By Tim Squyres
We made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on a very limited budget, so my staff was just me and my assistant sharing one Avid system. The action scenes were all shot almost entirely MOS, and we didn’t have the manpower to add sound for each grunt, footstep, and weapon hit, so in cutting those scenes I didn’t bother with sound effects and focused instead on making the music right. For the assembly I had used some fast, heavy Japanese taiko drumming for the first chase/fight scene that worked really well. For the assembly screening, the first time the director saw the film, we had a volume knob in the theater. I told my assistant, who was manning the knob, to start it pretty full and to keep creeping it up as the scene went on, so that by the end it was really, really loud. Everyone loved it, and we never considered a different musical approach to the scene. Music can be tremendously effective at setting the tome of a scene, and editors who ignore it often get surprised when a scene winds up doing something different than they had planned because they hadn’t paid enough attention to the music.
 Tim Squyres Tim Squyres is an Academy Award nominated film editor and frequent collaborator with director Ang Lee. He is known for his work on such films as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Life of Pi and most recently Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken. |
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