Editor Peter Oliver On Cutting Emmy-Winning Netflix Hit ‘Baby Reindeer’

How did you get into film editing?

It’s not the usual. I did a fine art degree and I was a sculptor. I built very big sculptures, but I couldn’t keep the sculptures, so I filmed them and then edited the film. I eventually discovered, on the floor that we were in, tucked away was an edit suite that no one ever used. It was a tape-to-tape edit suite, and I just basically taught myself.

I really enjoyed doing tape-to-tape, but you do get through a lot of tapes. And because I was a poor student you’d have an SVHS tape because that’s all we could afford, and you’d just go over and over it and the generations would become rougher and rougher every time you re-recorded over it.

But I’d love to try doing that again actually and see how different it is. You had to make decisions more in those days. I never did film, I never used — a Steenbeck, was it? I’d like to try that as well.

How did you leverage sculpting into a career in editing?

I went on to record everything I could at university—like fashion shows—and put those together. Then I had a friend, Luke Price, who very kindly took me on as a runner in Soho, and so I did that for a year and a half. Then Tim Murrell, who’s a brilliant editor, took me on as an assistant.

So I assisted and then was an assembly editor for a show called Teachers many years ago, and then I had to go back to assisting again and eventually make my way back to editing.

I had a call with a young lady earlier today who’s trying to get into the industry and I was saying to her, ‘Don’t get disheartened, because sometimes you have to backward to go forward.’

And then someone fell off his bike, Luke Dunkley, and broke both wrists. So I took over from him in an edit, and that’s how I got in. I had nothing to do with him falling off his bike, though!

But yeah, that’s how I got into editing.

Your roots are in comedy editing. How have you navigated from straight comedy shows to drama-led material?

I always think it’s easier to make people cry than to make people laugh. Comedy is really, really hard, because how do you cut comedy? There’s no one formula. You have to approach each joke differently.

But I think it’s interesting because I didn’t intentionally start with comedy. There was a lot of comedy around, and even things like Skins had comic elements. So I’ve done straight comedy, but I think most stuff has a comic element.

My agent always says that one thing that sticks out when I’m going for jobs or when people phone her for editors is that they often want someone with a comedy background, even if it’s not a comedy show. So I was very fortunate to start in comedy, and as I said, I still do shows like Trying, which are comedy.

But it’s helpful for shows like Baby Reindeer which are comic in the first maybe two or three episodes, and then things turn. There are still comic elements later on, but Richard (Gadd, the show’s creator, writer, and lead actor) is really clever at writing those kinds of things, and that is exactly what I like: The darkness, but with comic elements.

Warning: The video below is NSFW.

There’s a scene in episode 2 of Baby Reindeer, by the canal with Martha stood in Donny’s way (scene is depicted in the video above). You kind of have that jump scare to start off, and then she throws a couple of jokes in and you’re warming to Martha, and then it gets very serious and ends with her abusing him.

What I loved about scenes like that is that you can do so much: It rollercoasters from comedy to dark and then terrifying at the end. And that’s what Baby Reindeer did really well, was that you’d be laughing and you’d be caring for the character and then go “No! Don’t trust her!”

But as Richard has said about that series, it wasn’t about people being evil, it was more about people being lost. And that certainly came through, I think, in that he was always empathetic and sympathetic for Martha.

So there was a natural progression from comedy to more serious drama. But I do prefer more serious drama just because it’s less hard work! (laughs)

How do you handle that shift of tone and balance?

In Baby Reindeer, with director Weronika Tofilska, and on Eric with director Lucy Forbes—sometimes with a director you can really see how they’re journeying through a scene in the rushes. And it’s just so amazing to be able to watch through that process. Some directors film a lot (of variation and coverage) and so you can pick your way through and think, ‘okay, we could do it this way or that way.’

So I do weekly assemblies and then send them off and people never got back to me (laughs) so I presume they were too busy, but I think a lot of the edit that I did originally stayed in the final episodes.

For some scenes, Weronika had a very specific plan. And so we’ll take them apart and put them back together.

Jess Gunning, who played Martha, was incredible. She could just switch from being lovely to this very lost person, and it was just a joy to work with her because you could just keep the shot on her, really.

