Cory Stillman
Drew Hancock‘s Companion (reviewed here by Joey, who spoke to Hancock here) is a thrilling and hilarious riff on our contemporary anxieties around AI, but for editors Brett W. Bachman, ACE and Josh Ethier, ACE, it was essential to never reduce Iris – the robotic companion whose fate grows increasingly uncertain over the course of Companion‘s runtime – into a talking point.
“We always thought of Iris as a three-dimensional character and treated her as human, even though she wasn’t,” says Bachman. “The character has desires that are gradually overcome by a deeper, inner need. It’s a traditional character arc. The robotic components are merely external elements.”
Indeed, Companion effectively resonates with our AI-embattled era, but its true success lies in its careful treatment of its characters, not to mention its playful sense of misdirection. Hancock’s script is full of surprises, and early test screenings of the film proved crucial in ensuring these surprises landed for audiences.
“The most important part of this for me is always being in the room with a stranger when it plays,” says Ethier. “It really puts you on high alert and instead of watching the film, you’re cataloguing the energy of the audience. Making sure no one gets too far ahead of (or behind) the film is so important for a movie like Companion that relies on an engaging mystery but also on big laughs and genre moments.”
Those genre moments prove similarly invaluable to Companion‘s final cut, which flirts with elements of rom-com and heist films but also doubles down on a grisly degree of gore. Of course, Bachman and Ethier were uniquely suited for such tonal shifts. The former even cut Josh Ruben’s Heart Eyes, which also released to much fanfare earlier this year and similarly fuses the horror and rom-com genres into one. Across both films, Bachman kept returning to that aforementioned cornerstone of storytelling: character.
“If the audience is connecting with your characters, the tonal pivots are easier to pull off because the actors are leading the charge — they are the main emotional conduit for the audience,” Bachman says.
Fortunately, Companion features a stellar cast of rising young stars, including Sophie Thatcher as Iris, and Jack Quaid as her not-so-nice boyfriend Josh. As far as emotional conduits go, both Thatcher and Quaid ensure that the film remains emotionally grounded and immersive.
“For a cast as young as they were, they all gave us so many great options in the edit,” says Ethier.
Check out my full conversation with Brett and Josh below. We discuss what it was like to collaborate with Drew Hancock on his directorial debut, how they managed to maintain the film’s element of surprise, and which scenes continue to stand out to them both today. Brett even dives deeper into the similarities and differences between Companion and Heart Eyes!
Hey Brett and Josh! Companion marks Drew Hancock’s directorial debut. What was it like collaborating with him as a first-time director?
Brett W. Bachman, ACE: Although it’s his first feature, Drew comes from a long history of screenwriting. He wrote a wonderful script with layered and complex characters, and he was passionate about exploring their nuances in the edit to bring them extra emotional depth.
He possessed an ideal work ethic, in that he had a strong vision that inspired the cast and crew, but he is also extremely open to collaborating and seeing new possibilities if they add something complimentary. Sometimes you get new directors who exist outside that spectrum – either they don’t really know what they want, or they have a locked-in perspective and can’t be open to new ideas. This wasn’t the case with Drew at all. There was a very healthy sense of trial and error in the editing room, we were allowed to experiment and take risks–to present bold ideas.
Josh Ethier, ACE: Like Brett said, because of his writing background, Drew wasn’t entirely new to the process. By the time I joined Drew in the editing room, it never even occurred to me that he was a first-time director. He was incredibly prepared and fluent in editorial language. He knows when to step away and let the editor work through some footage by themselves but he also knows when to sit down and dig in with you. Even on late nights and weekends, he was a joy to work with and a perfect match for my own sensibilities in the cutting room. It was always light, creative, and fun. We all looked forward to sitting down together in the morning and cracking open a scene over a cup of coffee. It was an ideal atmosphere for an edit and a lot of that is thanks to Drew’s confidence in his writing and direction, and also his receptiveness to the process.
Josh – I understand you came to the project partway through the editing process, with Brett taking a brief paternal leave. How did you balance your own editorial instincts with the established tone of the film?
