Film editor Pamela Martin on digital advances

Melissa Leo and Mark Wahlberg in THE FIGHTER Melissa Leo and Mark Wahlberg in THE FIGHTER Photo: Cinema.com Photo: Cinema.com Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Film editor Pamela Martin on digital advances 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

'Fighter' film editor says digital advances allow for more experimenting

Film editor Pamela Martin took a 17-year break between her first David O. Russell film, "Spank the Monkey," and her Oscar-nominated contributions to the director's best picture contender "The Fighter." What's changed?

"On 'Spank the Monkey,' we had very long discussions each time we wanted to revamp something because it meant you were going to physically tear up the whole film and put it back together again," she says. But, thanks to digital advances, "editing has become much more free-form in that you can try out ideas quickly."

Martin, also nominated for a 2011 American Cinema Editors award, had plenty of opportunities to experiment while working on "The Fighter." She and Russell tried out multiple versions of individual scenes to prevent the boxing comeback story from becoming melodramatic.

"You don't want anything where you feel like, 'Oh, they're acting,' " Martin says. "You can't have one false moment, and that mostly has to do with performances. It was a matter of finding the best combinations of takes and reactions."

For example, as Mark Wahlberg and Melissa Leo face off during a third-act showdown when the boxing star fires his mother as manager, several questions emerged, Martin says: "What anchors the scene? Is it the mother wanting to say, 'I'll try to do better'? Is it defensiveness? Is it better for Mark to cry or keep a stiff upper lip? We had a wide variety of performances from the actors. Within the framework of the movie we had to decide: Should this be an emotional movement, or should it be a more quiet moment?"

Martin, who says she's become "less judgmental" about onscreen characters such as Leo's fierce Boston matriarch since becoming a mother of two, says, "You could play that confrontation scene three different ways, but you craft the scene to slant a certain way once you realize where it needs to go emotionally."

Unknown sought to portray Tupac

Rapper Tupac Shakur died in a hail of bullets in 1996. Now Morgan Creek Productions and director Antoine Fuqua are bringing Shakur's story to the big screen starting this summer. "We're going to be looking for a relative unknown to play Tupac," says Morgan Creek marketing executive Greg Mielcarz. Next month, the filmmakers will join the SkeeTV website to hold an open casting call that lets anyone upload audition videos. Mielcarz hopes to find a diamond in the rough. "So much weight is going to be placed on the one young actor who can actually pull this off," he says. "He needs the same magic quality that Jamie Foxx brought to playing Ray Charles."

Japan will be setting for film based on book

While living in San Francisco and working as a travel writer in the '80s, filmmaker Alan Brown became so fascinated with Japanese culture that he moved to Japan for seven years. In April, he'll return to that country to make "Audrey Hepburn's Neck."

Based on his Pacific Rim Prize-winning novel, the story draws on Hepburn's intense following among Japanese film fans. "People there have this cross-cultural obsessive thing for Audrey Hepburn," Brown says. "When I was in Japan, 'Roman Holiday' was the most popular foreign film. You can easily imagine a Japanese woman wanting to be thin and dark-haired like Audrey Hepburn, where she wouldn't want to be, say, Marilyn Monroe."

And the neck? "In Japan, the nape of the neck is considered a big erogenous zone," Brown says. "If you look at 19th century woodblock prints of women in kimonos, it's the only skin you see."

Before prepping "Neck," Brown filmed "Private Romeo," an all-male version of "Romeo and Juliet" about cadets studying Shakespeare in a military academy.

"Juliet was so transgressive in this male-dominated society where women did what they were told," Brown says. "I wondered, how can you transfer that transgressive quality to a contemporary setting with a really rigid authoritarian, masculine society? Two guys, of course." {sbox}