But smaller things like how long the pauses are, and how long we hold on a shot, and all that kind of stuff… with Richard, we worked on the voiceover quite a lot, going back and forwards. He’d go out into the corridor and record stuff. don’t know what people thought of his ramblings as they walked past, but we didn’t have a room for him to record that, so he walked into the corridor to do it.

How do you go from the rushes to your first edit?

I watch through everything just because I think if they filmed it and the actors have acted it, then it’s my duty, it’s my job to watch through everything.

For me it’s worthwhile watching through everything just because otherwise you might miss something—just even just a tiny reaction—and you can always use that. Some people just use one take during a back and forth, but the audience won’t realize if you use different takes. Even if it’s slightly different or the hair is slightly different, I prefer to get the best performance and the best reactions throughout the takes. So I’ll watch through everything they filmed before I start editing, and then start piecing them together.

Do you watch with a notepad, or on the timeline while pulling selects?

I just watch. I can usually remember the bits that I want to go back to, and then I’ll start putting it together. I very rarely start on the wide shot, because I think filmmaking is all about revealing, so it’s usually tighter shots I’ll start off with and then I’ll reveal where that person is. You get geography shots somewhere in the middle.

I’ll try and make everything as layered as possible, as final as possible. So I’ll put in a lot of sound effects.

There’s a scene in Baby Reindeer where Martha says her birthday is coming up. At the start I put a lot of laughter in the background because it’s a busy bar, and the audience is laughing with her and sympathizing with her, but then she hands him her phone and says: “Give me your number,” and everything freezes. Not literally freezes, but we drop out the sound and there’s a track playing in the background that sings “she’s in disguise” in the chorus—and it’s very subliminal, because it’s so low on the juke box, but I think it’s interesting to do that kind of thing.

So I cut all sound, go to the front shot, have this moment of tension, and then as the scene goes back to normal, I’ll use less laughter in the background. She’s laughing again at the end but it’s a more sinister laugh, so I’ll try reflecting that in the background sounds. I’m always thinking of how can we do backgrounds that add to the meaning.

The other thing I try to do these days is try watching everything without music. So if I put an episode together, I watch it all without music and then decide where it is best placed.

You can wallpaper over stuff quite easily with music though, and then you’re in trouble, because then you’ve wallpapered over everything and then it just gets more and more and more layered. So I try and watch everything without and then go, ‘that could really do with some music there.’ A lot of the time you don’t need as much music as you think you do.

That’s my process, really.

One scene from Eric that really stood out was the opening of episode 2. How was that scene created?

That was one of my favorite scenes to cut in that episode.

Lucy (Forbes, the show’s director) likes to come in, give a few notes and then leaves you to it.

For her it was tough because she directed the whole series, so she had three edits running at the same time. She would jump into one, watch something, tweak it, and then jump into the next one. And she’s so talented to be able to do that because just to get your head into one episode and then get into another one as well.

But yeah, that scene was just a joy because as you said, LeDroit (McKinley Belcher III) was really good at reactions. Some actors are good at that and it really helps.

There’s one two-shot that I really love when Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann) just both look at each other. The chemistry between them was incredible throughout the whole series, but in that one scene, Gabby’s so brilliant because she was playing ‘bereft but holding it down’ and she did that so well. I had to search through everything to see just tiny moments of emotion from her because she was playing it down.

But I also loved that we don’t see the police officer who’s speaking for a lot of the time, and I think that was a Lucy thing. My first cut will usually be to make sure that we’ve got the lines on people’s faces. That’s a very early cut. And then I’ll go back over to say how much do we need to see them.

But that scene was just a joy to work on because there’s so much going on, but nothing going on. As in, there’s no movement, but there’s lots of people and lots of different things, and there’s comedy in that as well. And like Baby Reindeer, Eric had those moments of joy and complete sadness, which is great.

The great thing with Lucy is that I can rework the whole scene, and she’ll come back in and doesn’t even mention it! And you think, did you notice that I’d reworked it? And she says “Yeah, of course I did, but it’s great. So it’s fine…” It’s like, ‘Wow.’ Even after exec viewings she allowed me that creativity, whereas a lot of people would be like, “No, we’ve got to keep it as it is because the execs have seen it now.”

But it’s always a work in progress. So she was very good at saying here’s my notes here and there, and then do whatever you want to do.

Did you edit remotely for Baby Reindeer and Eric?