JE: When I came onto the project Brett was about five weeks into the director’s cut with Drew, so they’d already made some incredible strides in discovering the voice of the film. Even the cut I watched about two weeks before starting was very different from the cut I eventually took over. The edit was entering that discovery phase between “This is the script” and “This is the film”. It was actually a perfect time to bring a new editor into the fold because this is exactly the point in the process you want to start stress testing things that are working, but also try approaching some sequences in a totally different way. We marked a number of sequences with post-its on the wall, “This is working but it could use a fresh set of eyes.” As we came to them, I’d try something different with the footage. Sometimes that meant bringing lines back, other times it meant trimming lines. More often than not it also included a fresh take on temp score. Everything was open to interpretation.
Although Brett and I were never cutting concurrently, I feel like the finished film is almost a conversation between the two of us. Whenever I thought to myself, “This shot could stand to hold a little bit longer”, I’d drag it out to find out exactly why Brett cut where he did. At totally different parts of the process we’d both come to the same conclusion about the footage. It was our long distance version of Walter Murch’s, “Try and land the moviola on the same frame twice in row.” I think the best compliment we’ve received on the film is that no one can tell which cuts are Brett’s and which cuts are mine. I think that’s because we both went to great lengths to always let the film speak for itself through us.
Brett – you also edited another popular horror release this year in Josh Ruben’s Heart Eyes. With both films fusing elements of rom-com and horror, did you find yourself relying on any particular strategies or skills across both projects?
BWB: Drew and Josh Ruben shared one big factor in their approaches to each of Companion and Heart Eyes: the characters needed to be grounded and their plights played for real. We didn’t want the films to feel too self-aware. The dramatic component of these films had to work before anything else, and that meant dialing in these couples stories and interactions; making sure that we mined the material for the best possible performances, the most natural chemistry – basically making sure our audience members were sincerely connecting with them. In Companion, our entire foundation is Iris and Josh, and in Heart Eyes, it’s the budding courtship between Ally and Jay.
If the audience is connecting with your characters, the tonal pivots are easier to pull off because the actors are leading the charge — they are the main emotional conduit for the audience.
Once we have that foundation, we have the power to nudge the direction of the tone. We do this primarily through sound and music. The score and needle drops can follow the emotion of the scene with a complimentary tone, or vice versa, you can counter it with an opposing tone. In Companion, we’d often utilize needle drops to counter a scene that has darker, most sinister components with a piece of music that’s sweet or gentle. There’s a point towards the end of the second act where a major character gets abruptly killed, and instead of utilizing sinister or dark music to accompany the beat, we drop in “This Guy’s In Love With You” by Herb Alpert, a gentle love song. We felt that it offset the darkness, and kept the tone of the film more buoyant, more fun. We do it again by reprising an Iris love theme from the score in the tense third act finale.
In Heart Eyes, the tonal pivots occur more frequently, and they’re often really funny. We had to be really careful not to force them too hard, or else we break the verisimilitude and venture into parody, which is something we didn’t want to do. Like I said earlier, we don’t want it to be too self-aware. The film is very playful and embraces common tropes in rom-com and slasher genres. Much of the charm of the movie is derived from that juxtaposition, like going from a really tender conversation on Ally’s bed, to discovering the Heart Eyes Killer in her closet 10 seconds later, and we’re in a brutal life-or-death fight scene.
There’s a lot of trial and error to get it right. Sometimes a few decibels in a piece of music or sound effect is all that stands between a moment feeling contrived or too winking, versus it feeling complementary and effective. Horror and comedy both exist on that razor’s edge, and it’s tough to really find that very specific rhythm and tone. Josh and Drew both come from comic backgrounds, and they have terrific instincts of when to push, versus when to pull back.
The important thing about these tonal switches is that you cannot force them. They have to be a natural extension and interplay with all of the other factors in the movie; the color palette, the photography, the dialogue, and the rhythm of a scene. That means you really have to calibrate what feels right in the edit—the right read from an actor, the right pace, the right piece of music (or lack thereof). In summary, it’s all about crafting something you can emotionally respond to, and that largely boils down to “do I believe this? Does it draw me in?”
Companion offers several shocking twists throughout its runtime. How did you work to maintain the element of surprise with each twist and turn?
BWB: The challenge is to stay just a little bit ahead of the audience, which can be difficult! Audiences are never passive, they’re constantly doing arithmetic while watching and guessing what is going to happen next. It helps to keep the film moving at a brisk pace so you’re constantly developing the plot and characters. In Companion, we used to have several more clues to Iris’ true identity in the first act, and we ended up losing them as we thought they were too leading, like having her body twitch on a walk outside when Josh activates a setting from an app on his phone from within the house.
