Broken Voices is set in a musical environment. How was that reflected in the editing?

Directors differ greatly in how much importance they attach to the audio and visual aspects. Some are very visually oriented, and sound is secondary for them, while Ondřej Provazník is the opposite. He likes music, plays clarinet, and the sound aspect of a film is very important to him. That’s why all the singing in the film was done live, without playback, to achieve maximum authenticity. During editing, Ondřej paid attention to subtleties of sound that other directors don’t even notice, and the result is breathtaking.

Do you prefer to edit with the director or on your own?

There are different stages of editing, and it depends whether the project is scripted or unscripted. During the most creative phase of a scripted project, I think most editors these days like to be in the cutting room alone. That’s when the shape or narrative of the film begins to emerge. We get the key, the direction, the overall concept from the director, then lock ourselves in the editing room with the material. In the digital age there’s a huge amount of material, so we need to completely immerse ourselves in it and not be distracted by communicating with someone else. Composing the first version of a film is an extremely complex mental process in which you evaluate many factors simultaneously, constantly weighing their importance, picking out bits of image and sound, putting them in context and giving them meaning. In addition, being absent at this stage gives the director a chance to get some distance from the material. The director then comments on the first cut, and we go on together from there. On an unscripted project, though, I work together with the director from the start.

What was the key to Broken Voices?

Telling the story from the point of view of the 13-year-old heroine—authentically capturing her intoxication with the beauty of the music she creates, and preserving the fragility of that perspective until almost the end. The film was shot in blocks, and I did the editing in parallel with the shooting. Once the first version was complete, Ondřej, who is a very precise writer, and I worked out everything in detail together. This was possible in part because Broken Voices was shot on 16mm, so there was much less material. For example, we worked a lot on how to make the relationship between Karolina and her sister Lucia even stronger, to show their rivalry and the dynamics. The biggest challenge, though, was figuring out the frame of the story.

Shooting a feature film on 16mm stock is pretty rare these days. What adjustments did you have to make in order to do so?

Mainly there was a much smaller amount of footage, so there was concern about whether there would be enough stock for the mass scenes with the nonactors playing the other girls. Twenty years ago, when we were editing exercises shot on 35mm at FAMU, the ratio of used material to filmed footage was at most 1:10. Now, for example, I’m working on a TV series called Ratolesti (Offspring), which the director Michal Blaško and the cameraman Adam Mach shoot carefully and very prudently, but the ratio is still around 1:30. And these days, a feature-length documentary film might have 800 hours of raw footage. Shooting on film is much more expensive and therefore more restrictive, but it has a positive effect too: on the set, during “action,” everyone subconsciously feels the money flowing through the camera, so they’re more focused and try to get the best out of themselves. You can feel it in the footage. Working digitally, everything is so much more relaxed. But it has other advantages. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work with both.

How has digital technology directly impacted your profession?

Editing is the only truly cinematic profession: unlike acting or cinematography, it has no equivalent outside of film. I also feel like it’s the most versatile profession—a synergy of image, sound, music; working with emotions, time and space, narrative, rhythm and pace. The fact that almost no one shoots on film anymore, and the fact that editing is done on a computer, has brought changes both good and bad. It’s cheaper to shoot, and digital means great freedom and democratization. But many of today’s cinematographers regret they’re no longer the real creators of the shot—instead of breaking a sequence into several shots, the scene is “sprinkled” with, say, thirty shots from eight angles. The focus of creation, the emergence of a film’s content, has moved even more to the editing room.

I have a strong sense the major professions would like to work together more closely. As it is, the director is the only crew member who goes through the entire process, the different phases are isolated, and people need more creative connection—for editors to be involved during preproduction, for cinematographers to be able to select material in the editing room, for editors to be able to convey their ideas to sound postproduction. It’s a question of money, obviously, and the producer’s attitude.

You edit feature films, documentaries and television projects. Is there a big difference?

The Czech verb stříhat— “to cut,” meaning “to edit”—is misleading, since it suggests that we’re removing something. Yet editing is composition, synthesis, montage. The main differences between the projects are, first, the amount of material and then how clear the director’s intention is. With documentaries, the intention can change, sometimes even the subject. This happened on I, Actor, a documentary I recently completed with Martin Ryšavý. His original plan was to make a film about the 50th season of a regional theater, but over the course of rehearsals for the play, I, Feuerbach, there was such a strong generational and existential drama between the actors that he just let the camera roll and watched in fascination to see what would happen next. It was completely unplanned. In scripted dramas, the theme usually remains unchanged, and the editor’s job is to develop and deepen the director’s intention. This creative variety is one of the things I really enjoy about my work.

Martin Scorsese supposedly has classic Hollywood films running in the background when he’s in the editing room to get a feel for their rhythm. Some editors play reference music while they work. Do you do anything like that?

I don’t use reference music, but I do try to feel the rhythm of the footage—the gestures of the actors, the cadence of their speech, the movements of the camera. I also like to watch a film from a different place in the editing room than from the computer. I don’t do anything special apart from that. I guess my method is just to play the whole film or longer sequences as few times as possible. The key is not to lose your distance, or else you can’t tell anymore what works and what doesn’t. So, I try to work in segments and to keep at least some of the viewer’s perspective until the editing is done.