The “True Detective” Editors Want You on the Case

READ MORE: Uncovering the Mystery of Editing “True Detective: Night Country” (The Rough Cut)

A clue to the popularity of HBO anthology series True Detective is that viewers themselves enjoy turning sleuth. In the latest hit season, Night Country, directed and written by showrunner Issa López, the task was to solve the mysterious disappearance, and even more mysterious discovery, of eight men from a research station in the Alaskan ice. The law enforcement officers on the case are Detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis). Mags Arnold, Brenna Rangott (who previously worked with López on the 2019 series Brittania) and Matt Chessé, ACE all served as editors of the season.

A chief task was to unpack a story-within-a-story told over time — the backstory between Danvers and Navarro using flashbacks and audio/video of Matthew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller singing “Twist and Shout.”

“Some flashbacks organically made their way into the edit as the series progressed,” Rangott told The Rough Cut’s Matt Feury. “Those were places where we felt like it was helpful to nudge the audience. But as far as ‘Twist and Shout,’ that was all very much in the script. It wasn’t an afterthought but there were moments where we needed to add more of it to give the audience an idea of its link to everyone’s past traumas.”

She adds, “There’s a sort of cross-pollination of traumas coming into reality and ‘Twist and Shout’ is a good example of it. We wanted to hit on it to give the audience an idea that Danvers associates that song with her past trauma. There were a few more moments where we added it where it wasn’t scripted.”

The drama reaches its pivotal moment at the end of Episode 6. For Chessé this was “the control point that told us how much we needed, how much we knew, and when we knew it. So, we reverse-engineered it from Episode 6,” he said.

“It was a cool process. People would slip stuff under the door, and I’d have to craft it into my episode. I think that’s the way it has to be on something like this. It’s like you’re having a dialog throughout the show with these elements and you have to work it where it happens.”

The trio could access a pool of shared shots to help assemble their individual episodes.

“Sometimes you need a shot that acts like a palate cleanser,” says Chessé. “But it’s got to resonate with whoever you’re leaving or who you’re going to. And they would double up sometimes. The assistants had to go through the episodes and spot, ‘We’ve seen that snowman too many times. We can’t repeat ourselves.”

Fans of the franchise enjoy playing detective, so the filmmakers pepper the series with clues and red herrings giving them enough rope to solve the puzzle but not too much as to be confusing.

“We’re not beating things over the head, leaving things for people to interpret and talk about after the episode,” Chessé says. “I think Issa had a great sense of playing with that. She knew what to hang on to, what to hold back, what to pay off, and what to let go. It seems like she had great taste because everybody loved the show. I didn’t have people afterward asking me to explain things to them. I think the takeaways were solid.”

On reading the script, Arnold cites a scene between Danvers and Navarro in Episode 1 where they talk about something that’s happened in the past. “What they said made me think that there was some sort of hinterland and that they’d had a prior relationship. I thought, ‘Not only is this Jodie Foster, True Detective, and Issa Lopez, but now Jodie is going to play a gay person as well. I was super excited. Of course, it didn’t go that way. I didn’t misunderstand, but it could be interpreted either way.”

To help them assemble all the story elements in order that ultimately made sense and that kept audiences engaged they employed a process they call “clumping.”

Arnold explains, “It’s when, instead of cross-cutting between characters, you go to two different characters playing their scene and then you come back, which is how it was written, just to keep it exciting. What we started doing was clumping things together so that you could get a sense of being with these characters a little bit more.”

Chessé details this further, “A lot of times you watch a show that has multiple characters and there are certain things you’re more into than others. But you don’t want the audience to have that feeling of, ‘I don’t want to be with this person right now. I want to stay with that person.’ You want to feel like you’re cutting away at a point that seems organic in terms of interest level and comprehension of the story,” he says.

“You’re on a journey collecting little clues so you’re going through the episode thinking, ‘I should remember that. That seemed important.’ You have to lay that breadcrumb trail out for people in terms of their interests and allegiances to the characters so that they’re bonding with this entire town that they have to meet. What is their relationship? We don’t say it overtly. You have to have those ‘reveal’ scenes close enough together that you can track them. If you put them too far apart then you’ll forget how everything’s connected.

“That’s the strength of being the editor, getting to be the first responder. You’re selling it to yourself first. So, whether the director feels a certain way or not, you can use that as an excuse to say, ‘As the audience member, I feel like I need to know this now. Can we try this over here?’ You have to make it make sense to you before it can make sense to other people.”

For those following along at home, that word again is “clumping.”

“I’m working on having it trademarked,” Chessé remarks to Feury, “Are we doing a clinic on clumping at the next ACE gathering?”

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