“Judgment Day” is a peak moment for 3 Body Problem. The Netflix series escalated to new horrific heights in the mid-season episode, in which an attack on the ship Judgement Day. It’s pure terror cut with absolute cleanliness by Michael Ruscio, whose work on the episode is nominated for Outstanding Picture Editing For A Drama Series.
For an episode with no shortage of carnage, Ruscio brought his “never say die” approach to it. “I told David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] that I was a ‘never say die’ editor, always looking for solutions and whatnot,” the editor told Immersive. “They took that to the bank because we went through a lot of variations.”
Recently, the Emmy-nominated editor spoke with Immersive about a few of those variations for “Judgement Day.”
I do want to start off by asking, because I do think it leads to Judgment Day, you started off working on great movies like Return to the Living Dead, Chopping Mall, and Howling II. As an assistant editor and apprentice at that time, were the ‘80s a good time?
A lot of fun and a lot of uncertainty and surprises. Return of the Living Dead was my first job and I was cleaning weeds out of the driveway in Burbank and then I graduated to being an on-set PA and giving [director] Daniel O’Bannon sandwiches that he put into his pocket. My job, I’d put up Billy Idol posters for the cast and then emptied all the trash.
I remember I saw all this film in the garbage cans in the editing room and was like, “Why are you throwing all this away and understanding that?” So I really got into asking a lot of questions for the assistant editor and then emptying their trash, of course. There was an apprentice at that time on the film who crashed the post-production station wagon into a tree. She’s fine, she was fine, but basically, it made it so that she wasn’t able to work on the show anymore. So, I became the apprentice editor.
And then, I guess a lot of people worked at Corman and got in with Dennis Virkler, who… another crazy story. He was working on a movie of the week at the Disney lot. He’s very, very gruff, had a very kind of the Darth Vader editing reputation. I set up this interview while I was working at Corman. I just drove my car in a lot and he never left me a drive on, but I got on the lot. When he saw me, he didn’t say anything to me. I walked down the hall and he just looked at me. I thought it was a test. It was like a Jedi test that I got through on the lot.
He was really generous with. At that point in the business, I think in the late eighties and early nineties, there were opportunities for people to move up so that my bent was the independent films. Dennis went on to The Hunt for Red October and Free Jack, and he brought me along as an additional editor.
Then you went on to edit some great stuff like The Sopranos, True Blood, and Dexter.
Well, he moved me up and then I went to work with Alan Rudolph. I did this movie called Twenty Bucks. I was in the indie world of film for the nineties until I got sort of into premium cable in the 2000s and then was lucky enough to sort of go through on that run.
And so, it is bizarre. Actually, I have been around for a minute. I realize, as you start to get older, you kind of reinvent yourself and don’t talk about that, but I’ve had an opportunity in the last couple of months to talk about everything. I was like, well, the truth is always the most fascinating part.
Did any of those horror instincts kick in for the episode “Judgement Day”?
I know what you mean. In the actual centerpiece of “Judgment Day,” part of this was deliberate and part of this was extended editorially, but you see the guy on the deck with the hose. You see the paper dolls, you see them cut off and we extended that shot. We love that shot so much that we kept on adding to it, but you’re sort of seeing that little tease of it and you’re seeing people run through the cafeteria.
You’re not exactly sure what happened to them, but then you start to see parts being chopped. And that was very interesting, editorially, because you would have a fluorescent light falling on somebody or people just crumbling to the ground and who knows really what that was going to look like. As time went on we’re like, no, it’s 10 frames too long. Really, that person’s toast already.
So a lot of debate over what to show and what to leave to the imagination.
We needed to go back and work with the effects to get it all, so it would really work together and sing as a sequence without overstaying. I think the one person who you’re most invested in is the Jonathan Pryce character. He knows the ship better than anybody else, so he knows how to escape. You basically see him completely sliced and you see him half-tuna there on the ground. We really killed him seriously on camera, and I had to apologize for him at the premiere.
