Kirk Baxter on editing David Fincher?s ?Gone Girl? with Adobe Premiere Pro

postPerspective by Danial Restuccio

When David Fincher took on the film Gone Girl, he immediately started to round up the ?usual suspects,? his most trusted collaborators, including Kirk Baxter, who has two Editing Oscars on his mantle from previous work with Fincher (The Social Network and Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).

Gone Girl is based on Gillian Flynn?s book Gone Girl; Flynn also wrote the screenplay. The film follows Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a husband who either knows or doesn?t know the whereabouts of his missing wife.

Baxter began cutting Gone Girl on September 16, 2013: day two of shooting. And for the first time in three movies with Fincher, Baxter cut this one alone and without his frequent co-editor Angus Wall. We wondered what that was like.

What informed your decision to move from editing on Final Cut Pro to Adobe Premiere?
That was really decided by (post supervisor) Peter Mavromates, Tyler Nelson and Fincher. For me, my interaction with an editing platform is just the interface. I?m the easiest person to please. It needs to move like second nature, so that your thinking isn?t in the doing; it?s in the goal.

I found Premiere very, very easy to work with and very user friendly, but the attraction to it is all of the Adobe After Effects (shots) and how we can be doing visual effects in-house and reducing a lot of that cost and increasing a lot of the speed of these things and the promise of what?s to come, I think.

They?ve very much promised to work hand in hand. They think we?re able to streamline the post with this series of tools that they want to provide. At the time, Apple Final Cut, it was blurry about what the future was. We were more than happy to try this new path. It seems to be paying off. read more...