“The Studio” creators and directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg knew all along that they would need the help of editor Eric Kissack if they were going to pull off the Apple TV+ comedy’s unbroken, one-take aesthetic.
“It was a very unique process the whole shooting of the show,” Rogen told TheWrap during a new installment of How I Did It, presented by Apple. “Everyone who was a guest, we would give them our spiel, basically, and walk them through the process and a part of that spiel was, ‘This is our editor Eric. He will be giving the notes that we essentially would normally be saying behind your back and a few months from now.’ “
Kissack was the only editor Rogen and Goldberg met with when they were planning “The Studio.” The editor, who received a Primetime Emmy award nomination for his work on the series’ first episode, said he knew that Rogen and Goldberg’s plan for the show was an ambitious one, to put it mildly.
“When Seth pitched the show to me and explained how he wanted to do every scene as essentially a oner, my brain started spinning out and I immediately started thinking, ‘OK, how are we going to do this?’” Kissack recalled. “You can pull off a oner. I mean, oners are done often. But pulling off a oner that’s also exciting and dynamic and funny is a really, really hard challenge.”
The solution that Rogen, Kissack and Goldberg landed on was bringing the editor to the set of “The Studio” every day of principal photography so that he could give notes and “live edit” scenes as they went along. That created a dynamic on set that Rogen said only made “The Studio” better.
“The more we got in tune with it, the more we were just like, ‘Tell us how you would edit the scene and what you would be looking for and we can maybe incorporate all of that into the shot,’” Rogen revealed. “[Eric] would be as nuanced as, ‘Oh, I would cut to a reaction shot of Ike [Barinholtz] and then I would go back to you.’ We would do it and he would be like, ‘I would hold on that reaction shot for, like, a split second longer and then I would go back to you.’ Then we would do a whole take again just to hone in on that.”
Kissack’s vocal involvement in the shooting process initially came as a surprise to everyone except Goldberg and Rogen. “In the first week, I noticed a lot of people were like, ‘This editor is crazy. Look how opinionated he is! He won’t stop talking!’” Goldberg remembered with a laugh. “We had to be like, ‘We want him to do this! This is an arrangement we’ve created.’”
“I’ve never heard of an editor being on set in that manner,” “The Studio” co-creator added, and Kissack echoed that remark. “I’ve visited sets on other shows, but never [been] there for all 60 days,” the editor noted. “It was a learning experience for everyone. But by the second or third week, it was sort of like, ‘Oh, yup. Eric’s here. He’s going to help us make this better.’”
Kissack was so involved with the daily making of “The Studio” that he became someone the cast and crew felt like they could truly rely on.
“I think that the actors eventually — our core cast especially — came to see Eric as a safety net,” Goldberg revealed. “They’ve never had that [experience] where they’re being told, ‘That’s not fast enough and I know it and you’re going to do a better job delivering that joke if you speed it up 10%,’ [especially by] an editor.”
“The Studio” is now streaming on Apple TV+.
