'The only way we fail is if we don’t make art'
A Sundance conversation with editor Ron Patane about reframing autobiographical art
Through a glass darkly: the artist Tarrell (André Holland) with his wife, Aisha (Andra Day), a singer, in Titus Kaphar’s Exhibiting Forgiveness. (Photos courtesy of the Sundance Film festival.)
A philosophy major who grew up in Connecticut, the New York-based picture editor Ron Patane is a crucial figure in American independent cinema.
He’s a significant collaborator in the works of Derek Cianfrance, J.C. Chandor, and more recently, the fantastic Till, by director Chinonye Chukwu, with its knockout performance by the luminous Danielle Deadwyler.
I met Ron and talked with him on that project.
His new film, Exhibiting Forgiveness, a debut narrative feature written and directed by the artist Titus Kaphar, is a probing, acute, and deeply personal work about a gifted and accomplished Black artist, Tarrell (André Holland). The story tracks how his life, family and art are upended by the reappearance of his estranged father, La’Ron (the sensational John Earl Jelks).
Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, he is a spectral presence whose form and shape occasions its own personal reckoning, of the past and present.
The film premiered in the dramatic competition at Sundance. I recently spoke with Ron, and we talked about the film, art, meaning, beauty and personal representation.
Patrick Z. McGavin: The writer and director Titus Kaphar said he approached filmmaking as an extension of his studio work as a painter and installation artist. What did that mean for your work?
Ron Patane: I’m not that intimate with his process of painting. Obviously I've seen the work; it’s really impressive, especially if you've seen it in person because of the size of it. I just think it takes on another dimension seeing it that way. I was lucky enough to work with him at his studio. He built an editing room in his studio, the building in New Haven where he paints.
It was cool to be able to see the work, and be around that work as we were editing. For me, I think there is definitely something unique about this film. It’s pretty rare. I will probably never work on another film like that again. That really set it apart more than anything else.
It was important for me to understand Titus’ relationship to the events and characters in the story. There were certain things that were just very important to him, regardless of the audience’s perception of those things., because he had lived them. Now, it’s not totally truthful. It’s autobiographical, but fictionalized to some extent to help the story be more contained and be able to be told in a two-hour format.
So guiding him through that process was really unique.
I think he's so brave for being able to tell his story and put it on the screen like that, having actors recreating moments from his life. It was very emotional for him. So I feel like this film was more about being with him, going through the journey of telling this story and interpreting it for the audience.
I was trying to understand what was important to him, and how to best make those things fit in the context of the film. It was a unique challenge in that way. Sometimes there were things that had a certain relationship with, and I would tell him, the audience is not really going to see the full scope or the importance of this. But it was crucial for Titus that certain elements be framed a particular way, whether it was out of respect for the family members who actually experienced the thing or just his memory.
Patrick Z. McGavin: You mediated his own family conflict and history.
Ron Patane: When I worked on Till, or this HBO movie, The Wizard of Lies, about Bernie Madoff, in those cases the director was not there at the time those events were happening. There’s a certain amount of removal, and you are trying to figure out how to best tell it for the audience's understanding. You’re translating a reality for an audience. It's just a totally different thing. That was the most important thing that I took away from the film.
Patrick Z. McGavin: The director Derek Cianfrance, one of your primary collaborators, is a producer of the film. Was that your pathway to the movie?
Ron Patante: Yes and no. I actually found out about the film through my agent. She sent me the script, and said this was something Derek was producing.
Derek had this impression of Titus as a great person, a great artist, and somebody who just had his head screwed on right, and someone who was great to work with. I was definitely interested in meeting with him, seeing the work and hearing his take. Everything felt right. The fact that Derek had been involved definitely gave me assurance that I could trust the process of what was going on.
Patrick Z. McGavin: Why do you think you and Titus hit it off so well?
Ron Patane: I think, for one, he sought Derek out, and knowing I had been involved with that work attracted him in the first place. Like Derek and a lot of people I work with, we’re just grounded in family, and the balance of life, the idea that work isn’t everything. Titus is also a family guy with two sons, and I have a family, two daughters, so we had that in common. We have a lot of similar references, pop culture stuff and film. We are the same age, we both love music, and we both have been bass players.
Patrick Z. McGavin: The fact this was such a highly personal project and first feature, how did that shape your creative relationship?
