If you had the chance to see The Big Short this past weekend, you are probably still marveling over the adept editing from Hank Corwin.
Besides the incredible director Adam McKay, script, and cast, two of the films hallmark features are its crazy cuts and riveting montages. We worked with Hank to select just the perfect footage to make these sequences work in the film and carry the tone from original, live action footage to these vignettes of sourced imagery.
Slate’s Aisha Harris sat down with Hank, whose credits also include The Tree of Life, The New World, and Natural Born Killers, to discuss his work with Adam McKay on The Big Short. Some highlights are below:
How did you decide on the specific images to use for the montages? There was the Ludacris music video, “Money Maker”, and I also spotted clips of Britney Spears, a burger commercial—I think I spotted LL Cool J’s album cover for Mama Said Knock You Out …
Yeah, very good. You know, the times are very chaotic, and I wanted it to be really eclectic. And honestly, I’m a big fan of Ludacris, what can I say? That was right on the money. They weren’t meant to be pretty images, they were meant to be provocative and a little jarring … With the business world, I just love the absurdity of it; it’s surreal that you have this going on and then you have the banking crap going on. I don’t want to say it’s evil, but I just found I needed a foil to what was going on, and I needed chaos because what was going on was so hard to understand. And the culture—Ludacris is like life. It’s the life that we live, and so is Britney and so are the burgers …
So for you, those images were kind of outside the realm of the bankers—what the rest of the culture was consuming, oblivious to the bankers’ actions?
Absolutely … One thing Adam and I were really conscientious about—we tried to make it not political, like Democrat, Republican or any of that crap. People can read into it however they want …
In a way I wanted to show it’s not just the bankers. In our society—and god help us, we’re still there today—it’s like people aren’t sensitive to their surroundings or how toxic they can be. Honestly, Ludacris and “shake your money maker”: the concept is horrible and the glorification is horrible. It’s like the bankers aren’t the only ones, they just happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Was the idea of breaking up these scenes with these montages McKay’s or yours?
I don’t want it to sound like I’m taking a lot of credit, but he brought me in to do these things. He and I had some long talks, and I suggested using stock footage and he said “go for it.”
How difficult was it to get all of the stock footage? Was there anything you really wanted to use that you weren’t able to get permission for?
You know, we were pretty blessed on this one. It’s like everything that I found, pretty much we got. The studio had a couple of people that they used, and I have a company called Stalkr that I met in Berlin and they’re just spectacular, and I got all kinds of stuff, and they cleared stuff for me.
In addition to the montages, there are also a few scenes where they cut off a half-second before the viewer would expect it to, like in the middle of someone’s line. The one that stands out most is the scene in which one of Mark Baum’s [Steve Carell] colleagues interviews a tenant whose landlord hasn’t been paying the mortgage.
Yeah, and also the scene with Carell’s boss … toward the end. For this kind of a film—this goes along again with what I was saying about wanting this film to be really experiential. It’s like so many times, say, if you’re walking in the street, you’ll turn your head and there’ll be a sound you hear, you walk away and it cuts out … In film, people shoot these long shots, and they think that’s the truth, but that isn’t truth. It’s what’s recorded onto a piece of film or digital art. I try, when I cut, even the shot selection, as opposed to having it be third person where you’re watching people doing something, I want it to be like you’re in there with them.
Read the full interview on Slate here.
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