JE: Several weeks after I’d started on the film, we entered the testing phase. First, with a recruited screening on the Warner Brothers lot, and then finally at a 300-person theater at the AMC Burbank 16. The most important part of this for me is always being in the room with a stranger when it plays. It really puts you on high alert and instead of watching the film, you’re cataloguing the energy of the audience. Making sure no one gets too far ahead of (or behind) the film is so important for a movie like Companion that relies on an engaging mystery but also on big laughs and genre moments. Sometimes we can let them step on each other a bit as we do in Companion a couple of times. A funny line can be punctuated by a quick flash of violence to great effect. Other times you’re building a feeling of dread and you want to make sure it’s right at the perfect point of anticipation before it tips over into boredom. With the amount of work that Brett and I have in the genre space, we’re thankfully perfectly suited to this kind of fine tuning.
BWB: There’s a big twist later on in the second act that I think is really effective because of the scene’s rhythm. We give the audience a little clue to a pretty big secret, and then we rapidly fly through fifteen seconds of dialogue–we don’t give the audience a chance to really ponder the implications of the clue, and then after a flurry of quick cuts, we drop a pretty big twist that floors most of the audience. These fast cuts, this little editorial chaos, adds to this momentary confusion before we drop the big reveal, and I think it’s pretty instrumental to making the twist work as well as it does.
The film also features an exciting young cast of stars, including Jack Quaid, Sophie Thatcher, and Lukas Gage. How do you evaluate talent in the editing booth, and did a specific performance or scene in Companion stand out to you?
BWB: The film really rests on the shoulders of Sophie and Jack. There is nothing objective in the way we evaluate performances. Editors are actors’ secret partners. They never really meet us, besides at ADR or a fleeting moment at the premiere, but our primary job is to curate days, weeks, or months of their work. We learn their tics, their tactics, and if they’re delivering on take one or take five. I think if you talked to a group of editors, 95% of them would say they obsess over actors’ performances more than any other criteria in the film – and it’s entirely subjective. What works for Editor A may not work very well for Editor B. Evaluating performances is entirely personal, and largely instinctive.
While watching dailies from set, I try to be very aware of my initial gut reactions and trust those emotional impulses. I don’t necessarily try to articulate why take two might be better for me than take three, but I take notes and prepare a selects reel of my favorite bits. I’ll prepare a first edit and see if these moments result in a moving, compelling scene. If it doesn’t, I often go back to my dailies and try again. Once the director gets into the room, we’ll often do another round of swaps to make sure that the performances are working for them too. It’s a melding of what both editor and director respond to.
JE: For a cast as young as they were, they all gave us so many great options in the edit. There’s lots of standout moments that still get me, even having worked on the film. Sophie’s earnest, “I’m not real, but I’m still yours.” The vulnerable way that Harvey [Guillén] drops to his knees and says to Lukas, “You know I would never treat you like that.” Every character has a perfect moment to shine in the script and the cast really seized upon them as performers. Megan Suri may have had the most difficult scene in the movie, sharing a glass of wine with Sophie right before the big reveal. I love the way she handled it, deftly dancing around the elephant in the room. Jack Quaid’s Josh getting dumped is one of my favorite moments in the film. I love to watch that scene with an audience, he really ate it up.
BWB: The entire cast really brought their A-game. Harvey was a constant sense of buoyancy and just lifted the comedic tone of every scene he was in. Lukas brought this quiet tenderness and his arc sneaks up on so many people. It was wonderful to watch Megan bring Kat to life as a natural foil to Josh’s fragile ego; she wonderfully undercuts him and calls out his BS. However, Jack and Sophie – I mean, they’re the beating heart of the movie. As an editor, there are few things better than working with leads that are technically precise, AND gifted. They both possess something special that transcends training. I love the breakup scene between the two of them that occurs around 30 minutes into the film. Sophie’s character undergoes a startling revelation, and it’s wonderful to watch her attempt to understand it – for me, it’s where I fully begin to empathize with Iris. Meanwhile, I love that I get to see how this interaction frustrates but also saddens Josh. I wanted the audience to pity him just a little bit before he becomes even more villainous.
