Patrick Z. McGavin
French-American photo editor Celia Beasley is a rebel who likes to break the mold.
The Oakland native wasted no time in cutting all eight episodes of her Netflix show “Penelope,” making her first foray into television.
Created by Mark Duplass and director Mel Essling, the show is an impressionistic depiction of a 16-year-old girl (Megan Stout) who escapes civilization to explore the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.
Beasley sat down with CineMontage to talk about the transition from film to series, what it’s like to edit without formal training, and the great outdoors as a character.
CineMontage: What attracted you to this project?
Celia Beasley: I’ve known Mel Eslyn for about 15 years. She and I come from the same Seattle independent film community, working with Lynn Shelton and Megan Griffith. “Penelope” director of photography Nate Miller is also a member of the group. This is my third Duplass project. Mel and I had never worked together as directors and editors, but we were very familiar with each other’s work and I really felt like I knew her sensibilities from editing so many projects she’d produced.
When she first told me about the show, I already saw it in my mind because we have a lot of shared history. What she describes is unique and immersive, and sounds like a very interesting challenge for me as an editor to work on a project that doesn’t fall into genre, to be able to stretch myself creatively and try a lot Different tools, techniques and vocabulary.
CineMontage: How do you like working in this compressed half-hour format?
Beasley: I had never done a scripted TV show before. I’ve only done features, so it was really fun to delve into this different format. I like it. It was really fun to design an opening and an ending eight different times—how to set it up, how to pace it, how to end it, whether it was a cliffhanger or whether you were concluding something.
The show was shot like a feature film in one giant block, so I edited it as they shot it. This is an experimental show in many ways. Eight separate episodes allowed us to explore creatively in each episode without having to feel restricted because everything we did had to flow through the entire show.
CineMontage: How does the editing work with the scenery to create the inner rhythm of the protagonist?
BEASLEY: The landscape is essentially a character in the play. We really wanted to have this very immersive experience with Penelope. The entire show is her experience, inside her head. We are like a mouse on her shoulder, seeing things through her eyes. Although the wilderness is vast, her relationship with it is intimate. She has to pay attention to all the details because her life literally depends on them. For example, when she’s looking for berries, if she doesn’t pay attention to detail, she might pick the wrong berries and get poisoned.
So it’s really a very different relationship to nature than to a spectator. I love how Nate Miller and his camera department find these small moments of beauty—a caterpillar crawling onto a blade of grass, a dead leaf spinning from a spider’s web—and let the action unfold within the frame. This was important in creating an immersive experience, not only for our experience in the wilderness, but also for our experience with Penelope.
CineMontage: How does the editing reflect her shift in consciousness?
BEASLEY: For example, in the pilot, there’s a scene where she seems to be walking aimlessly through a grocery store. For a moment, she is fascinated by the camping equipment, and we shift from observing her to entering her head. This was all shot at high speed, so I used a speed ramp to get us into slow motion. Now, as she gathers supplies, we’re in her head. Then she pushed the shopping cart down the aisle, and as the cash register beeped, I bolted for the checkout. It was a way of bringing us back to reality, she was slapped and pulled out of the dream. Most of the time, I try to keep editing invisible. We don’t want people to see the seams. But this is a case of being a bit of a wink to the audience.
This is an example of the entire shift in experience that occurs throughout the show. Another example is when she woke up under a big tree in total darkness and tried to pitch her tent. We needed to feel her struggle to put this tent together, failing, trying and failing, so I used a lot of jump cuts and fast pacing to come back and emphasize her repetitive feel.
CineMontage: How beneficial was it to edit all eight episodes without interruption?
Beasley: That’s the way it feels a lot like a feature. It really allowed me to get involved in the process and feel the cohesion of the entire season, while also being able to really focus on what was happening in each episode. I know how it all ties together. We established these editing vocabularies early on, such as asynchronous dialogue or compressing time through jump cuts. The things we tried felt a little crazy at times, but the ones that stayed became part of our editorial vocabulary for the series. If you do something crazy once, it might disappoint people. If you do it three times, it starts to feel like part of the show.
