Edition and surprise

The workshop dynamic at this stage was very specific: there was a meeting room where, as the pairs progressed with the editing, we could show a rough cut and discuss it with both Werner Herzog and our colleagues. Several friends from the workshop presented their cuts and great conversations would ensue, because hearing others' interpretations clears your head and forces you to make decisions. The opposite happened to us: we felt we were going to need every last second. We only had two days for editing, and the goal we had set for ourselves was enormous for that amount of time. The story was complex due to the number of locations and characters, and because the acting had to truly hold up. But there was also an even more difficult problem: the post-production narrative device. It wasn't just about “assembling scenes”; it