COLIN INTERVIEWS NIELS PAGH ANDERSEN, EDITOR OF "THE ACT OF KILLING"
In his third post for POV's Documentary Blog, 2014 Fellow Colin Nusbaum has a fascinating interview with Niels Pagh Andersen, editor of "The Act of Killing":
Colin Nusbaum: The Act of Killing looks at evil so closely. Looking at a character like Anwar, your main subject of the film, as the face of that evil, I am curious how you dealt with the needs of the audience, and their willingness to watch a person who is the embodiment of that.
Niels Pagh Andersen: Before I came on, Joshua [Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing] was sitting in London for almost a year with two junior editors, so I got around 35 hours of edited scenes, but without structure, and we had to recut the scenes. That’s where we built Anwar as the main character. We were re-editing the scenes from his point of view. It wasn’t just what everyone was doing, it was how does that affect Anwar.