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In the Sundance NEXT selection King Coal, Elaine McMillian Sheldon takes a hybrid approach, mixing contemporary images with archival material and a poetic voice-over to explore the impact that coal—the substance and the industry—has had on the Central Appalachians. Below, editor Iva Radivojevic, a director herself, discusses her collaboration with Sheldon on the film.
director: How and why did you end up editing your film? What were the factors and qualities that led to your being hired for this job?
Radivojevic: Elaine and I had known each other for about a decade before we made this film, we met in 2013 when we starred in Film director Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Cinema. We also worked briefly on a short film she made a few years ago. There was always mutual respect and admiration for each other’s work. King Coal marks a leap for Elaine in terms of her personal storytelling style and voice. With this film, she opens up new possibilities and experiments with magical realism and the language of fables. Elaine knew that I had recently made a film that lived in the realm of magical realism, and this collaboration seemed natural. King Coal is also the first film in which Elaine addresses the viewer with a voice-over. Narration and writing navigate all my films, the films I’ve directed. It is a language I speak well; personal and introspective reflections, poetic unions of image and verse. Such attempts require a distinctive flow, with refined accents. Those are my strengths.
director: In terms of the progression of your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were your goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to improve, or keep, or remove, or completely redo?
Radivojevic: In the very beginning, when we started theorizing about the film, we discussed and considered what shape the film would take. We originally envisioned it as a rectangle that on the left starts dark, gray and gloomy, reflecting the world of coal. The gray color gradually weakens as it progresses to the other end of the rectangle, it passes into vibrancy, forest colors, greens, yellows, etc. A new world opens up. This is something we wanted to keep throughout the editing process. The challenge was how to do this, ie. to completely separate the two worlds or to interweave each other. It took a lot of experimentation with the “how” to arrive at the solution we finally settled on. It had to be in tune with Elaine’s idea of how this world would resonate and what it should feel like.
director: How did you achieve these goals? What kinds of editing techniques, or processes, or screening feedback allowed this work to happen?
Radivojevic: Elaine and I dug into each other quite a bit to get to this place. She would cut a scene and “throw” it to me. I loved seeing what she came up with because it allowed me to capture her thought, her rhythm and mood and then take it from there. And vice versa. It is much easier and faster to understand what a director wants or what he is aiming for when he can show it to you.
director: As an editor, how did you get into the business and what influences have influenced your work?
Radivojevic: A long time ago I attended a lecture on the craft of editing in downtown New York. Editor Alan Heim was the chief guest and speaker. He was dissecting scenes from Lenny and clarifying their decisions around redundancies. I loved listening to his thought process and reasoning, which for me merged into a kind of dance. An incredibly nuanced dance. I learned to edit to make my own work. I find the process really enjoyable – like sculpting or digging, solving a puzzle. It’s world building. The better you know the software, the more enjoyable this process becomes. I edit all my work. I started getting hired, seriously and for feature films, after my first feature documentary came out. People liked his rhythm.
director: What editing system did you use and why?
Radivojevic: Premiere Pro with Frame.io integration. Elaine had been clipping dailies and fundraising samples along the way, and it just made sense to stay the course with the proxy setup she was using.
director: What was the hardest scene to cut and why? And how did you do it?
Radivojevic: There is a point where the film goes into a moment of wanderlust. Finding the right tone for this rush was a difficult task. This section had various iterations and took a lot of experimentation. This is a high point and an important emotional moment in the film. It has been tested on multiple projections, with different intonations. Eventually, Elaine excavated this feeling from within, from some corner of her experience as a miner’s daughter, and refined the scene to its final form.
director: Finally, after the process was over, what new meaning did the film take on for you? What did you find in the footage that you might not have initially seen, and how did your final understanding of the film differ from the understanding you started with?
Radivojevic: I’ll be able to answer that question after seeing the film at its Sundance premiere, with an audience and some distance. However, I can say that throughout the entire process of the film, the learning never stopped; learning about the Appalachians, history, landscapes as bearers of history, Elaine, and many other wonderful things.
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