David Konow: What was your first reaction to his films’ fractured editing style?

Steven Kemper: It’s something that I hadn’t experienced. First of all, I loved a lot of John’s slow motion, in that it was more exciting to watch than simple slow motion in all of these explosions. Even if they were gunshots, he was always a big fan of putting extra debris in these explosions. There’s the tremendous bird cage scene in "Hard Boiled" with all those little clippings of paper floating around and stuff. At first I was very intimidated by it. I had only seen cut footage; I had never seen full taped dailies of John’s, of course. So when I started seeing his full takes, I sort of hooked onto it and saw exactly what I would want to do with it. And I just went with my gut, and it turned out that John loved it. So it turned out to be lot easier than I thought, but at first I was rather intimidated. From a purely American sensibility, I was thinking that some of his movies had too much slow motion. I was wondering how I would deal with that, and whether I would get into issues with John about it, which I in fact ended up doing. Particularly on "Mission: Impossible II," we had a lot of conversations about me feeling there was just too much slow motion. But then you find you can make a really nice connection between a normal-speed shot and a slow-motion shot. Sometimes you find out you end up taking certain short pieces of dailies that you’re cutting in and even slowing them up yourself editorially in post-production. You can make a nice seam from one shot to another, which John was totally open to and loved. So I found out that not only was I getting camera slow motion, I was generating slow motion myself in post, which turned out to be really interesting. One of the things I worked particularly hard on all of Woo’s pictures is to carefully meld the over-cranked, under-cranked, and normal speed material. If you catch it at the right action, it’s almost seamless. It’s almost like you haven’t realized for a beat that you’ve gone from slow motion right back to a 24-frame shot. I not only found it challenging, but a heck of a lot of fun.

The poster for "Face/Off"

David Konow: You once told me John gave you a lot of leeway in the editing room.

Steven Kemper: Complete leeway, as I remember, which I always enjoyed because I really never quite had that freedom with any other director. He gave me the dailies to the airport scene in the beginning of "Face/Off" and I didn’t see him for three weeks. He just let me cut the thing, and when he saw it he just flipped. Later on when I started working on much more of the body of the film, I don’t know if you remember the surgery scene very well in "Face/Off," but I cut from the very beginning where John Travolta decides they’re going to do the (face operation) under the table, and I cut it all the way through to where he wakes up as Nicolas Cage. Actually, I cut it all the way through to the point where Nicolas Cage gets the doctor to put his face back on. When I delivered the surgery scene to John, he just didn’t touch it. He put it right in the movie, and never changed a frame. So we connected right away, which I’m still thankful for, because that’s your biggest insecurity, as an editor, or for that matter any crew member on a film; you want to make sure you’re able to get into the director’s head and deliver what he wants. So you know, I connected with the guy. I don’t know what it was. It was intimidating at first, but after that first scene and that great reception I could really relax and sort of get into his head.

Somebody once asked me what it was like learning John Woo’s style. He really lets it come out of the story, and this is the way I love to cut so I love that he does that. It’s always story and character-based, and for me that’s why his movies have always rung true because he wasn’t just imparting a style, he was imparting a style that was very much involved with the characters. And I learned from him quickly. And if we go back to the example when after the surgery when Nicolas Cage wakes up, and of course, he’s John Travolta. But he wakes up and they take the bandages off him, and he sees his face for the first time. He’s standing in front of one of those mirrors that’s like a fashion mirror. It was just a great symbolic depiction of what the character might be going through, feeling so fractured that he looks and sees himself as another person. So I sort of ran with that, and that scene is very jaggedly cut. I used a lot of quick cuts of just slashes of his image in the mirror. I was doing things like that to thematically run with what I thought he so beautifully set-up. In this mirror, you would see so many images of him, and sometimes you would see part of his face and other times you would see his whole face. So I cut that scene very, very jagged and did a lot of repeated action and tried to extend the breaking of the glass mirror so that I would have this opportunity to really symbolically break this character apart.