angles. We used some temp music from a Ridley Scott movie. Instead of going with the actiony music, we wnt with very sad — look how horrible this is. This guy’s going to drive into this truck and kill all these people and we feel bad for him.

Because there was so much gunfire and so many different cuts we took that way down and just played the visceral images of this guy doing it. There was one place where he screams and I cut to a shot of his kid and I overlapped his scream on the screen with the kid to show that it’s this visceral thing where he’s saving his family. And then it goes to white. It was a different way to go and it was very effective.

I got a lot of calls and Gansa got a lot of calls after that one. He said, “Wow. I’ve never had so many calls about the editing of an episode since the beginning of Homeland.” That was the biggest compliment in the five years I was there. I was so proud because he’s done so many episodes of Homeland.

It’s just so thick and complicated and there’s so much going on. The other two editors are great and there’s a camaraderie there, plus it parallels what’s going on in the world. The writers’ room is just all incredibly bright people. They were all Ivy League. They’re all the brightest of the brightest and they’ve been on it for a long time. Scripts are great and the acting is fantastic.

HULLFISH: Let’s talk about the way you approach a scene with a KEM roll. Do you use that to watch dailies I’m assuming?

ROSENSTOCK: I do.

HULLFISH: From there do you use the KEM roll as a source or do you start trimming that down to a tighter selects roll?

ROSENSTOCK: I don’t do a selects roll. There’s a guy Philip Neel who’s on there — he does selects rolls. But I only use it as a way to view all my stuff and take notes. Then after I cut the scene I can go back and zoom through it to see if there’s a little piece of something in one of those takes that I might like — instead of just going back through all the takes.

It makes me feel like I’m on the KEM and it just gives me a better feeling.

HULLFISH: You mentioned the idea of watching dailies as a group, but in the old days you’d watch an entire day’s dailies — not just one scene. So now, when you’re watching dailies, do you watch the entire day all at once, or do you just watch the dailies for a single scene before starting to cut? You might get dailies for three or four scenes in a single day, so I just watch a scene at a time.

ROSENSTOCK; Would you rather watch more so you can inform yourself on where it’s going?

HULLFISH: As you know, the scenes are not usually shot in order so that doesn’t matter. I just find that I have a hard time wrapping my head around six hours of dailies. I’d much rather watch 90 minutes of dailies and get started working,

ROSENSTOCK: On Homeland, there may be six hours of dailies, but the six hours of dailies are also three cameras and it’s necessary to watch them all but I sort of watch them all out of the corner of my eye. I kind of know what I’m going to do and if I get stuck then I’ll go back because there is a schedule and if I watch six hours of dailies I wouldn’t be cutting until four o’clock in the afternoon.

But one of the other editors, he would watch them all. He’d watch every single one. Take notes on every single one, even if the C camera was on somebody’s shoe.

I do what I call “build the house.” I find my stuff that I like. I cut the scene, so I know where it’s going, and then I see, “Hmm. If that’s the right direction, then maybe this other take might be better for this and that.” And then I start decorating the house. Start putting windows on and taking the floorboards out and sometimes recutting the whole scene.

I like to get it up and going so I can feel something about what’s happening. And then the whole thing’s different once you put it in the cut. What is it informing? Where does it go? Does it belong here? Am I giving anything away or should I save this for later?

That’s what I mean about that show. It’s so complicated. On that show — which is something I’ve never done any other show — we all watch each other’s stuff. I mean we don’t watch whole episodes. But Phil will call me in or Jordan will call m in and say, Look at this. What’s going on in your episode? There’s competition, but not the kind of competition that we’re going to hide anything. We’re all gonna just try to make the best shows possible. Everybody is on the same page trying to make the best possible product.

HULLFISH: Many people do that workflow of quickly getting a scene up on its feet. I like to do the same thing. The advantage of it is that when you’re watching the rest of the dailies you’re doing it with a different eye because you now have kind of seen what the scene is.

ROSENSTOCK: That is true. What I try not to be guilty of — I’m a little more guilty of it now than when I did movies. When I did movies, I had these notepads and they were like these bibles and I would have notes on every single thing.

