Because of the intense nature of a drama series that unfolds over 15 hours in as many episodes, you might assume that Max’s “The Pitt” is made with that same frenetic energy. But editor Mark Strand (who is credited with more than a third
of those episodes, including the tone-setting opener) insisted the team was never beholden to time in the same way Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle), charge nurse Dana (Katherine LaNasa) and the rest of the staff of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center are.
“We paid a lot of attention to the fluidity and continuity of the time space,” Strand said. “But we didn’t pay a lot of attention to the accuracy of how the minutes fall within the hour. So if a character says a time of death is at 11:37 or something like that, I don’t know that it landed at the 37th minute of the hour. When I was cutting the pilot, there was an idea of, ‘How much of the traveling through space [in real time] do we want to spend with them? Do I really need to see them take the steps? Could it be four steps? Two steps?’ But I found that when you travel with people, certainly when the stories are continuing, that travel time added to the tension.”
One of the reasons “The Pitt” has such immediacy is its use of the Z-rig (or Zero G), a fluid camera that has a Steadicam vest and arm function, allowing for changes in height to accommodate actors on the move.
“To make sure that everyone’s in step and continuous, they had to do full resets for a scene,” said Strand, who added that this is a fairly unusual process on a TV series. “Where you normally might just do a pickup shot later in a scene, there’s so many moving parts here, so it was easier to go all the way back to one so that everyone’s behavior could be landing in the same time frame. So we started getting these incredibly long takes. It actually makes the editing very smooth to cut because it’s consistent.”
One inspiration while making “The Pitt” was Jonathan Glazer’s haunting, Oscar-winning WWII drama “The Zone of Interest,” which was notable for following characters through spaces without an abundance of editorialization. The series is dramatically different from Glazer’s film, but once made aware of that approach, a viewer can start to see the influence.
“In that film, action would happen where you may be following somebody (in one part of the screen) while something else is still going on,” Strand said. “That defined the world that we were going to be in. We’re going to leave trauma rooms. We’re going to re-enter those rooms, and you may still be interested in what’s going on and eager to find out what happens, which would add tension as we move back out, check on somebody, check on a third person and then make our way back into the space.”
Strand also noted that most of the actors rarely disappeared from set, giving the show more of an all-in, hangout vibe where they were always hyper-aware of the storylines unfolding even if they weren’t central to all of those stories.
“I think it does fill in the texture of the world that it’s really happening right now, and these people are moving through the space,” Strand said. “Seeing those people in the background is another building block that keeps it feeling more
real.”
And Strand’s job was immeasurably helped by one of the directives from a key creator. “John Wells…if he sees anything that feels soapy, over the top, not real, anything that feels not grounded, that stuff’s going out. It’s all textured. Nobody’s bad, nobody’s good. People have points of view.”
This story first ran in the Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
