Oppenheimer Editor Jen Lame, ACE Visits Class

It was with enormous pride that I welcomed my former student Jen Lame, ACE to my Editing Fundamentals class last week. Jen is just coming off the enormous success of Oppenheimer, but has also edited a number of other significant films in the past decade, including Noah Baumback's Academy Award-nominated Marriage Story, Ryan Coogler's Academy Award-nominated Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Ari Aster's highly influential Hereditary, and Christopher Nolan's Tenet.

Busy as ever, Jen joined us for an hour via Zoom after dropping her kids off at school and talked about her working relationships with directors (she is honest to a fault, but never confrontational) and how some of her big breaks came about (when your agent says you can take a friendly meeting with Christopher Nolan, you fly across the country the next day to do it). She also talked about building select reels (twenty takes of every single line in every scene for Frances Ha!) and how important it is to build emotional truth for the audience. For instance, on the horror film Hereditary, she said the key to making the film scary was not the jump scares or the horror itself, but the dramatic scenes that made the audience believe that the relationships between the characters were authentic.

Can't wait to have her back again!