The Art of Script-editing: Kate Leys

By George Louis Bartlett

At the top of the list as one of the most overlooked yet often essential roles in the screenwriting process: the script editor. A difficult job description to nail in a few sentences, the script editor is an engineer of sorts, brought in to work closely with the writer or writer-director to examine what isn’t quite working with the story or screenplay and to, sometimes, propose ways of fixing it. The script editor will enter the process at any stage before production - at the seed of an idea or hours before shoot day. Other than a purely technical function, the script editor will often fulfil a more holistic objective of helping the writer navigate their idea, digging deep into it to find problems or solutions that the writer just can’t see, for multitude of reasons. Sometimes the script editor doesn’t receive a credit, as their part in the process may be minimal from the outside - yet really they’ve usually serve as a crucial part to the whole. 

Kate Leys, veteran UK script editor, has worked as head of development at several companies including Film4, where she helped commission and develop some of the UK’s most successful feature films, including Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting and The Full Monty. Among her more recent productions are films such as Lady Macbeth, Pin Cushion and Churchill. I sat down with her in a cafe in Hackney, the London borough in which she’s lived the whole of her life, to talk about the art of script editing.

GLB—Is script editing an art or a craft?

KL—I think craft is probably the right word to describe script editing. But it’s really interesting. There’s no award, or ever will be. There’s no degree. How do you clarify which part is the script editing? If you go and see a film, if you thought it was well script edited something was probably wrong. It would have to be making itself noticed. 

Because I suppose because the work is about supporting somebody else’s art. It’s incredibly important to not get in the way of that. I think so anyway. The job is about … it’s really important that I’m invisible. I shouldn’t be noticed. 

I think of myself as part of the crew, below the line. I think that’s where I am and I think that’s where the script editor should be. So I’m part of the complex series of people and departments and thinking that make a film happen. You couldn’t make a film without a cinematographer but the cinematographer isn’t making the film. And that’s the same. That’s what I do. 

You can absolutely make a film without a script editor, it isn’t imperative. In the same way that somebody can be their own editor or producer or … some people don’t look to that kind of support. Although, I have never worked on something where it hasn’t been valuable. Even when people hadn’t anticipated it being valuable. So it’s always a good thing but it isn’t essential. 

Do you see yourself a technician?

I see myself as an engineer. There are a lot of metaphors for script editing. The one I hate the most is ‘midwife’. Laughs. I’m not anybody’s midwife. But engineer is the one I like and the one that makes sense for me, I think that’s what I am. So where the filmmaker or a screenwriter is something like an architect and I am the engineer. I’m the hard hat, clipboard … so I would say in that context my work is like an engineer’s work. On the one hand, to make sure that the crazy marvellous magic building you dreamed up isn’t going to fall down and kill anybody. Or just to make sure that you’ve remembered to put a door so that the people who want to go inside it can go inside it. Or not, if you don’t want anyone to go inside it. 

But my job is also maybe to make sure that the beautiful crazy magic building that you’ve dreamed up is the thing that you make, that you don’t compromise yourself. Either by being so ready to compromise that you just keep changing it. Or by not being ready enough to compromise. Which is weird. You could be thinking that what you’re making is magical and actually be designing a Barratt Home. And you might need an engineer to say, Let’s make this really magical. Let’s go for it. Even if what you want to make is a tower made of water let’s damn well make a tower made of water. But it’s as easy to go wrong doing that by refusing to hear as it is by trying to fulfil too many instructions. 

So the question is hearing. Film is collaborative. It’s something that everybody likes to say but something that not very many people like to do. I think that it’s very very difficult for the creative voice to figure out the difference between collaboration and compromise. And I think getting that is enormously difficult. How can I tell the good man from the bad man? How do I know that somebody isn’t trying to make this film something else? How do I know what somebody’s agenda is much less not letting them contaminate my film. Is it going to contaminate my film? Or will it just help the film? What’s the difference? 

So I see my job weirdly in that process rather than me being one of the people that might contaminate the film. My job is to make sure that you’re so clear about what you’re doing, that you’re so happy with what you’re doing. That you’re scared because you’re going further than you thought you would but that you are good with it. That those notes stop becoming threatening and the process stops becoming alarming and becomes instead an understanding that loads of people won’t know what you’re doing and they’re going to tell you all kinds of things. But my job is to get you into a place where you’re so clear about what you’re doing that you know how to tell the good notes from the bad. And that when a good note comes you go, Yeah I’ll have that. Because you’re so comfortable in that fact that it’s your story that a good note is just great, it’s not threatening, it’s not going to contaminate. 

