Tina Kakadelis
In 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the larger world was introduced to an alternate version of the webbed crusader: Spider-Man Noir. Voiced by Nicolas Cage in the animated film, this version of Spider-Man instantly became a fan favorite. Spider-Man Noir calls 1930s New York City home and is your typical gumshoe private eye. Almost a decade after Into the Spider-Verse, Spider-Man Noir gets the star treatment in co-showrunner Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot’s Spider-Noir. In the series, Cage’s character is known as Ben Reilly, aka The Spider, who has ended his web-slinging ways, but a detective case may force him to take on the mantle once again.
Editor Jennifer Barbot is responsible for editing Episodes 1 and 5 of Spider-Noir, but this isn’t her first unconventional superhero rodeo.
You started in journalism school, which is probably an odd beginning for an editor. How did you make that transition? Is there anything from journalism that has maybe unexpectedly transferred really well into the world of editing?
Jennifer Barbot: That’s a really fun question. Remarkably, I kind of fell into editing and it turned out that I’m obsessed with it. I love it and it completely fits my personality. What happened was I was a journalist in college and I was also working as a waitress to pay my way through university. My journalism professor said there was a job at the local PBS station for an in-house editor.
I liked putting together my journalism pieces, and what I really liked was finding out what the real story was. I got the job at PBS and I was their in-house editor. I would work all hours of the night because they were super-flexible and I could do it whenever I wanted. I just loved it. It completely fit with my personality and I thought, I could actually do this as a career. I moved to Los Angeles and I was an assistant editor on several movies before going to television. I got so lucky.
What translated from journalism was that an editor is really good about honing down the story. What is the story? What do you want to say? What’s your topic sentence? How do you wrap it up? What’s the arc? All of that definitely translated to film and television.
Talking about film and TV, you’re now doing Spider-Noir, which I feel is a very exciting project that I don’t think anybody could have predicted would exist ten years ago. How did you get involved with Spider-Noir? What were you excited to dig into?
I came to Spider-Noir because the showrunner of the job that I did before, Peter Craig, was friends with Oren Uziel and said he’s looking for an editor for his pilot, would you be interested? Peter told me what it was about and he told me it starred Nicolas Cage.
First of all, yes, who doesn’t love Nicolas Cage? He’s amazing. It also sounded like a very interesting project. I met Oren and we got along well. It felt like a really good fit. I liked Oren’s take on the character. It wasn’t hard for me when I read it. I was like, oh, I see this. I understand what he’s going for.
With Spider-Noir it’s obvious from the title, but the series is borrowing so much from the noir genre. Did you go into that meeting having rewatched a bunch of films from that era to emulate the pacing and the editing style?
For sure, for sure. Something Oren really cited was The Third Man, which is an interesting film. I watched Casablanca and so many different films that are classic noir.
I also listened to a lot of the old scores because I wasn’t sure what direction Oren wanted to go in. If he wanted to do a classical old score or if he wanted to do a modern score. I also looked at a black-and-white photography book that I happened to have. Oren and I talked a lot about lighting and what that would look like.
You mentioned pacing, and we did a lot of experimenting with that in terms of whether a 1930s noir-style pacing would work in a modern piece. I think we came up with an interesting blend where there’s some ’30s pacing that’s a little bit slower, but then there’s the rat-tat-tat of modern movies as well, which is really fun.
This isn’t the first superhero show you’ve worked on. How was this editing different from Jessica Jones? Especially when it comes to the fighting sequences.
The thing both of them have in common is that they’re character-driven pieces first, and then the superhero part comes after. Jessica Jones was several years ago, so visual effects weren’t where they are now. On Spider-Noir, we had a whole visual effects department that started with us from the very beginning. In Jessica Jones, we did visual effects at the end.
It was interesting, because Nic’s character is an aging superhero, right? How do you show fight scenes for an aging superhero? That was different from Jessica Jones. That was something I really liked about the script as well, thinking about what it’s like to be an aging superhero and then to get to see Nicolas Cage do it.
He was so great. He looked like he was having so much fun. It’s infectious when you see that.
I read that he described the performance he was going for as Bogart mixed with Bugs Bunny. It makes perfect sense.
I would not have thought to put it in those terms, but that’s exactly it. It’s in his physicality. He’s a total gumshoe.
You mentioned that you just happened to have the book of black-and-white photography and what I thought was really cool about Spider-Noir is that they’re offering people the ability to watch the series in black and white or true-hue full-color. How did that affect your role?
It was a little bit complicated to get it up and running because there was a lot of conversation about how we were going to do this. Are we going to edit in color? Are we going to edit in black and white? There was one point where we talked about, oh, we would just desaturate our TV and then we could see it in black and white. It has never been done before, right? To have something that simultaneously would be in black and white and in color.
Eventually, we settled on having it in AVID with two lookup tables (LUTs). We had a black-and-white LUT and then we had a color LUT. Visual effects needed to have it in color to work on their part. We had a great visual effects editor, JC Bond, who would just work in color. Then he would apply the black-and-white LUT and we would get it back. Sometimes we would go in for visual effects reviews and it would be in color. That would be the first time I would see it in color. When I edited, I only edited in black and white. I hope everybody watches it in black and white first, then color.
Am I right in saying you edited Episodes 1 and 5?
Yes!
I watched Episode 1 in black and white and then I watched Episode 5 in color. I had a very similar experience of being shocked by that color. As part of a larger editing team, you had to have a shared language of pacing and of how you cut the series. With shows like this, do you get to talk to the other editors? Or is the showrunner the in-between for all of you?
When we started out, I was remote for a while, then I was in-office, back to remote, and then I was in-office. It was back and forth, but there was definitely a period where we were all in the office and we would chat.
There are always lots of conversations going on about different actors, visual effects, or certain sequences we wanted more eyes on. It’s definitely a good community of people and we’re all doing the same job, right?
We all understand what the details are and what it takes to do the job, which is a really hard job. I think there’s just a natural, shared love in there because we’re all doing the same thing. Oren also had a very strong point of view. He knew what he wanted, knew what he liked, and he knew the character so well.
Lastly, I read that you really want to edit something in Spanish or French because that’s part of your background. Why is that something you’re interested in pursuing? Do you think it would change how you edit if you’re editing a different language?
Gosh, I don’t know if I have the answer for that because I haven’t done it yet. I’ve cut some scenes in Japanese for The Man in the High Castle. That was really fun to do because I have a very small understanding of Japanese.
I would love to cut something, particularly in Spanish. The edit is the edit in terms of emotion, telling a story, getting to know a character, being with them, and empathizing with them. I don’t know if it would necessarily change my process.
I know it would be really hard and it would be such a great challenge. I like when it’s hard. Editing is hard. It’s really hard. It uses this part of my brain that then exhausts me, and then I can go to sleep at night. I really appreciate that.
