Only Murders in the Building reached some new heights in the recently wrapped fourth season. One episode, in particular, that really shook things up was “Blow-Up.” It’s an episode largely told from the point-of-view of The Brothers Sisters, two experimental filmmakers. They show the star trio in a whole new light, and so does editor Matthew Barbato.
The editor worked on season one and returned for the latest chapter. In addition to the wonderful Hulu series, he’s worked on The Good Place, Veep, and Lessons in Chemistry. Barbato recently spoke with Immersive Media about his work on “Blow-Up” as well as season four’s penultimate episode.
“Blow-Up,” that episode’s fantastic. Congratulations on your work there.
Thank you.
You had questions and prep for that episode. What were some of those questions, and what were some of the answers you got that helped you along the way?
The questions I had were… one of the things was when you’re going to do an episode like that, the first thing that comes to mind as an editor is, “I’m going to have different coverage to work with.” I’m not going to have the typical wide shot, single shots, which is a very big tool that we have in comedy, particularly to adjust the pace of a scene or the performances. A lot of these, in the documentary, appear to be single shots, and it’s almost like you’re watching a play. My first question was, “What kind of coverage are we looking at? What ability would I have to manipulate it and change it so that I could get the best performance and the best pacing out of it?”
I also wondered how we were going to transition from scene to scene because typically, with a regularly scripted show, that’s designed — there’s a reason for it — or the scene just comes to an end, and you cut to the next thing. But because I wanted it to seem like a found footage documentary, I just wondered what the transitions were going to be. In fact, that was one of the biggest things we had to look at.
Ultimately, based on how I wanted to approach the episode, we ended up with the simplest possible transitions I could think of, which was a cut to black for a second and then come back. This made it feel like really authentic found footage to me. We discussed at certain points in the edit whether there’d be title cards. A big question on this episode was how much extra information the audience was going to need because we were throwing such a curveball at them, telling an Only Murders in the Building episode and story where we needed to hit the comedy, the investigation, and the character moments. But we were telling it through this lens of some characters we barely even know. All we really know about them is that they’re a little weird and maybe very deadly and suspicious.
My initial desire was to keep it as raw as possible. I have a very indie instinct, and I like to challenge an audience. I don’t like to spoon-feed them or hold their hands. I believe people will get it in the end. From where I started, we added some markers to help and some subtle information to give just enough for the wider audience to understand what was happening.
But my theory was always that once you start telling the story and pointing any camera — whether it’s a security camera, Howard’s camera, or a doggy cam — at our characters who are experiencing the story, the audience is going to be invested in the story, not necessarily in the way it was captured. That was my hope, and I think that worked out pretty well.
Like you also said, you ended up with a more simple solution of, “Let’s just cut to black.” Do you often find that sometimes the simplest option is the best?
Yeah. A lot of times, the transition is an opportunity to add to the story, to include some vital information, and then you have to think about novel ways to handle that. In this case, what we were striving to do was to let it play in a way that every fan and audience member of Only Murders in the Building could experience the episode as they always would, but with The Brothers Sisters style infused onto that. We wanted to add another layer without disrupting a typical Only Murders episode.
There was an opportunity for us to go crazy with transitions and do something weird. My concern with that was that unless you really get lucky, it ends up feeling like pretension for pretension’s sake. I have a real phobia of coming off as if we’re being pretentious on behalf of these characters, because unless you do it right, it just seems tedious. So we talked about some other options, but in the end, I was very happy we went with the simple solution.
How is editing a Ron Howard performance?
It’s so funny. We were really lucky to get Ron Howard. I was like, “Oh gosh, what am I going to do? Can I do this?” I would love to edit a Ron Howard movie. I wanted to make sure I did him justice so he wouldn’t be like, “Who edited this performance?” It was really fun. He was really game. I think this has been written about elsewhere, but he was only supposed to come on for a few hours.
They were really strategizing how to make the most of the time they had with him. I don’t know if it was right before they shot with him or after, but he said, “No, no, no, you’re going to need more time.” He looked at the schedule, his lines, and what needed to be done. He realized the crew was trying their hardest to get him out quickly, but he saw it required time.
So he said, “Wait a second, you’re going to need more than a day. I’ll give you two days.” He went out of his way to make sure there was enough time to really do it, which was very sweet. And he’s Ron Howard, what are you going to do? He’s just that nice, and he really delivered.
Very good penultimate episode [“Double Time”]. Even when the clock is ticking, there are still these great character moments that breathe. How do you do that? Keep momentum going while deepening the characters?
That’s a really good question because in episode 409, which I co-edited with Jack Cunningham, my longtime assistant who’s now an editor in his own right, he did a really good job on it. That was an interesting episode because, for a while, as I was cutting it, we were thinking of it as the penultimate episode. It was about the investigation leading to a climactic reveal. I kept getting scenes with Charles and Oliver that slowed everything down, going against my initial thought for the episode, which was to build energy. We kept having quiet moments. They’re great, but how do we keep this momentum up so that the climax and reveal are impactful?
After a while, I realized, “Oh, this is an episode about Charles and Oliver.” The investigation is almost the B-story, oddly not the main focus. Once I figured that out and embraced it, I changed things to focus on the emotional part of that story. I went back to include more of Charles’ annoyance with Oliver’s selfishness about his bachelor party, so those scenes ended in frustration rather than comedy. This setup allowed us to understand Charles’s mindset and why he explodes at him publicly.
As we ramped up from the restaurant scene with Ron Howard, where they pepper him with questions, there were so many jokes. But we tried to build tension into the reveal, and cross-cutting and montages became crucial. We pulled out most of the comedy from the last third of the episode, focusing on details in a subtle way. So when Oliver and Charles see the picture, it’s a little subtle, and we had to focus just on that moment. That was a big thing to figure out in that episode.
