A glory-hogging trip to Cannes aside, David Cronenberg’s Crash marked another achievement in terms of the making of the film itself.

Crash was the first feature project undertaken by Cronenberg and by editor Ron Sanders, head of Toronto’s Dark Horse Productions, using an Avid Film Composer non-linear editing system.

Sanders, who has been an editor for more than 20 years, worked on a number of tv movies last summer on his recently purchased Avid system in preparation for the feature project. ‘It had to work flawlessly, because we had little time to do this picture,’ says Sanders.

Crash’s 55-day shooting schedule ended in mid-December, and since the plan all along was to take the picture to Cannes, cuts had to be ready in January for preliminary screenings and a finished picture was required to send to festival director Gilles Jacob in Paris by March.

‘If we hadn’t been working this way we wouldn’t have been ready to submit the picture for Cannes,’ says Sanders. ‘To do it the way we wanted it and the way the director wanted it, and not make compromises on quality, I don’t think we would have been able to do it cutting on film.’

Crash was the first feature for which Sanders did the ‘whole film conform thing’ in the editing process.

‘Normally on a film we would cut a work print and cut a 35mm print. Working this way, you don’t even have to do a print,’ explains Sanders. ‘At the director’s cut stage, the Avid system printed lists and the work print was cut to correspond with those lists. I don’t touch the film, the cutting of the work print is totally from the Avid list. It’s the first time we’ve done that.’

Sanders says the Avid lists were extremely dependable, and Cronenberg, for whom this method was also new, was pleased with the process.

Sanders says cutting on film would have taken about an additional month and would have required an extra assistant or two. In terms of budget, he says using the Avid system meant an overall redistribution of cost. Where editing facilities and equipment may cost more than film, he says there are savings in stock and transfer costs as well as in personnel costs.

‘If we can cut a picture in a month less, that’s a month less of me, of the assistants and the equipment. It’s not more expensive, it’s a rethinking of the budgets.’

While there were concerns over the increased pace of editing, Sanders says because the system allows working quickly, time can and should be taken to digest the work in progress.

‘Instead of coming back from a screening and starting to cut, you can take a day and talk about it, look at the cards, look at the tapes – the director has a full set of rushes at home. The time that naturally occurred working on film you can put aside. I think it’s important that you do.’

The director also had concerns the film in progress was largely seen on tv monitors instead of film on a screen and wondered if it would play differently in the theater. But there were no surprises, says Sanders. ‘We’d anticipated and tested just about anything that could happen and found the process went smoothly.’

Sanders says Avid support was also good: ‘They understand when you’re working on a picture you can’t have problems with your equipment.’ TI