Another thing is that with a sequence like that where you have these nanofibers that have a rhythm and have a sort of ticking clock to them and how much you’re allowed to with character with Jonathan, you can draw it out that you can sort of have his POV. You can sort of hold on things, you can stretch moments and kind of not repeat moments almost so that you… You’re milking in as much as you possibly can within the physical constraints of the real time and the real science.
How was it handling all the exposition in “Judgement Day”? Did you do a lot of experimenting in post there?
That became a lot of variations in those, especially in that sophon sequence. The way that David and Dan and Alex work, they do letter versions, so they have version A all the way down to Z. I think we got to double A or a B on something. I think on episode one we got that far, and then within that also, let’s see, an A, B, C of the sequence. So, it’s like three different variations of the same thing. We like what was in C, but we really liked the pace of A, and that’s sort of up to me.
Do we need to see that? Do we need to explain it while we’re seeing it? Is the visual going to be enough? And working with VFX is like, look, we need to slam this out of the park. We need to understand instantly what this is, and you saw that visually without explaining it, but initially, it was all explained and we just realized, “No, you’re going to get lost in it. How do you simplify the science? The guys who are great at, how do you simplify the science to the very essential human element so you can understand it, and yet stay in that kind of PhD mode of scientific viability.
What’s always the number one factor driving you as an editor?
The story is the main thing. I’m kind of the librarian of the film as well as the story that there’ll be notes or it’s like, wow, we really need to hammer this home. And then I’m always aware of, well, the director had this great shot that they really loved and she really liked this. If I don’t have that, then I’m thinking about her and I think, “Okay, how can I achieve this and still stay true to what she had thought?” Sometimes you can’t.
It’s like, well, we really love that, but we really had to take it out and then they’ll see it. I’ve been lucky to work on projects where in later stages the producers will send cuts to the director and they’ll, after their initial shock, they can have a little bit of influence either through me or through talking directly to the producer. Like, “Yeah, I understand why you did that, but have you thought about this and have you thought about this way into it?”
Which may be a new way, because at the end, it’s so collaborative and people really bust their humps. You want everyone’s work to shine. My job as an editor is to bring out the best in everybody. Sometimes you can’t even tell those secrets, especially the actors, but I want them all to look as good as they can.
Like you’ve said, you’re a “never say die” editor. What were some moments on “Judgement Day” you just wouldn’t give up on?
Well, there was one particular sort of running around the hallways in the cafeteria. There was one area which was designed by the director as something that was sort of a cheat. It was another hallway, but there were similarities to the one hallway that was already seen.
There was sort of a part of the VFX team that wanted to have it be that continuation of that hallway or to change things around a little bit. So, it wasn’t that way, and I really did hold firm with that. I said, “This needs to be this. We need to change this door, so it doesn’t have those signs or put these signs over here.” We need to be able to buy that there.
For hallways, there was a limited amount of real estate and we wanted to give the idea that there was a big sense of, which way do we go? There was an architecture to the ship, and then there was an architecture that the director had designed. I really did fight for that. In retrospect, this is something I haven’t talked about, actually. I was like, “No, this is important.” It meant redoing VFX shots, but I held firm.
The attack on Judgement Day is where everything changes for Augie. I imagine those reaction shots took a lot of finessing and questioning, just knowing when you’re hitting that point home. How was handling her point-of-view in the chaos of the attack?
It was challenging. There are three different distinct POVs there. We designed this thing which worked out sonically beautifully that you had this mayhem and then you went inside this sort of the ivory tower of the trailer and it was quiet. Sometimes she would peak too soon and you had to kind of wait and you had to get to the point where it was believable that she could take the headset off and really have had enough after she’d seen so much. There’s a part of her who can’t believe what she’s wrought. At the same time, there’s the pride of the scientist to understand that it’s working.
You want to keep that integrity. A difficult thing with all the characters is, you want them to be human. The way that the guys adapted the books, the books are scientific science-fiction ,and they humanized it. And so, Augie becomes sort of a portal in that way. She’s still a scientist, so we needed to find takes and delay takes. Sometimes she’d give too much and we’d have to wait and see how we drew it out. And also, afterwards she goes through the whole demise and she sees the basketball shoes. We had to save some moments. I think that so much of it is what you withhold.
3 Body Problem is available to stream on Netflix.