I was at home for both assemblies. I generally like to edit from home to start off with and then go in (to town) because I’ve got a family. So it’s nice to edit from home, assemble as long as I can just because then I can take breaks when the kids come back from school and then come back to it. And it’s kind of more fluid, because I’ll have all the time that kids are at school, and then go back to it in the evenings.

For years I stubbornly wanted to keep my family life apart from my work life, so I wouldn’t have an edit suite at home. But I regret that, because I’d be coming home at 10 o ‘clock at night and they’d gone to bed and I’d be like “No! I missed them again.”

SOURCE: NBC

So generally, I assemble at home and then fine cut in town, just in case anyone wants to come in. A lot of the time a director sits with you (during the fine cut).

How do you work with your assistant editor and what’s the relationship like?

It’s very close. On Baby Reindeer Andrew Reynolds was my assistant and he’s very good at temp visual effects, which is so helpful when you’re working really fast. There were a lot of computer screens and that kind of thing in Baby Reindeer, and we’d change them a lot, and Richard was quite particular about what was on screen.

I’m one of Martha’s friends on Facebook in episode 2, actually. There’s a little Easter egg for you, you can see my face as one of her friends.

But yeah, Andrew is just incredible: During the assembly he’s at home and I’m at home, but in the fine cut there’s a lot more back and forth, and we’ll be on Slack all day. If there are notes within the edit that I can give him then I’ll just quickly slam that through on Slack, and then he’ll come back and let me know he’s done it. So it saves time.

I (also) try to get assistants to assemble scenes—not because I’m lazy, but because I’ll assemble the scene and then they’ll assemble the scene and we’ll watch with them together so that hopefully it will give them a bit more experience, and they can see what I’ve done. And then I can steal anything that they’ve done that I think is better! (laughs)

Assisting should be training as well. So it’s good to train them up like that and give them a scene and say, ‘what do you think of this?’

And then there’s lots of ingesting to do, especially with all of the music: You’re constantly changing music, especially temp-composed music, so there’s a lot of that going on. I don’t think I’m that technical so it’s great to have a technical assistant.

Assistant editors have to do a lot more than when I was an assistant. Now they have to be a lot more advanced and they have to be able to do temp visual effects and all of that kind of stuff.

Do you select projects based on the script or the director?

I’ll always read the script before I make a decision, and I always look for hope in the script. I always think that you should bring hope with whatever you do and I think it is because I’m a Christian, but also because I think that you should see hope in everything.

It was interesting because with Baby Reindeer—I didn’t see a lot of hope in the script. But I think the hope came afterwards, because so many people have benefited from it: The charity helpline at the end, We Are Survivors, got 82% more calls about male sexual assault and abuse after Baby Reindeer than they did before.

It is something that is very hard to discuss, obviously for anyone, but for men in particular. I hope that doesn’t sound sexist, but a lot of people have come up to me and said, “Thank you, because it helped me talk to my brother or my cousin or my friend about stuff that’s happened in the past.”

We all have darkness in the past, but there is hope in that, and Richard’s just really clever at writing so that even in the darkest of situations, there’s hope and lightness in the darkness as well.

But to answer your question, I’ll always read the script and try and think it through and think about how they’ll do it. You spend a lot of time on a project and so it’s important to get the right jobs. Then I’ll meet the director and suss out who they are and what they entail.

All directors are great, because they’ve got that creative edge, so it’s just how well you work with them. It’s such a joy to have them in the edit, and also such a privilege, because they’re out there with hundreds of people working with them on set and then it will bottleneck down to: You’re in a room with them on their own.

So I’ll always try and give them a day or two just to sit down and say whatever they want to say, you know, just to decompress and then get on with stuff.

One thing I find a lot with the directors is that they take a lot of what’s happened on set into the edit.

I sometimes say, “Why don’t you like this scene? It’s great.”

And they’ll say, “Because we shot half of it here, and half of it there.”

And I’ll be like, “I’ve never even noticed!”

And I suppose that’s our job as an editor: To be in our ivory towers. And so we don’t have to deal with any emotion that’s happened on set. But it was lovely to have Weronika and Richard in, just because they’re both so creative and we’d go one way and then go another (with a scene). But they were very gracious of each other, and usually you wouldn’t get as much input as Richard gave in an edit because he was there for a lot of the time.

It was just really powerful to have him there, and given what’s happened in his life, it’s incredible, just to be a part of helping tell that story. So it was a different edit from a lot of edits, but very creative.