And equally, when you’re in a really good place with your script. When you’re being brave and true, bad notes won’t worry you. You’ll think, Bless their heart; these people have no idea what I’m trying to do. You won’t have to argue with those notes; you can thank whomever the note came from and tell them you’ll give it some thought. And suddenly meetings aren’t war. They aren’t battles. You’re all on the same side. You know it’s possible to start remembering that people who give you notes are doing so from a good place. 

So that’s my job. Not so much to be the person who gives you a list of instructions but to be the person who helps you manage the fact that as a screenwriter you’re going to get opinions from everybody. I’m sure every filmmaker has had somebody come up to them in a bar and give them suggestions on what they should’ve done with their film. That’s the whole point though. You’re out there making a film that goes out to people and you want it to generate a reaction. You want them to see it and feel passionately about. Because the thing to remember is that that passion is sometimes going to come out in stupid comments – but it is still passion. 

When you make film filmmakers can often have that fear. It’s insanely difficult writing a screenplay. And it’s insanely exposing. Which is why of course most people on this planet don’t want to do it. And so I do always love that writers tend to think that everybody wants to be a writer and they’re the only ones who can be bothered. But it’s not true; I don’t think most of us want to be writers at all. It’s too scary. So the desire to stay in control all of the time is understandable. But doomed to fail. Because when you make film, what is it that you make? It’s hilarious. You don’t have a thing. You don’t have a world where you can say, Look, here it is and here’s the zebra crossing and here’s the highway. What you’ve created is something that exists entirely in the head of the person who’s watching it. Even when you’re holding cans of film in your hands. That’s not what you’ve made. What you’ve made is an experience and everybody is going to experience it differently. And there’s nothing you can do about that. Comments come because it matters to people. You want people in the bar arguing about your film after watching it. People get set on fire, that’s great. That’s what filmmaking does. 

And I think the business of getting bad notes during the process comes from the same place. The thing about film is that we all take it so personally. So we all feel that we can do it. And that must be one of the most frustrating things for a screenwriter. Because only when you sit down and write INT. CAFE – DAY do you realise what a total nightmare it is. Most people just never get that far so they carry on thinking it’s easy or they carry on thinking it’s fine to tell you how to do it. And I think the only thing you have to hold on to is that that’s fair enough. They don’t know how you do what you do. And you don’t know how they do what they do. I guess the only difference is that they think they know how to do what we do. There’s nothing you can do about that, that’s the nature of storytelling. Everybody feels like that about stories. You know that feeling you have when you’re watching a really great film? And you feel like the only person there that really gets it. The thing is, that happens to everybody. People want to be heard. 

A lot of my job is making meetings manageable. And a lot of the reason they’re not manageable is actually it’s really quite difficult to be absolutely clear about what you’re doing. All screenwriters will know that. You have a strong idea about what your screenplay is going to be and then you write it and it isn’t that. Or it refuses to be that, no matter how you try and force it to be the thing you started out with. When you’re immersed in screenwriting you’re looking at it page by page so it’s very difficult to stay on top of what you’re doing. And you can often have a vague sense that it isn’t what you want it to be – in a way that you often don’t feel certain about. And again that can make you very defensive. Someone crashes into that and goes, Obviously you’ve written a thriller. When that’s really not what you were doing. 

What are the practicalities of dealing with that?

There’s a point where a film must be handed onto a director. That must happen. Otherwise the film won’t live. Just like the director has to trust the cast or the colour graders or the distributors. Go and talk to distributors about directors sitting in the room and giving them orders about exactly which photo to use. It can get uncomfortable. Laughs. Everybody is trying to control the experience all the way down the line and it’s never a good idea. 

I never get let onto location or into a studio. It’s really, honestly, of all the people who are useless on a film set, the script editor must be the most useless – I just eat the sandwiches or stand in the way. But whenever I do get the chance I have always loved that thing … you know? You’re always somewhere really stupid, it’s always cold and often dark and you’re in a field somewhere and there is anything from thirty to five hundred people there but however few people there are they’re all specialists. They’re all working at quite a very high level of expertise in something. And you don’t get that if you walk into most industrial workplaces. There are usually a lot of drones and that’s not true in film. And that’s an extraordinary thing when you watch it happen. Everybody’s grumbling and everyone’s complaining but as you build up to a take, it looks like bedlam from afar but it’s not, and it’s amazing. It seems to me that people forget that that’s how filmmaking works from the very beginning. 