CineMontage: How would you describe your approach to editing actors and performances?
Beasley: One of my filmmaking mentors said, “Acting is king.” It’s always where we start. You’re constantly asking, “What is the emotion that we want to get out of this moment? How do we do that with the tools and lenses that we have?”
When I was first assembling for Outside In, before I started working on my version, I asked Lynn Shelton if she wanted to see a scripted version of the scene. She said, “I don’t want to see anything that doesn’t feel real to you.” That guides a lot of what I do, and I just focus on whether it resonates. Of course, usually you end up putting things back and taking things out, but it always starts with a feeling where you can feel whether it’s working or not and everything else revolves around that.
CineMontage: Is there something special about your emotions and sense of beauty that makes you a natural fit for photo editing?
Beasley: I didn’t go to film school, so I didn’t have any formal training. When I arrived in Seattle, I was actually interested in photojournalism and video journalism. There is a non-profit media arts center with workshops, equipment rentals and screenings. I attended every seminar I could. I became a volunteer and that’s how I got to know my community and started working on various projects with people who became friends and collaborators. They’ll say, “I’m shooting a comic book movie this weekend and I need someone to provide costumes,” or “Can you do the sound for this documentary I’m doing?” I really do everything myself.
I started editing because I quickly realized that was where it all came together, or not. That’s where the power lies. I quickly discovered that this was an area where I could react very instinctively and I could be confident in my responses. You do need to have a very high emotional IQ to edit because you react to emotions. You react to people’s faces. Movies just use people’s faces and the sounds coming out of their mouths to tell stories, not even words. You have to be very, very attuned to that—the nuances in a sigh, the movement of your eyes, the tension in your jaw. This is really inspiring to me.
CineMontage: Would you liken the process to sculpting, a handcrafted feel to creating something by hand, even though it’s executed digitally?
Beasley: It’s funny you mention that because my dad is a sculptor. He was never involved in the idea of ”liberating” sculpture from the medium – he was more of a builder. I’m also more of a builder. I’m French, and in French the word for editing is “montage,” which is closer to the concept of building or assembling. I don’t like the word “edit” in English because it means we start with something complete and extract from it. But this is not extraction. It’s being built, assembled, like anything that starts with many parts.
When I explain editing to people who aren’t in the film industry, I say it’s like I got a big box of Legos and hoped to build a house. Maybe the architect’s drawings were for a three-story house, but that three-story wouldn’t be very sturdy with the parts I had, so I ended up building a two-story house, and A swimming pool. It will still be a house, but it will look a little different than the original plan. Some LEGO bricks won’t fit. Some of them were amazing, golden, beautiful LEGO pieces that I had never imagined. My job is to build a house that stays true to the core vision using the parts I have.
CineMontage: Do you believe in the theory that the author is not necessarily the director? Maybe an actor or an editor?
Beasley: I don’t know if people who have seen my work are going to say, “This is obviously a Celia Beasley cut.” I think my biggest influence on a project is the collaboration between me and the director. Two things I need to be a good editor are: clear vision and trust. I need to really understand the vision, but that doesn’t mean the director has all the answers. I will often ask questions during the editing process. It’s completely fair to ask questions. I really need to understand what they want to say and what they want to do.
Then there’s trust. Everything I do is in service to the film. I need to know that I’m in a safe place to put all of my creativity, my experience, my skills, all of that stuff toward their vision. I don’t always do exactly what they want, maybe I bring ideas that they don’t have.
I always become good friends with directors I’ve worked with, or we’re already good friends, because we end up developing this very close relationship. We spent a lot of time together and we shared a lot about ourselves. The relationship with the director was my favorite part of the whole process.
Patrick Z. McGavin is a Chicago writer and cultural journalist.
