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Interviews
Barrie Vince, editor ‘…the sequences themselves had to be a specific length and themselves to have a particular shape so that they could fit together and, as it were, suspended in thin air – they had to defy gravity.’ I was final editor in the film and I came on to the film and worked with Philip on what was a very specific task. The Moon and The Sledgehammer was an unusual film, in fact probably unique, in that at feature length it was finally 65 minutes long and it has no plot. It has no story. It has no clear narrative. There is a development in it from thinking that you’re in the Garden of Eden to finding out that you’re with unhappy families, so there is some kind of development in it. But none of the scenes is logically connected to the one before so the task of the editor on this film was to find a structure for the film, for the scenes, which would hang together. It was engineering rather – Philip was interested in engines, very keen on engineering. It was like building a bridge where every scene had to bear a certain amount of weight and be connected with the scene that followed it in a particular way which made some kind of sense and then you’d have blocks of scenes which worked together, but then they had done their job then you had to make a transition to another block of scenes which did their job, so you can see it was quite like engineering. This film is unique in that we had to find a more than the sequences… the sequences themselves had to be a specific length and themselves to have a particular shape so that they could fit together and, as it were, suspended in thin air – they had to defy gravity. I thought the film could be paced a little bit faster without damaging it, without making it look as though it had been driven too hard. We had actually refined the edit. We’d taken little amounts of certain scenes; two scenes we reduced substantially, and that created a substantial shift in the film which then meant that a general audience would actually follow it through, but because of its unique quality, that there was no plot, we had to find that precise length for it, and I think in the end we did. > More interviews >> Richard Stanley, Cameraman >> Robert Erskine, partner in Vaughan Films >> John Russell Taylor, Film Historian Press release | Gareth Evans' Introduction | Questions and Answers | London screening page |