Now, I just start cutting away, and then when a director comes in, he’ll ask, “Hey, don’t we have a better take?” I don’t even have to go to my notes. I just go to my tiles (thumbnails, or “Frames” in Avid). That’s just a different way of going.

HULLFISH: Did you find that the notes that you take are really more to get them into your brain than anything you actually refer to later?

ROSENSTOCK: I think to get it in my brain and to see where there’s kind of golden nuggets in there or something that just speaks out to me. Oftentimes I try to use it and it looked better in dailies — that kind of thing. I couldn’t really use it in the scene, but I’m very persistent so I’ll go back and try. If there’s something that hit me. I try to use that. That informs me of where the takes are going, performance-wise.

HULLFISH: So, you’ve got the scene cut, and then it goes in context with the scenes around it. At what point in the process do you start bolting scene one onto scene two onto scene three?

ROSENSTOCK: I kind of wait. In television, I wait till I have another good cut that I can see how it’s going to inform the other stuff. I usually wait until right before I build it, because that’s the scary part, once you put it together.

Even now — I’ve been doing this so long — and still, the night before I’m going to screen my first cut I get nervous. What I find is, especially with Night, he doesn’t like putting music in and I’ve gotten used to doing that.

When you’re putting music on scenes you’re not putting music on the whole episode so it kind of stands out in a bad way.

I had an experience once on a movie called Kiss the Girls — Gary Fleder was the director — and I came on to replace the editor, which was not necessary, but anyway I did,

Gary said, “Let’s watch the movie.” We watched it. I said, “I think it’s great. It really works, but it’s kind of slow.” He said, “Yeah, maybe we should take the music out.” I said, “Where?” He said, “All of it.” I said, “What a great idea? Let’s just turn it off.”

It was edited on Lightworks, so we just turned the music tracks off and we could tell — Morgan Freeman’s walking down the hall for like three minutes which should have been like a minute.

When I was working with Night last year he said, “In all my movies I never put music in until they’re done.” I said, “Yeah, but now you’re working in television, so it’s sort of different I think a little bit it. it helps establish a style.”

We’re starting to do that now, more and more. The reason I’m bringing this up is sometimes when you put music in finished scenes and then you put the scenes in the cut it makes very little sense because it’s not coming and going and there’s no head and tail and it jams its way in.

I have a habit of cutting scenes as if the scene is the whole movie. And I worked with this great editor — Frank J. Urioste — many, many years ago and he said, Every scene can’t have a beginning middle and end because the movie has to have a beginning middle and end.

There’s a California guy who had a lot to say. That’s why I think I wait until the very end. Once in awhile, I’ll put something together just to see how the transition would be, or if we’re going to flop scenes around. I’ll sort of think of that in my head as I’m putting it together. Basically the answer to your question — in a long-about way — is I just wait.

HULLFISH: The point about scenes having beginnings middles and ends that’s where you see problems when you start bolting them together right? Because the flow over multiple scenes has too many starts and stops and the rhythm gets stilted.

ROSENSTOCK: Yeah. It doesn’t work within the flow of the film or the show.

HULLFISH: Did you have to adapt your workflow when you started cutting TV? Do the time constraints of TV require a different way of working?

ROSENSTOCK: Yeah. I went from film to my first TV thing, which was Moonlighting. That adapted itself to its own style. I did movies for a while before I went back to TV with a show called Justified.

Michael Dinner is a director I like a lot. He was the showrunner and director of that. That was kind of like a movie — like a cowboy movie, so it was kind of fun to do that. On that one, I really didn’t have to adapt.

Then I went back into movies again and then I ended up doing a short stint on The Blacklist when it just started. That was really an adjustment because they were really a different way of cutting and a different style. They were all fast and close-ups and music all over the place and so that was a little bit of adapting, but then I went back to the movies for a while.

Right after that was Homeland which is a whole different ballgame. Since we’ve been COVIDed away, we’ve been watching the Sopranos from the very beginning.

HULLFISH: Obviously you need to cut the show the way you think it needs to be cut, but each showrunner has his or her own peculiarities and things that they like and don’t like. For example, I’ve heard about showrunners with a hesitancy to use pre-laps or someone might like cutting on action and somebody else might NOT like that.

