Having finally gotten to sit down with the other panel on my Comic-Con@Home schedule today, I wanted to pass along a great bit from Charlize Theron discussing action editing.
I don’t know historically, but I think that there was a real attempt to do a first which was a spliced-together take which really played as one, which meant that logistically we had to shoot seven to ten minutes of action continuously, and I know that sounds like nothing but as a performer that means that you have to get everything right in seven to ten minutes, and that is an incredibly difficult thing to do, especially for actors. For myself, I’m not a martial arts fighter, I’ve never trained in martial arts, but it’s possible [plausible?], and that’s what’s so incredible. And I was really proud of the action we accomplished in Atomic Blonde. It felt to me like we were pushing the envelope. […] What’s great is that there is no one way, but that we are definitely pushing it. You know, you look at a film like Fury Road, and there’s definitely more edits in that film. George Miller’s style in shooting his action is fast-paced, but it’s done in a way that doesn’t feel like a cheat. I think editorially we’ve always cheated action, and when you don’t cheat it people really know, they can feel it, and that authenticity has really I think been celebrated in the last decade.