I’m in a funny position. I am below the line. But I tend to work in a position where the only other people are above the line. So I’m there with the writer and the director and usually a producer and even sometimes cast but just the writer and me sometimes. But even when there are only those people, still those are the people you need. You really do need that many brains. There’s a point where the script needs somebody else’s voice because you’re telling the script to somebody. 

How do you decide which projects to work on?

You know somebody once asked me how do I decide which projects I decide are going to work. Laughs. You can’t possibly know that. But I’ve been doing it for long enough that I’ve learned now that my choices are based on good people to drown with. That’s really what you’re looking for. There are so many holes that might let water in the ship so what you really want to know is that you’ve got big hearts with a sense of humour and if you’re all going to go down on something you’re still going to talk to each other. And that’s it. 

I think in the business of making a film, including writing a film, you’re always going to need other people. And I think the process of figuring out how to negotiate that is a big part of the job. Because if you’re the writer you’re technically the person who needs the least people, but you are the one who’s talking to the most people. Because they’re all coming to see the story that you shaped. Your work will always involve other people. 

I had a really interesting conversation with a writer once a long long time ago and I asked him, How do you do that? He was telling me that he had sent out an early draft of an outline and everybody hated it. Back in the draw. And I asked him how he took his child out of the drawer and sent it out into the world where literally he was asking people to judge it – that’s what they do. And he said, he was much older, and he said, with a kind of careful smile, he said, because if I leave it in the draw it’ll shrivel up and die. And he’s right. That’s the point. It’s unimaginably frightening. 

I think that films are amazingly like real life. In that all they do is focus in and take everything else out. Film speaks to us because we bring all of our faculties into the cinema but when we know it’s a story, whether it’s a fictional or factual story, we remember to ask the right questions, which is one of the things we fail to do in our lives. So we connect with films in an extraordinary clear sighted and clear thinking way. It’s a stripped down version of life where we see instantly what is going to happen and that’s fantastic. 

My example of that would be the way that in real life we often know people who tell us that they’re unhappy, that they’re in a terrible relationship or a terrible job or a terrible flat. And in real life it’s possible to try and engage with that and support them and offer them help. But it might be months or years before we realise that they don’t actually want to leave the relationship they just want to be in a relationship that they’re not happy with. For whatever reason; people have very strange comfort zones. But we don’t remember that in real life. We don’t remember to understand that. So we’ll offer them a bed or introduced them to other nice people or say, ‘Leave the job, leave the job.’ But then you realise that maybe they don’t want to leave the job and for some reason they want to be in a job that makes them miserable because for some reason feeling helpless is their thing. In the cinema we know that instantly. It’s stripped down in a way that is absolutely truthful but clearer. So it isn’t that characters are simpler or rendered two dimensional but actually that we switch our brains on and relate to them in a different way. 

Where am I when I’m watching a film? And obviously because of my work I’m constantly thinking, ‘Who’s the writer? Where is the writer?’ But it took me a long time to understand that the writer and the audience are in the same place. That the writer is in the seat with the audience saying, ‘See him, see her and see what’s going to happen?’ And there’s that collusion that you’re audience is somebody you are showing the key things you want them to see in the way that you’ve seen them.  That’s where we are. We aren’t the character; we’re watching the character. We’re not in the story we’re watching the story. 

There is nothing and there must be something. That’s what the writer does. The writer dreamt that up, that angle on the story is because of the writer; whatever the director brings to it the writer’s voice can’t be taken away. 

I remember when I was first starting out a veteran script editor said to me, ‘You know, you’re going to find that there are some people who won’t talk to you when the film is made. Because they can’t bare that they needed your help.’ And he’s right. There are some people for whom you are just the screw. And that’s their call. And I think that’s a shame. But it’s the nature of anxiety, I think. 

I often think of filmmaking as a beehive.

Yes. I’m so excited. I had a nest of wild bees in my back garden. A few years ago it was a woodpecker nest and slowly over last summer I’d realised it’d become a honeybee hive. They swarmed, it was completely wild. But they were high so they didn’t bother us at all. And anyway I knew a guy who knew a guy who knew something about bees who called a bee guy. And when he arrived the next morning to collect the hive all of the neighbours were hanging over the back wall watching. So he just stood on a chair and told anybody who wanted to know what he was doing to come over and he’d give them twenty minutes to explain when he was doing. And he explained. It was just heaven; our own little bee presentation. As he collected the bees he told us what he was doing and talked us through the whole business of the collecting, thinking and whatnot. And I was so excited and thought, ‘This is like film. This is just like film at its best.’

