Film Music Editing and Creating a Narrative World: A Conversation with Suzana Peric

rs [ron sadoff]:

Our Friday@1:00 series this semester is particularly special, as we were able to assemble so many of the artists that we hoped for.¹ Today’s featured guest, Suzana Peric, has sustained a prosperous career as one of the top music editors in the industry—and she has been associated with the NYU Screen Scoring program for over two decades. Your first time—and you were actually only my third guest—

sp [suzana peric]:

No!

rs:

Yes!—in 1997.

sp:

Wow. [laughs]

rs:

And my first two luminaries were David Raksin² and Leonard Rosenman,³ so—

sp:

That’s a pretty good start. [both laugh]

sp:

And Ron, this is where I met Nancy Allen⁴—in your class—and then got her from there—and she became my assistant and worked with me for ten years.

rs:

Yeah, and Nancy now—

sp:

Now she has a fantastic career. Yeah.

Figure 1.

Suzana Peric.

rs:

And so you all know, the mentorship thing is alive and well! Suzana has served as a music editor for over a hundred feature films including Lady Bird,⁵ Juliet, Naked,⁶ The Giver,⁷ The Illusion-ist,⁸ Manchurian Candidate,⁹ Closer,¹⁰ The Pianist,¹¹ Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring,¹² Beloved,¹³ Crash,¹⁴ and Silence of the Lambs,¹⁵ to name only a few. She received a Golden Reel Award for her work on Lord of the Rings in 2002 and again for her work on Jane¹⁶ in 2017. Among the directors she’s worked with, are Peter Jackson,¹⁷ Barry Levinson,¹⁸ Jonathan Demme,¹⁹ Greta Gerwig,²⁰ Roman Polanski,²¹ Mike Nichols,²² and Wes Anderson.²³ Composer collaborations include Ennio Morricone,²⁴ Howard Shore,²⁵ Rachel Portman,²⁶ Philip Glass²⁷ over ten times, [laughs] Alexandre Desplat,²⁸ Marcelo Zarvos,²⁹ and our faculty member, Chris Hajian.³⁰

sp:

That’s right, who wrote a beautiful, beautiful score for this documentary, In Balanchine’s Classroom,³¹ that was going to go make festival rounds just as we got locked down, which was in March. It’s a beautiful documentary and a beautiful score he wrote.

Audience Previews and the Music Editor’s Process

rs:

Suzana, let’s begin today with a bit about your role for a film’s preview audience process. Relatedly, an integral task of a music editor is assembling the temp track, so perhaps you could discuss how that works, in terms of your preparing for preview audience screenings.

sp:

To begin, one of the reasons a music editor starts work early on, in the cut of the film—meaning my job would start probably sometimes during the filming, conversations about music would start—if I already have a relationship with that certain director. But no later than immediately after the first cut of the film is done, then there’s a screening. These days, the first cut of the film is really finished a few days after the filming ends because a picture editor is working concurrently with the filming of the film so that they could then, in time, catch certain angles that might be missing in the coverage—and that’s the reason you would want your picture editor involved from the beginning.

The picture editor is cutting concurrently and so, a few days after the film is done shooting, the director can actually sit down and watch the movie. My job usually starts at that time. In this moment, if you’re working on any kind of a studio picture, let’s say, where there is a definite schedule, from that moment on, the director has ten weeks time to deliver his or her version of that film to whoever the investor is. That will be the first time that the investor will see the film—and then they will give their comments. That’s also the time when they would want to test the film with an audience so that...