From the beginning of his work on Saturday Night, filmmaker Jason Reitman knew that it would be “a very rock-and-roll movie” — a piece with “an insane pace to it,” that would be “a roller coaster from the get-go.”
The piece would be unusual, Reitman recalls, in the way it was written, structured, and shot. Comprising “choreographed chaos,” it needed “a singular voice that people could connect with as they were following 30 characters and 80 speaking roles.”
Related Stories
Helping to bring that quality to the film were editors Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid, the latter of whom tells Reitman on The Process: “I feel like this film was just asking for heightened emotion. It was asking for heightened tension, heightened comedy, heightened in a sort of grounded setting. And that’s what makes it such a fun and unique film.”
Written by Reitman and Gil Kenan, the Columbia Pictures title employs a blend of meticulously choreographed tracking shots and handheld camerawork to chronicle the frantic 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live, when everything that could go wrong did. For Reitman, the first key epiphany in post that defined how the film turned out came when the editors presented him with “the literal ticking time bomb that I didn’t know we needed”— a graphic of the time relentlessly ticking on that appears intermittently throughout.
When presented with that, Reitman recalls, “It just absolutely delighted me and I think kind of changed the pace of the movie right away. And it’s funny because when we’ve watched it with audiences, they laugh at it. It’s the craziest thing, but they laugh at the clock, and I don’t know why, but it works so well.”
For Orloff, these moments cutting back to the clock were a sort of momentary reprieve for the audience, who could start to “become numb” amid “chaos, on top of chaos, on top of chaos.” Every time the clock appeared, viewers could catch their breath. Because, as Orloff points out, “the chaos only works if you juxtapose it to absence.”
Beats focused on the clock also served to reorient viewers to where they were in the chronology of a story playing out in real time. Says Orloff, “Time is the villain” in the story, “but if you don’t know the time, you don’t know where you are, you don’t know the pressure. You just know that everyone’s acting crazy.”
Essentially, the editor notes, the concept of the clock “unlocked a structure that the script didn’t know it needed.”
Providing further instrumental guidance in keeping track of “the heartbeat of the film,” per Reitman, was the score from Jon Batiste, who appears in the film as SNL musical guest Billy Preston and improvised its music live on set, with score funneling back into editorial in a way that was unusual. Says Reitman: “Jon’s brilliant musicality and improvisational jazz nature changed the soul of the film as we were cutting it.”
“I think it helped us find the soul and it was such a gift because as you’re talking about listening to the film and what it needs, doing that with temp music is great, and every film you need to sort of do it, and then when the composer writes stuff later, hopefully it improves it even further,” Orloff reflects. “But to have our score as we’re recutting scenes and fine-tuning and putting it together was one of the greatest gifts to find that true north.”
“Yeah,” agreed Reid. “Because when you do temp score and then you do your final score, there’s another separation between the communication of everything. When you recorded all the music, not only did it capture the studio and the live feeling that was pulsing through all of [the film], but when we came in and [music editor] Chris [Newlin] broke it down for us and we were able to build, it rhythmically helped us build sequences. I don’t think sequences would’ve come together the same way [otherwise].”
Starring Gabriel LaBelle as SNL‘s creator and producer, Lorne Michaels, Saturday Night world premiered at Telluride and opened wide on October 11, which marked the 49th anniversary of Saturday Night Live‘s premiere. To watch as Reitman and his editors demystify the “black box” of the post process, click above. View clips from the film below.