“One Battle After Another” is a film littered with great moments, from the captivating prologue that Teyana Taylor dominates to the poignant “American Girl” needle drop that closes the epic out. But there’s one sequence the film that critics and audiences have singled out as a standout: the stomach-churning, incredibly suspenseful road chase along a winding desert highway path that serves as the film’s tense climax.
“The road, man,” Luke Lynch, editor of “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions,” told “One Battle” editor Andy Jurgensen during IndieWire’s Editors craft roundtables. “I mean, it’s just a road, but it’s playing with lenses and movement and timing and the suspense that you’re building.”
Jurgensen and Lynch spoke about their respective films at IndieWire’s Editing Craft Roundtable, hosted by IndieWire features writer Jim Hemphill. Also in attendance were the editors behind “Hamnet,” “Dead Man’s Wire,” “A House of Dynamite,” and “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” who spoke about the challenges and accomplishments of assembling their films.
Speaking on his work behind the car chase sequence, Jurgensen said that the sequence was difficult to cut down. To get it to the right length, he relied a lot on the sound department’s input to figure out the right rhythm for the shots.
“You know, there’s a lot of footage, we shot from all the different perspectives,” Jurgensen said during the roundtable. “I made selects, was just choosing the best things. It was really long for the longest time. Sending it to the sound department early helped a lot, because we could kind of give each of the cars their own sound, as their own character. So even though it was really long, then I could just take that really long sequence and chop it up and still use their stems to kind of still have that same feeling, the layering on that sort of orchestra sound going up and down over some of the different hill sounds. So it was just fine-tuning till the very last day of the mix.”
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