Star Wars- The Last Jedi The Rough Cut

Recorded live in front of a "studio audience" at the National Association of Broadcaster's convention, editor Bob Ducsay (The Mummy, Looper, Knives Out) discusses his work on director Rian Johnson's entry into the Skywalker saga, Episode VIII - The Last Jedi.
Bob details the pre-viz process from the 'Battle on Crait' scene, as well as how post-viz was a powerful weapon in his editorial arsenal. Bob also walks the audience through the "Snoke's Throne Room" scene and describes how an editor utilizes "suspense" versus "surprise". He also describes working with the pre-existing template of the Star Wars universe and modifying it both visually and sonically to create something new and different within the trilogy.
Bob's work on his new film, Knives Out, has been nominated for a 2020 ACE Eddie Award in the category of Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy).
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TRANSCRIPT>>
Matt Feury
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage editor Bob Ducsay.
Bob Ducsay
Matt! Nice to be here with you.
Matt Feury
Okay, so that was a little intense. Reflections? Thoughts? What do you remember most about cutting that sequence there?
Bob Ducsay
It looks exhausting to do.
Matt Feury
It felt exhausting.
Bob Ducsay
I know. But interestingly enough, this particular sequence had challenges that you wouldn't necessarily guess because a lot of the great complexities of the sequence were worked out in prep and in early post production. In this particular case, in early post production. This sequence was pre-visualized, which is sort of a low resolution cartoon that's made of the sequence. But what happens in a sequence like that is you have this template that you start with, but then you start to make all of the changes in the sequence as the photography comes in, and this sequence was no different in that way. And one of the big challenges of a sequence like this is because it's so visual effects intensive. In my editorial job, I'm heavily involved with the visual effects, and mapping all that out, and how all of those things interact, and all of the timings, even though some of those things will have been worked out, you know, as a template and a starting point in the pre-vis, there's an enormous amount more work that has to happen. So this sequence is really a lot about the complexity of the visual effects. But you get all of these extra things when you're shooting. And so the sequence changes and evolves over time. And another thing about the sequence is, this isn't the whole Battle of Crait. This isn't just a clip from it. But even what's in the final movie was considerably shorter than what was originally envisioned and photograph but, you know, in the total run of the movie, we found that it was a little bit long, so we compressed it. So those are the sort of challenges that a sequence like this has.
Matt Feury
You mentioned the animatic part of it. I found that really interesting, the pre-prep, because I remember a lot of the talk about the original Star Wars back in 1977, George Lucas would cut together shots of aerial dogfights from old World War Two movies, as a point of reference, and this is very similar to that, where you're literally putting together a sequence that represents what you're finally going to do, and then laying over the new shots on top of that.
Bob Ducsay
Well, to some degree, yes. And I mean, that's amazing what they did back in, you know, 1976, when they were making the movie. Because they didn't have the ability, they didn't have these tools that we have now. So, it's a fantastic way of envisioning and it's something that we kind of refer