AI is such a hot-button issue, but Companion manages to broach the topic with levity and nuance. How would you describe the role that AI and robotics play in the film?
BWB: Honestly, we barely discussed it. We always thought of Iris as a three-dimensional character and treated her as human, even though she wasn’t. The character has desires that are gradually overcome by a deeper, inner need. It’s a traditional character arc. The robotic components are merely external elements. It’s an emancipation story of one character discovering their inner worth and extraditing themselves out of a toxic relationship.
JE: Exactly. Iris was always Iris, she was never just an object. The script does a great job of showing characters that live in a world that’s more reliant on artificial intelligence and robotics without expressly saying whether it’s all good or bad, which leaves room for the audience to fill in the blanks with their own lived experience. Ultimately that’s why I think the film struck a chord with viewers. After screenings you’d hear folks asking their friends, “So what if YOU had a Companion?” The best films always seek to ask questions, not necessarily to answer them.
Companion regularly alternates between humor and horror. How would you define the film’s genre trappings, and how did you balance those different elements in the edit?
BWB: It’s odd, but in most genre pictures I work on, it’s rare for someone in the editing room to ask, “is it scary enough?” Or vice versa, “is it funny enough?” We focus on the core components; are you connecting with the characters? How is the pace? What is boring, what is confusing? A film will be much scarier if you have empathy for the characters in their plight, as a film will be funnier if you are rooting for the characters to hit their objective.
Comedy and horror are very closely tied. It’s tension and relief. Pacing, rhythm. Tone dictates whether it’s scary or funny. Like I said before, you can’t force it.
JE: It can be limiting to say, “Here’s a horror skill set that I can deploy when need be”, or vice-versa with comedy. The important thing is to learn the language of the film you’re editing and speak it accordingly. It’s not about balancing between two things, it’s about understanding one thing. The sequence with Iris and Sergei on the beach is tonally different from a large part of the rest of the film up until that point, but that’s because there were different goals in mind for the story and different stakes at hand for the characters. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in the language of Companion, because it very closely mirrors where Iris and Josh wind up at the end of the film. You focus on the scene in front of you and its needs, and then you work outward towards the bigger picture.
BWB: There is a saying all editors have heard, “the film will tell you what it wants to be.” I think it’s important for editors to listen to the material, and instead of trying to force it into a specific container, allow the film to find its true voice, its own unique tone and rhythm. Finding that balance is different for every single film, but it all goes back to empathy and building a film through well-written, well-performed characters. I’ve seen horror films that weren’t really scary, but I still love them because of their dramatic chops. I think it’s a little bit of self-sabotage if you are only setting out to make a funny or scary movie, and not be more concerned about what kind of story you are trying to tell.
JE: Brett and I have been lucky to work on some very unique projects in our time in the business. We’ve worked on films that are heavy on scares, laughs, action, character, you name it. Honing your chops allows you to be more confident when you take bigger swings at a piece of material. Companion was a perfect opportunity for the two of us to combine our editorial experience and deliver something memorable for an audience.
You have each established yourselves as stalwarts of the horror genre. Are there any other genres in which you would like to work, or filmmakers with whom you would like to collaborate?
BWB: I’ve been really fortunate to work in a lot of different genres. I’ve done comedy, action, dramas, documentaries, and tons of horror and its subgenres (haunted house, slasher, cosmic, whatever Mandy is, plus many more.) I’d love to keep trying new things and not get too comfortable in one place. I’d love to try my hand at a bigger budget action film one day—that could be really fun. I love mystery movies.
Yet, it’s really all about working with great people on a great script. I had a wonderful time doing Pig, and would be eager to do another drama outside of the genre space. I’ve been really fortunate to have worked with some incredible directors and producers, and I hope to reteam with those folks in the years to come.
JE: On one hand, I’m looking forward to continuing to work with directors like my friend and producing partner Joe Begos who make loud, bombastic, unapologetically genre films. I’d also love to work with more directors like Henry Dunham (for whom I edited The Standoff at Sparrow Creek) who want to make quieter, heavier, more atmospheric films. More important than genre is the script and the director. I think either of us would be happy to cut a big studio romantic comedy as long as we connected with the script and the director. I wake up every day excited that I get to make films for a living, and I’m happy to continue down that path for as long as I can.
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