Ron Patane: Titus is very smart, obviously. He's a super quick study. So I was very impressed at how easily he could pick up the language, the cinematic language, the literal moving parts of making a film, and just intuitively understand, like how you might use ADR, or things that are foreign to people who come to film from a different medium.
I think he really had an intuitive understanding of things like performance, for instance. That was very reassuring to me. I think another thing that was really reassuring to me is he had an ability to see things for the first time, which is a tricky thing when it comes to editing.
You’re making a bunch of different versions of the same scene, or you've watched the cut like a million times. It's not always easy for people to see something, or see it fresh.
I think he had an ability to kind of see things similar to the way he saw it for the first time, even though it might be the 10th version of a scene or something. That was very helpful to me because I need that. It's not quite objectivity, but I needed that perspective.
Because I can sometimes lose perspective or feel that maybe the person I'm collaborating with has lost perspective. I think that made it kind of easier than it could have been with someone who hadn't made a film before. I think there's also definitely leaning on my experience, and just understanding the best way to accomplish something given a certain set of material. You’re only going to have a certain number of options. He would lean on me on my experience of how to communicate something.
Because it was so personal, I didn't want to put myself in the way of the film at all, which I never really try to do. I'm here to facilitate this person's art, and what he’s trying to do. I'm not here to impress myself upon this movie really at all.
If I disagreed with him, I would always say it, and always tell him exactly why. And then, if he saw another way, it was like okay, that's fine. But you know, I've said my peace about this and let's try this way, you know, because I just had the respect of him putting his own life on the screen. He understands what it needs to be. One of the best things he said at the beginning of the process was, “The only way we fail is if we don’t make art.”
Patrick Z. McGavin: One of the hardest things to dramatize is the creative process, whether it’s painting, music, or writing. You do some really interesting movements and cuts at the beginning with Tarrell working with his canvas? It felt similar to the Nick Nolte sequences in Martin Scorsese’s section of New York Stories.
Ron Patane: I didn't actually look at the Scorsese film. I did look at Basquiat and Pollock. I thought what was really unique about what Titus was doing compared with those films, the artist is always portrayed as this out of control force of nature type of character who creates this work like a storm.
The work itself is not always really directly related to what is happening in these characters’ lives necessarily. It’s like a separate thing. I felt like what Titus was doing was really showing the process of how stuff from your life can be worked out, or not worked out, as it says in the film, on the canvas.
That wasn't something I felt I was really seeing in the other films about painters, or at least, not in the same way where you could really relate the paintings to the story, and what’s happening in the film to the character.
There really wasn’t that connection.
I thought that was special. He spent time with André, getting him up to speed and being able to do that stuff. I think the approach was almost like a documentary, and it came to how we were going to show what he does with the art. It’s all real.
So I tried to just keep the editing concise, but process oriented. You feel like you’re seeing the process to some degree, whether it's like the wheels spinning or just seeing the development of an idea in a concise way without trying to overthink the cuts. Just letting it be free in some of the sequences, like the one where Tarrell whitewashes the canvases.
In the first cut, there's music in the sequence now, but not in the first cut. It was just a little bit longer and just really straight. What he was doing by itself was really interesting. I thought, “This is something you never see in a painting.”
It’s always a montage. There was real power to it. We ended up putting music on it, and I think it’s a real counterpoint because the music is uplifting and pushing you forward. That gave the film a forward thrust into what was going to be a really complicated thing really soon. So in that case it was a choice made based on where that sequence came in the film.
Titus liked that music choice right away. The score by the composer, Jherek Bischoff, is really good. Jherek had done a lot of work making pieces before we edited, which he’d done really quickly. I liked his stuff right away. I like his sensibility, because it’s not so easy to tell where the emotion of the work is. It’s not wearing the emotion on its sleeve. The palette is complex enough to keep a bit of intellectual distance.
Patrick Z. McGavin: One of the themes is how the past is continuously superimposed over the present. The long flashback scene of Tarrell as a boy being brutalized by his father. Was it scripted that way, or did you play around with the order of the sequencing?
Ron Patane: It was in the script, and it was basically in that spot. They took the camera out, and did a lot of stuff for real. There was a lot more material there. It was about finding the stuff that felt the most honest to Titus, and felt that it best represented how he remembered feeling in those moments.
Structurally, I think it’s pretty much how it was scripted. There’s some time compression, and there was the idea of playing with what you might see beforehand, and shorter flashes and how the imagery tied into some of the themes or things that you see later.