But bees don’t have egos to satisfy. 

Bees can’t tell stories either. You know, you have to have an ego or you can’t have an angle on a story. I don’t think you should be egoless. Your point of view is what we buy tickets for. I want to know what it is that you’re seeing. Even if I don’t know who you are, even if I don’t know your name. That’s what we go to the cinema for. 

So a bee movie wouldn’t work. Because it would be tidy, but it wouldn’t have an angle. The angle is the point. I want to know what you see. 

The other aspect of storytelling is about trying to figure out what’s true. And I think that as long as you’re doing that, factored in with your point of view, that’s the point. That’s not about dominating that’s about getting naked. That’s about trying to get to something. It’s not simply about telling your point of view, it’s about telling me what it’s like. That’s why it’s possible to make a film that questions or a film in which you make a fool of yourself or in which your laugh at yourself. I don’t think it’s about worrying that your point of view might be wrong. That’s why it takes such guts. 

The guiding principle for me as a script editor is the same thing. I have to say things that are true. Which sounds really obvious but actually is important. So how I do it is by a huge amount of work, mostly. By the time I was twenty-three years old I’d probably done my ten thousand hours. And to be honest I’ve probably just done another ten thousand since then. Because weirdly this is all I’ve ever been interested in. This is thing I was doing when everybody else was climbing trees and riding their bikes. Not just endlessly reading stories and watching television and movies but endlessly trying to figure out how they worked. And when they didn’t why they didn’t. 

And then there’s the twenty-five years of experience of working in every part of the film industry but always focussing on development. And then there are fifteen years of experience within that of being a script editor. And then there’s the work I do on each project. Sometimes I’m looking at something scribbled on the back of a napkin but sometimes I’m looking at an edited screenplay. My job is to climb all over it. I will read script five times or more if I need to. And I will figure out how to climb inside it. I was reading something the other day where the structure was really complex and complicated. It was a thriller structure but there were 250 scenes in 85 pages. It was a really busy script. There was something I needed to do to get inside the script. And in the end the only thing to do was to literally make a list of 250 scenes separated out, which took a long time but at the end of it I knew exactly how that script worked. 

The hilarious thing about being a script editor is that, unlike many other jobs in film, if I’m not brilliant at it I am completely useless. You can have a not-all-that-brilliant art director, you can cope with that. But what’s the point of a crap script editor? So I do a huge amount of work to make clear that I’m talking about the script and not my opinion. Because my opinion is extremely fascinating to me and, you know, potentially mildly interesting to those who love me very much but after that there’s no value. 

My job is always to achieve that feeling, whoever is the creative force, of clarity. So whether there’s just a writer or whether they’re about to shoot, whoever it is that I’m talking to, my job is to say, This is the script and this is what it’s saying. Everybody keeps worrying about the ending but this is why they’re talking about the ending. So my job is always to bring clarity. Sometimes my job is to just stay stuff out loud. Sometimes my notes are script notes for the writer. Sometimes my notes are story notes for everybody. And sometimes they are process notes. It’s not about making the script better, but it’s about supporting the person whose voice matters and to get them to a place where they can most bravely or comfortably and clearly get to the thing they need to get to. 

One of the things I’ve learned is to trust the words. Trust what it is that people say. Listen to what people are saying, read what they’re writing and look at that and trust it. For example, I sometimes get writers to write their story in a sentence. And sometimes you can see that it doesn’t work. And that’s because you just named it, you just wrote it down you just called it. And when you do that you actually have to choose what part you’re going to choose to write down. 

Sometimes what a writer needs is to know what questions to ask themselves. I always want to say that nobody ever really needs me; they just need to learn how to do that kind of thinking. 

One of the shortest meetings I’ve ever had was with a writer and a director, two different people. And I’ve known them both for years. But they were stuck developing this thing and so I read it and scheduled a couple of hours to speak about it. So we sat down and we did the greetings and ordered the coffee and they said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘Well, basically, not enough is going wrong.’ And they both went, ‘Oh, god. Of course!’ And that was it. 

What do you think about the writer-director?

