When Andrew Bird walks into the editing room, he’s used to collaborating with the director and pitching ideas to him. But in the case of “The Sacred Fig Seed,” the film that officially nominated Germany for the Academy Award for Best International Picture, he had to learn to trust his instincts.
That’s because the Iranian thriller, which follows a family unit torn apart after a father accepts a controversial job as an investigative judge handing down death sentences, had to be shot entirely in secret by director Mohammad Rasoulof. Bird edited Rasouloff’s 2013 film Manuscripts Don’t Burn, another politically charged film about Iranian censorship.
“Part of my job as an editor, when I’m working closely with a director, is to always question everything,” Bird says. diverse. “I don’t really accept anything. But to do it on your own is a bit of a different process.”
Not only were Bird and Rasouloff physically present in the same room together during filming or post-production, but Bird received footage infrequently. “I basically uploaded when the shots were strong enough, or when they were in a safe enough place. So I didn’t really know what was coming.
Since Bird does not know Persian, the language used in the film, Rasouloff admits that even he “wondered how he (Bird) was going to get by with just a script and dialogue cut out in a language he didn’t understand.”
But as an editor with credits on several international films, Bird is accustomed to working on projects that are not his native language. The focus becomes “judging an actor’s performance without knowing what he is actually saying.” Thanks to the original script that Rasulov provided to him before filming began, he was able to grasp the overall idea.
Some of the most challenging moments Rasulov faced as a director were the interactions between family members in their apartment. With Rasulov having to direct most of the film remotely, “it was very frustrating for me to be remote because we really had to maintain the structure of the whole family and all the subtleties of their relationship.”
Bird also described these scenes as difficult. One particular scene, in which the family argues over student protests at the dinner table, kept Byrd awake for several nights.
“Mohammed was very keen to see this scene ahead of time and I wasn’t in a place where I was ready to show it to anyone,” Bird describes. “When I finally showed it to him, he said he was happy with it, but he also said he would have done it differently… The whole time I was editing, the question was always in my mind: ‘Am I too?’ Editing this in a very European style ?
In fact, uncertainty about this scene remained with Bird “until the point where we saw the film in Cannes with 1,500 people in the theater. I could really feel in the room how that scene really worked with the audience, how moving it was, and people applauded. And that finally put This ghost is in place.
Another important consideration to the editing process is the social media footage intercut throughout the film, showing the protests that the two girls, Ridvan (Masha Rostami) and Sanaa (Setareh Maleki), are secretly watching on their phones away from their more conservative parents. .
Early on when writing the script, Rasouloff knew that he wanted to incorporate shots that had been “circulated a lot, so that it immediately takes[the audience]into this historical moment… There was some flexibility about exactly where I was going to use it, but it was also a thematic approach.
Byrd was sent about 400 clips of cell phone footage from real Iranian protests and was free to use them wherever he wanted. “It was a big challenge because with so many of them, I didn’t really know what was going on,” he explains. “I tried to use footage that would be readable to a Western audience and not just a local audience in Iran.
While Bird wonders what the outcome would have been if he had been Rasouloff and they had been able to work more closely together, he is still proud of what “The Sacred Fig Seed” has become.
“Like everyone else in the film business, I went into this whole thing with the naive belief that through film and art, you could make a difference in the world,” Beard recalls. “Over the years, you become more pessimistic with that belief. But then you get a chance to work on a film like this and you see that maybe it’s somewhat possible.”
“The Sacred Fig Seed” is now showing in theaters.