Kirsten Johnson’s radical documentaryDick Johnson Is Deadblurs and subverts the line between fiction and non-fiction filmmaking.
But as her plans shifted, she and editor Nels Bangerter rethought the sequence’s place in the narrative.
“We were always a little torn about how it was actually going to work,” Bangerter says.
Credit: Netflix
And it worked really well in both ways."
(it’s possible for you to read more about that ending here.)
We spoke to Bangerter about how he and Johnson put it all together.
Netflix
Can you tell me about the different versions that the funeral scene went through as the film evolved?
We were working with so many great elements in that funeral scene.
We had Dick’s performance as he walks up the aisle, with all the people there clapping.
Netflix
We had Dick’s friend Ray’s performance, which was unbelievably good.
We had beautiful music from [musical duo] Syzygys that we wanted to play.
We had Kirsten’s voice-over.
We had all these things, and getting those figured out was not an easy process.
We can get this better."
I think what we did that last night was to add the flickering coffin in the wide shot.
That flicker off gave this sort of answer to, what happens when Dick comes up the aisle?
Does he have to encounter his body in the coffin?
We didn’t have much time to really reflect on it, and we sent it out.
How did you find the right tone, throughout the film but in this scene in particular?
The funeral scene is really a microcosm of the tone of the whole movie.
It was a broad swath of tones.
Ray’s long horn toot is almost scatological humor with the sound that comes out.
You have other really emotional moments with the people at the funeral.
Kirsten told me you spent a lot of time searching for the right sound for that horn toot.
Can you tell me about calibrating that moment?
So we needed a longer toot sound to occupy the whole time.
I think it was a smart choice to cut to that shot of Dick and Kirsten behind the door.
I think that kind of lets the audience know it’s okay to laugh in that moment.
We had the actual reaction of Dick and KJ that is completely amazing.
Tell me about putting that whole sequence together.
And that was a great shoot that was set up by our brilliant producers.
And we had to sort of guide them through, moment by moment, these shifting tones.
As she says, he’s sort of lost to us in some ways.
She brings everything together in that moment.
It’s our best footage in the film, where Dick walks up the aisle.
That’s what we’ve been building to this whole time.
So, wait, the ambulance scene was staged?
I completely bought that that was real.
I mean, I’m glad.
Which is really a violation of your trust with the audience.
We engineered that to be as realistic as we could, but luckily it wasn’t real.
It’s meant to be.
It’s something that we haven’t done before, put a date on the screen.
It’s sort of saying, “This is real.”
And then we mess with you.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