It’s different jobs. You have to get them to understand two different jobs. Directors decide things and writers ask questions. They drive each other mad. You know when you’re lost as a writer and you can’t remember why you started it? And you’re not even sure if it’s written in English anymore. And it’s making you feel both guilty and angry and you suffer all of the time. And everything about it is awful. That’s when you clean your fridge, ring your grandma, go to supermarket and cook really nice meals. Now imagine that you’re also the director and you have the option just to decide how to shoot it instead. Think how tempting that would be to not feel that pain to not feel that sandpaper in your eyeballs that writing really feels like but to go somewhere much easier. Writer-directors do that every twenty minutes. Every time it begins to get hard they go, ‘The titles will roll here.’ What you really need to do is to get the director out of the room. That’s why you send directors on location recces and to film festivals during development. 

But if I offered you a million pounds to write a screenplay but on the condition that the director would be next to you all of the time; in your bed; in the shower with you; everywhere all of the time; you’d never take it. And that’s what it’s like. It’s hard being a writer-director. And we have to look after them otherwise they’ll go insane. It’s two different skills. What you need to do as a writer is to try and remember how to tune the director out. And a director doesn’t want a screenplay pre-directed. That’s the last thing that they want. And if you remind them that they often get it, they want something that is tight. So trying to clarify that and making space for the writer to be the writer is part of my job. 

Part of the writer’s job is to push things open and let them sit there for a bit. It’s important to learn to live with things that are sorted out, learning to live with unanswered questions, to wait for hours or days or weeks until you’ve found your way to an answer. And that’s a hard thing for anyone to do. 

You said once that you’ve worked with all kinds of writers, novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists etc… and they’ve all found writing a screenplay to be the hardest thing they’ve ever done. Why?

That’s true. I think it’s an expectation thing. Everybody loves the movies and everybody thinks movies are super clear and simple. You know how a really good film has a certain inevitability to it? Well that can really mislead people into thinking writing screenplay is easy. So I think it’s partly an expectation thing. 

But partly what I think is difficult about it is how much of a script isn’t written. How much of it isn’t on the page. You have to know so much to get to the true tiny moment of a character doing something that instantly reveals who they are. How do you know, for example, that the person who just got on the bus, let’s say, is fundamentally angry? It’s not the fact that they’ve made a little monologue about their history. It’s not about that we know they were in prison when they were six. It’s not any of those things. That’s the thing that the writer has to get to. The writer needs to know all of the things that make the character angry in order to figure out what the truth is, in order to work out what the nature of a gesture is. Whether it’s that their back is a little too straight or whether it’s that they don’t smile at the bus driver or whether it’s that they smile and their back is perfectly relaxed yet we still know. Laughs. The writer has to have all of that stuff taped and then not write it. 

I always think it’s extraordinary when you look at a screenplay and see how much white space there is. So much empty space. The whole damn thing is double-spaced. The margins are enormous and then the dialogue margins are even bigger. It’s all so underwritten. And yet is had to be absolutely compelling brilliant and page turning otherwise as a piece of writing it won’t work. And it also has to do its job, it has to give us a window onto something that is true and life changing. Anything that’s true will do that. It’s not like a film must change our lives. But a film that shows us something true, however tiny, will change our lives.

What do think about screenplay as literature? 

Nobody talks about that. But I love making people look at the first page of a hundred different screenplays and the language that is used and the syntax and the length of sentences, the nature and style of the writing – it’s all doing the job of communicating how it’s going to feel to watch the film. So you can’t make a movie on a page. Which is why writing shot directions is a massive waste of time. But what you can do is try and write the way it will feel to watch the movie. And that is a hard job to do when there’s mostly white space on a page. It’s an extraordinarily difficult thing we ask you to do. It’s like playing ten dimensional chess. 

Every now and then in the film industry – and across my life working in film this has happened five or six times – somebody turns up and they make some kind of presentation and they make a speech or they have a launch party and some festival or something. And they usually come from outside of the business. And they say, We’re gonna do things a bit differently. You know, we’ve had a look at how things work in film. We can see how you’re getting things wrong. So what we’re going to do is different. We’re going to development them much faster than you do. And I’m always endlessly impressed at how polite the film industry is when this happens. But it never ever, ever worked. 

There is a reason it takes the time it takes. There is a reason the success rate is so small. Because it is very, very difficult. It’s emotionally and psychological difficult. It’s also difficult artistically because it’s about figuring out what you really think about something. And getting to that is the hardest job in the world. It’s bizarre. 

What’s the worst note you’ve ever heard being given?

Laughs. “The characters aren’t really there yet.” Laughs again. What is a writer supposed to do with that? I remember sitting with a writer once who just yelled, ‘They are here! They’re here on the page!’