ROSENSTOCK: Meaning what?

HULLFISH: I talked to Walter Murch recently and he was describing that he does not like to cut in the middle of an action. He likes for the action to complete in one shot and then start up again with another action and another shot.

Like, if my arm is coming up in a wide shot, he wouldn’t cut to a close-up to see my arm continue rising up in the close-up.

ROSENSTOCK: I always cut on action because I always feel that if you’re not cutting on action that you’re going to get a dead cut. That’s what I call it.

HULLFISH: Those are the kinds of things that directors might have opinions about. And what do you do if you like cutting on action and the director doesn’t?

ROSENSTOCK: Some have rules like that.

HULLFISH: You’re talking about trying to impose that style but the style is also something you’re deriving or responding to in the film footage itself, right? It’s hard to make the film become something that it doesn’t want to become.

ROSENSTOCK: Yeah. Every show has its style. When I got on The Blacklist it was sort of at the very beginning and they were just starting to get a style.

James Spader is so good and the way they shot him, the close-ups were an important part of it. I don’t say that you have to have them, but I think they’re important to get the performances. If you have a good performance I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being in a close-up to let the audience feel it.

When I worked on The Bridge, we really didn’t have a style. One of the producers wanted me to come up with the style because I recut the pilot, and I found a lot of great stuff in the bins that wasn’t used. A lot of that was close-ups.

You can’t really saddle a director with “here’s a list of how you’re supposed to shoot it.” I have nothing against close-ups. It has to be shot right. You can’t just float to the close-up or something. You watch some older movies, like Mike Nichols and two shots are something that’s forgotten — from the side and you see two people looking at each other or The Irishman.

Those are the movies that I look at for beautiful composition of filmmaking and close-ups and how they really grab your attention when you need them. The overuse of close-ups is really bad because you don’t know when to feel anything. You get numb after a while.

HULLFISH: You mentioned that one of the producers likes you to cut the action episodes. When you’re cutting those action scenes, is one of the things you’re looking to do to give the audience a sense of the geography of the situation? Talk to me a little bit about what you do to make an action scene make sense.

ROSENSTOCK: On the first big action movie I worked on, I was working for a guy named Mark Goldblatt, who was a very, very popular editor and we became friends. He was going to direct a movie called Dead Heat.

His editing style was point-to-point, which is very interesting.

HULLFISH: Explain that to me.

ROSENSTOCK: On Rambo, somebody would pull back a bow and arrow and the next cut the guy would be hit with the arrow. So there was no time. Stallone came in one day and said, “Mark! Mark! I need some fly time for my arrows!”

If you want to cut an action scene and just go bup-bup-bup-bup — point-to-point in a big scene, that’s fine, but on Homeland where it’s supposed to be real, that really wouldn’t work. You could do fancy quick cutting but not that kind of stuff where somebody’s on this side of the room then that side of the room and cutting on swish pans.

I think you get lost in that and you don’t feel like it could really have been happening. On Homeland, you always want to feel like it’s happening at that moment in time. We do some cool cutting but not crazy, so you’ll always know geography.

HULLFISH: I think it helps the audience just to understand the “story” of the fight. There is the excitement and action and the physical conflict and all that stuff is great in close-up, but to understand the story-points of a fight, you kind of want to be wider, right?

ROSENSTOCK: Right. Sometimes you can have a fight and if it is choreographed well you just keep it in a medium wide-shot. That’s just as good as cutting to a close-up. It doesn’t feel as fake.

HULLFISH: Sometimes the trick there is trying to hide the stunt performers and that’s easy to do with those quick kinetic close-ups, right?

ROSENSTOCK: Right. I had a big action scene on Ray Donovan. That’s a great episode of television. It’s probably the best episode of television I’ve ever done.

It was Ray Donovan Season 5, episode 8, called “Horses”

SPOILER ALERT

it’s the show where Ray’s wife commits suicide because she has cancer. He wants to get her to a special doctor and she doesn’t want to do it anymore. The performances and the whole way it was shot — the director was a woman named Zetna Fuentes. She was great and I really enjoyed that episode.

