Saturday Night is a fever dream that transports you back to 1975. In real-time, the 90 minutes before the first live broadcast of the legendary comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live. Set at a breakneck pace by director Jason Reitman, featuring fast edits to a brilliant and wild score by Jon Batiste. Expert sound editor Chris Newlin was brought in to make it all work. He recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom to discuss how he put it together.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity, context, and length.]
How’d you get involved with this project?
I almost worked on Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which Jason was producing. He had called me for that, but for various reasons, I wasn’t able to jump onto that project. We kept in touch, and I said, “What do you have coming up next?” And he was like, “Actually, let me call you in a week.” He called me, and he said there’s this film called SNL 1975. We’d love to have you.
What is your personal relationship with Saturday Night Live?
I grew up with it. It was the nineties cast. Like Jason… I think we’re pretty close in age. Chris Farley, David Spade, and Chris Rock and that era’ cast was something I watched very regularly. I spent a lot of time watching SNL. To this day I still try to watch it. When I got hired onto this film I did a deep dive and I started listening to the audiobook for the book Live From New York, the oral history. It’s just fascinating to understand the different seasons.
Can you describe what you do as a music editor?
The music editor is a very unknown role in this entire process, and I look at it as kind of a liaison between the filmmakers and the composer. I feel like oftentimes we’re the translator. I often take information from the director or producer back to the composer and say, this is what they’re asking for.
Lets relay that to the current project…
On Saturday Night, I’m working directly with the picture editor and the director to help shape the music and we can get more specifics to that later on. Then other times you’re hired on and you’re specifically with the composer’s team and you’re just there to support the composer. That could just be making sure the notes, there were spotting notes where you break down the music that’s in the film and here’s how many minutes we need to do per day to get to the goal when the deadline comes and the picture is changing constantly and we’re getting new turnovers of the picture. Beyond that, the music editor is also often hired to do the temp score, which is before the composer is hired, where we can essentially help the filmmakers find the tone and sounds they want and kind of shape the storytelling.
So let’s talk about the composer now, Jon Batiste – this is a phenomenal score. Genius level work, the score keeps the pace and tone of the film… it was like the beating heart of the movie. Talk a little bit about working with him…
It was interesting, I was brought on early but I wasn’t on set in Atlanta. I was working in LA. I got files delivered to me that were labeled “Score Record”. I click on it and it’s like 10, or 11 tracks that all say “Score Record’. I started listening to ’em. I’m like, I have no idea what this is. It’s all these random percussion tracks that were interesting, but I didn’t know what the context was. Nobody had communicated to me what they were.
He recorded in a very unique way…
Jon was improvising a lot of this with his musicians. It’s very inherent as everything was orally passed along where you play and hear things rather than have written down music and it’s all done by mouth and in your ears. It was really interesting to sit through and process. That became what Jason wanted to use and there’s this raw edge to it that makes it super unique.
That sounds fascinating, how did you break it down?
I said give me a few days. I just went through these 20 odd tracks, 20, 30 tracks, and I built these sample packs. They mic’d everything individually, but it was all in one big room, so there was bleed between all the mics. We didn’t have control over just soloing this one thing because you could hear everybody in the room. I went through and grabbed all those sections found the most usable material and made it so we could play them looped.
How much was already conceived for certain scenes? Or did you have to adapt it?
When we had shaped it out to what music Jason liked across the film, we went back to Sony with Jon, and we screened the film with him. Jon watched the film and saw his stuff cut to picture for the first time. Then we went into the scoring stage and recorded all the piano. There were two or three sessions we did where it was the first two were all piano.
Jon would just come up with something on the spot. The recall he had, after watching the picture and seeing a lot of these scenes for the first time was outstanding. He would remember all these sync points where things would happen, and he was just playing on top of these tracks and he would just accent in all the right places.
The score is very anxious, it’s definitely a technique that works in the movie. Were they telling you to amp it up more or what sort of notes would you get with the pacing?
The sound and the music needed to drive and it very much is the ticking clock. It was the villain of our film and it needed to feel relentless and just drive us forward, edit-wise, story-wise script-wise, it just read that way on the page. So it felt very inherent.
After the first preview screening, we ended up actually dialing some of it back, especially at the beginning of the film because we realized the movie takes off a rocket and it just shoots out and it kind of expects the audience to just jump on board, hang on, and enjoy the ride.
What was the origin of the ticking clock? Was that something that you added or something that was delivered to you? How did that come about?
The clocks obviously became a thing visually and audio-wise as well. Multiple things are happening. Anytime you see a clock, there’s ticking. You may not always notice it consciously, but it’s there in the soundtrack just giving you tension. Then in the music, obviously there’s this constant pulse and specifically this clave thing that Jon did that we just gravitated towards. It was this minimal thing that, and it’s a thin pointed sound, felt weirdly ominous in a really good way.
It was very effective. I really feel like I experienced Saturday Night. What is it like being on the other side of this?
What I love about the film is that it feels oddly unique. I feel like the script, the performances, the way it was shot (on film), the way it was edited, the way the score was done, and the way it all came together doesn’t feel like any movie I ever worked on, let alone, let alone seen. I think it’s just a really fun ride. Jason describes it as a comedy thriller…
Saturday Night is now available to buy or rent and in theaters.
