The editor of 'Sacramento' Max Goldblatt mentions Kristen with Below the Line

Max: Those are the victories as an editor, when you get away with something that an audience would never suspect. I love that stuff.

Aminah: It’s the best. In my last film, I did that by taking a character calling out someone's name, but I'd actually taken the audio from ten scenes earlier, and I put it in, out of shot, and it motivated the character's response so much more. And no one's the wiser.

Max: Right. On the film Sacramento, what I found fascinating about Kristen Stewart is that she is a very impulsive performer, really in the moment and really trying things. She’s giving you a lot of options to work with, and she knows this. I’d seen her performances over the years, but to be suddenly given this gift of her raw footage—how do you construct a Kristen Stewart performance? She might read a line a certain way and it's cool and it works. But then you really like the way she does a line at the end of the scene and, to get that emotional through line, the two don’t necessarily work together.

She's an incredible performer and part of that is her skill and the other part of it is the job of a good editor really honing it in a way that makes most sense for the story. I was really impressed by what she gave us. And I think there's trust there as an actor. They're trusting that the director and editor are gonna put the finished film together in a way that makes them look great.

Aminah: Across your various roles, what would you say is your happiest memory in the world of filmmaking?

Max: I’ll pick a recent one—when we premiered Sacramento at the Tribeca Film Festival. I’d had other films premiere at Tribeca, but with this one, there was a different energy. It was premiering in one of the larger theaters, and there was a red carpet. The screening was sold out, and it's a comedy. We had never shown it to more than two dozen people. So you're sitting there in the theater, the lights go down, and you're wondering if this sold-out audience is going to like this thing that you worked so hard on, or if they’re going to hate it. So, the movie starts. You’re anticipating those first couple laughs, or what you hope is a laugh. And they started rolling in. The house was on fire. They were such a great audience. There were some moments that were shocking or extremely funny, and I got so excited waiting for these moments to hit in this big auditorium.

There’s nothing like that, especially these days when you don’t know if a film is even going to play in theatres or go straight to streaming, or be lost in the shuffle. We’d just been picked up for theatrical distribution the day before. So, to be able to sit in the theater and say, not only is this so amazing, we're in a sold-out theater with people and they're loving the movie, and this is not the only time this will happen—it was just exhilarating for me.

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