Close Cuts: Sam Bould & The Sacred Egg on the director-editor partnership

Speaking to Little Black Book, Ed, Alex & Sam discuss what makes the enduring director-editor relationship work.

Close Cuts: Sam Bould & The Sacred Egg on the director-editor partnership

Sam Bould and directing duo The Sacred Egg have been working together for twelve years, and in that time they’ve collaborated on a number of acclaimed, award-winning commercial projects and music videos. Speaking to Little Black Book, Ed, Alex & Sam discuss what makes the enduring editor-director relationship work. Read the full feature here.

The Sacred Egg (Ed Kaye): 

I’ve had the privilege of staring at the back of Sam’s head for over a decade now. In the early years he had a kind of slick back hair do, that fell over the top of his crown and draped itself down the back of his cranium. Nowadays he’s got a military shaved style, grade 2 on top. grade 1 on the sides. When I get the back of the head that means he’s working. Actually editing. Maybe something isn’t working edit wise and he needs 5 minutes to try something. Or maybe I’ve suggested something, probably explained it very badly (but Sam knows how to translate it). He gives it a go, he shows me, but we end up changing it back to how it was before. This happens a lot. 

The back of the head is where things actually get done. It’s business time. Concentration and nothing else. However at some point the chair always swivels. The back of the head becomes a face. And a new sam appears. A new director editor dynamic takes place. Sam turns from an editor into a kind of hybrid person. His new role is now somewhere between therapist, friend and local lunch expert. He becomes the person who helps you go from your shoot self back to your normal self over the course of an edit. You walk in having slightly lost yourself in a dark damp Eastern European warehouse and you leave whole again. Ready to integrate yourself back into a normal life again. 

The truth is you need both the back of the head and the front of it to be a successful editor. The human side, that helps directors navigate what is a very strange career with some grounding and friendship. But you need to be a good editor. Someone with all the skills to technically put something together. Luckily both the front and back of Sam’s head are good. And the reassuring familiarity of seeing them amongst all the other unknowns in a director’s life can’t be underestimated. The question is… now he knows how much I stare at the back of his head – will he stick with military haircut, or will he surprise me by getting something a little more spicy? Go on Sam, grow yourself a rat’s tail. 

The Sacred Egg (Alex Mavor): 

It takes a while to become a director, and also, it seems, to get to know your editor. 

We started out together in music videos, then came commercials and most recently some narrative projects. Music videos allowed us to probe different sides of Sam. Occasionally flashy and tricksy, crowd pleasing stuff that lots of other editors aspire to and celebrate. But more often Sam’s edits were understated and deeply satisfying. They just felt good. He had to politely teach us that you don’t always need to cut to the beat. 

The discipline of commercials introduced us to how Sam could take something and make it tighter and tighter. Sam is a lean, obsessive cyclist and proves that edits are delicate machines like bicycles which ‘only by moving can balance / only by balancing move’ (Michael Donaghy, ‘Machines’). As he sits there working, quietly, patiently, and the seasons change, you begin to notice things like the tattoos on the backs of his calves and you discover (on request) that they merely represent the intergalactic battle between good and evil across the universe. Our first ever job as directors was a music video with Sam, back in 2009. Maybe the cosmic forces were on our side after all.

Sam’s sensibilities are more nuanced than good or evil though. After a rare disagreement between myself and Ed, Sam described the situation as an inversion of a childhood memory, one we all have, where you are sat in the back seat of a car listening to your parents arguing. Only in this version Sam found himself sitting up front, clinging to the wheel of the edit, while a stony silence descended on the sofa behind him. This sensitivity is what’s appeared in his edits of the more recent narrative projects we have worked on. The writer / director Céline Sciamma describes writing as ‘thinking about writing’. With Sam the approach to story is equally thoughtful, often helping us work out what it is exactly that we are trying to do. 

The paths of editor and director are particularly winding and indirect. We’ve been lucky to run parallel to Sam. Or maybe it’s that only once we have gotten to know and test Sam fully will we actually fully become Directors ourselves. 

Sam Bould: 

The director, editor relationship can be a pretty intense one. You’re stuck in a small dark room with each other, obsessing over 60 seconds of film for days, sometimes weeks on end. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are, If you don’t get on, the relationship won’t last long. Thankfully Alex and Ed have been excellent company in my dark little room for many years now.As the great David Brent once said “we’re having a laugh, whilst getting the job done”. 

From the first promo we worked on together, it was clear these guys were something special and I was going to have to raise my game to get to their level. Every one of their projects has pushed me technically and creatively and I credit them with making me a much better editor. 

The edit process can be an emotional experience at times, we’ve had some extreme highs and lows together, I feel strangely honoured to have been witness to their only ever argument and I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more time in hotel rooms with them than I have my wife. All of this has contributed to a bond and understanding that can’t be replicated, as a result, cutting with Alex and Ed never really feels like a job and I believe that is the key to making great work. Or it could just be that they like coming here for a nap.