HULLFISH: What were some of the things that made that episode stand out — other than the emotion of it?

ROSENSTOCK: My wife had cancer, so some of the scenes were really close to home. One day David Hollander came in and I was all — not teary, but close — and he asked if I was alright. I told him, “This scene just hits too close to home. It’s killing me. You got the right guy to edit this episode.” He said, “I know, my wife is going through it right now.”

END SPOILER ALERT

The way Zetna shot it — especially that fight scene — that fight scene was fantastic! She shot it in very small rooms. It was shot really well and it was great.

The show was so effective because the lady who plays Ray’s wife was just fantastic and he was great. All the characters were great. They all brought their “A-game” to that.

We choreographed it to this song “Horses,” which is a famous rock song (Patti Smith — Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mer(de.)) Something about the way it all went together was just very powerful.

HULLFISH: I’ve been talking a lot in recent weeks about how being empathetic plays such a critical role in being a good editor.

ROSENSTOCK: It’s important. It’s important to have an emotional core that you can relate to and make stuff come out of the performances and feel it because if you don’t feel it, you’re not going to get it.

That’s the whole reason — when we put that cue in Homeland — that the scene became something totally different. Instead of tire squeals and gunshots and percussive music, it was almost like a horrible ballet of the guy driving to his death.

He felt something and it had been shot just like an action scene. There were close-ups in the car with the stuff flying all over the guy. Not big ones, but it was enough. And it funny how the score changed that so much. It made it very poignant and very feeling.

SPOILER ALERT

Like in that episode of Ray Donovan where his wife dies and then he comes home to find her dead — when he didn’t want to do that. And he just breaks down. In all the years on Ray Donovan he never broke down, and that was the episode where he was allowed to cry. I mean, he had stuff happening before that.

END SPOILER ALERT

I like shows that make you feel something.

It’s funny cause I’m working on this show now which is kind of a spooky creepy kind of thing for M. Night. One of the episodes we did this year that he directed has a lot of that in it. Not super-emotional but very dark in a different way, so you’re feeling sorry for somebody instead of compassion, which is a different feeling.

HULLFISH: When you’re cutting those scenes for Night and he doesn’t want to use music, what kind of challenge does that present for you?

ROSENSTOCK: It’s a big challenge. Sometimes we have fights over it and I’ll try to sneak something in. “No no no no.” And then when we get the composer involved — the composer’s involved now, which is good.

We also had that on Ray Donovan. They have somebody on-site to put the music in, but the guy on Ray was working with the composer, so by the time the showrunner saw it, everything was sort of in line with how the show was going to go.

Here, on Servant, we have the composer on as well. Sometimes if I have a cue in that isn’t really working for Night, but it’s doing something, then Trevor Gureckis — the composer — will agree or disagree. And if he agrees, he usually makes it much better, because this show has a certain tonal quality to it. It’s like tubular bells and little things. It’s not a big score-y kind of thing.

I don’t know if you know what the show is about, but it’s not a very normal show. It’s just very off-the-beaten-path kind of show, so it has that feeling.

HULLFISH: I’ve interviewed one on Night’s longtime film editors — Luke Ciarrocchi — is he on the show?

ROSENSTOCK: No. I was hoping to go on to Night’s feature but it doesn’t look like it’s happening. I think he wants it to stay here.

HULLFISH: I want to thank you for shedding some light on your editing. Thank you so much for your time, Harvey.

ROSENSTOCK: Thank you for choosing me. I appreciate it.

To read more interviews in the Art of the Cut series, check out THIS LINK and follow me on Twitter @stevehullfish or on imdb.

The first 50 interviews in the series provided the material for the book, “Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV Editors.” This is a unique book that breaks down interviews with many of the world’s best editors and organizes it into a virtual roundtable discussion centering on the topics editors care about. It is a powerful tool for experienced and aspiring editors alike. Cinemontage and CinemaEditor magazine both gave it rave reviews. No other book provides the breadth of opinion and experience. Combined, the editors featured in the book have edited for over 1,000 years on many of the most iconic, critically acclaimed, and biggest box office hits in the history of cinema.