I think Titus really felt like that structure was the one he wanted, and he wanted it to come in these more significant chunks when you were ready for it, and not to show too much too early. He wanted to tease it, so there was at least some idea of what this trauma was about, and where it might link to the other character we saw at the beginning. You kind of intuit the connection, but it’s not really revealed to you until later of what exactly is going on.
The artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar, the writer and director of Exhibiting Forgiveness.
Patrick Z. McGavin: That connects to the other really great scene, where Tarrell literally turns the camera on his father, La’Ron? Did that scene require a lot of finesse to get it just right?
Ron Patane: That scene is essentially a true moment from Titus’ life. He made a short film, The Jerome Project, which I think has the actual footage of what he really did. He took the camera, and had a similar discussion with his father.
This was one of those parts of the film that really was really important to him because it was an experience he actually had. So because it was a lived and documented memory it was very important to him. It was about finding the best performances to tell that story, and to show the arc of Tarrell opening up to his father as he's getting drawn into learning about his own history and his father’s history. Initially he was very resistant, but then it all kind of collapses, as he realizes he has a very different take on things than his father does.
Both actors are really amazing, but it was about finding the right performance. It was about finding the right balance between the truth of the moment they were trying to portray, and the dramatization of the moment for the audience. It was very important to be truthful there, because the scene is long. This is the centerpiece of the film, and everything kind of hinges on this. So we have to let La’Ron tell his story but we have to feel it through Tarrell’s point of view to understand what it really means in this context.
It was about what’s really important to the audience versus what was just important to Titus, because it was something that he lived through and remembered. A lot of this was scripted, because It was important to tie the details together. Titus understood the connection to all the other pieces of the puzzle.
I was having discussions with him so that I could understand. That was part of the process of going down this road, asking him questions, such as, “Why did this actually happen?”
Patrick Z. McGavin: With Andra Day, a great singer, playing Tarrell’s wife, that introduces another vital element, formally and artistically. How did you want to weave not just her musical numbers, but the larger music and soundtrack?
Ron Patane: I think it was important for the music not to be too emotional, as I said. I think Jherek’s palette, and the way he writes has that kind of complexity where it’s not telling you exactly what to feel, but it's making you feel something. I think there were some places he needed to go back, and do things he hadn’t done because some of that more heightened or abstract stuff was not in his original conception of pieces that he gave us.
Andra, she’s super talented. So it's kind of amazing just to have her singing off the cuff in the film, like the scene on the guitar, which was very real.
That was written in the script to show that she's a real person, a real three-dimensional person who has her own creativity, her own life, her own aspirations.
She’s not just an appendage to this guy, and to show that's another thing that people have to balance in their life. We all have to have time to do the things we want to do. If you’ve got two creative people in a marriage, you have to work out some sort of balance. It was important for Titus to show that and to have that in the film.
Patrick Z. McGavin: Not to put you on the spot, but do you have a favorite scene or something that really sings for you?
Ron Patane: As we talked earlier, I love the scene in the basement with Tarrell and his father. The two actors are really amazing, and it’s really John’s moment to shine. John gets to show charisma there, and the weight of the character and everything. It’s such a great showcase.
Similarly, I think the scene in the park with Aunjanae Ellis-Taylor is also kind of amazing. Normally in a film, if you ask me what my favorite thing was, I might not pick long dialogue scenes, just from an aesthetic point of view, as an editor. For me, those are the scenes that really shine.
Also, the scene of Joyce [Ellis-Taylor] and La’Ron in the attic when they have this argument that ends up being the focal point of the trauma of his memories. Titus always knew he didn’t want to show any actual violence.
Something that happened when they performed it is that it started having these other dimensions of regret, and stuff that was not in the moment of what would have happened between them.
It was like the characters from the past somehow reflexively looking into this boy's eyes, as if from some point in the future where they could understand their behavior. It’s only in a few shots, but there’s something really going on in that moment that I don’t know that I’ve ever quite seen.
It’s a credit to their performance, and for Titus letting them go to that place.
It was also really interesting to try and figure out how to use it. There were other ways to go where we could have leaned into or been more illustrative of the violence. It was something I found really interesting that felt fresh and unique.
I’m still thinking about it, like “Wow, that’s interesting.” I don’t know what more you could do with that. It felt like something I hadn’t quite seen in a film before, or not in that way.