“The Drama” Has Big Ideas, but Its Editing Is Designed to Deliver 10 Ideas Per Minute

[Note: This interview contains spoilers for “The Drama.”]

Joshua Raymond Lee, the film’s editor, spoke with IndieWire about crafting the spiraling, chaotic, and psychological inner world of an engaged couple in Christopher Borgli’s latest film.

According to CinemaDrame News Agency, Christopher Borgli—writer and director of “The Drama”—typically edits his own films. This time, however, he brought Joshua Raymond Lee on board early in pre-production to help construct the life of an engaged couple, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and Emma (Zendaya), only to tear it apart with a shocking revelation—one that truly spoils the story: Emma, during her troubled and isolated teenage years, had planned a school shooting, though she never carried it out.

Your response to how “The Drama” handles gun violence, the seductive yet alienating power of American culture, and the socio-economic and racial structures underlying both may vary. According to official U.S. statistics, while mass shootings in educational settings are statistically rare events, they have profound psychological consequences; for instance, data from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security indicates that more than 2,000 firearm-related incidents have occurred in American schools since 1970. Lee and Borgli were less interested in merely exploring the big ideas sparked by Emma’s revelation and more focused on creating an experience that reflects the disorienting introspection of the main characters.

Lee told IndieWire: “I kept repeating this mantra that the editing should move at the speed of thought. We had several guiding principles during editing; one was that we should try to have 10 editing ideas per minute—to think about how we can be innovative in the edit beyond just telling the story.”

A fast, lively edit that playfully cuts just before the audience expects it is always effective for comedy. For example, Borgli and Lee chose to cut away during the opening wedding rehearsal scene at the exact moment the dance instructor reaches peak frustration, rather than letting the scene fully play out.

Lee added: “Flashbacks in cinema can be precise representations of the past, but we wanted to treat them more like how we actually enter and exit memories.” In doing so, Lee and Borgli created the editorial equivalent of an anxiety spiral. They further complicated the structure of “The Drama” by blurring the boundaries between past, present, and imagination.

Lee explained: “Sometimes we enter a dream with Charlie and exit it with Emma, and because of this structure, we’re not sure whether what we saw was a memory or a fantasy. Our philosophy was to give as much credit as possible to the audience’s intelligence and move at a pace that both excites them and forces them to watch more carefully.”

Breaking away from linear order and moving toward an emotional, anxious structure helped Lee and Borgli bring difficult sequences to life. For instance, they combined a scene in which the couple confronts a DJ (Sydney Lemmon) about drug use with another in which Charlie presents Emma’s story as a hypothetical to his colleague Misha (Haily Benton Gates).

Lee said: “We started experimenting with intercutting these scenes and arrived at a very interesting structure. You see Charlie angrily leave his lunch, then you cut to the venue, then return to his breakdown in the office. At the same time, you see him collapse during the confrontation with the DJ, and before you even know why, you witness his unraveling. It makes you really want to know what happens in the gaps, and when you see him cheating, it hits like a punch to the gut.”

Lee noted that to achieve naturalism and discipline in the film’s dramatic sections, they drew inspiration from works such as Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher.” He said: “In the scene where Emma, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), Rachel (Alana Haim), and Charlie confess the worst thing they’ve ever done, we used only single close-ups and static two-shots. These were the most mature and confident frames, and they turned out very intimate. The actors’ faces become a location in those scenes.”

The slowdown in editing rhythm in these sections becomes especially noticeable due to the playful energy Lee and Borgli establish earlier in the film. They treated everything before the opening credits as a single montage. The more they expanded the film’s world, the more trapped the audience would feel during its most suffocating moments.

Lee concluded: “There is no escape.”

“The Drama” is now playing in theaters.