A return to my series on reviews of worthwhile DVD commentaries. How do you judge a movie’s editing without seeing all the footage the editor had to work with? A flashy cutting style is one thing. But there’s a lot more to editing than that, as I learned from the 1999 DVD commentary for Go (one of my favorite movies of the 90s).

The most striking aspect of the track is how much creative credit director Doug Liman heaps on his editor, Stephen Mirrione, who joins him on the feature-length chat. Liman points out so many specific examples of his cutter’s contributions, it almost made me wonder if Liman was really any good as a director when I first heard the commentary. In fact, he paints himself as quite a novice filmmaker, even drawing attention to shots that were out of focus because he served as his own DP, which he admits he’s not very good at either. It should be noted that this was recorded long before Liman would graduate to make such high octane thrillers as The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

In many cases, Liman describes what he originally intended and how Mirrione magically made the sequences better in ways that Liman couldn’t have planned even if he had thought of them. One scene was originally done in a long, continuous shot that turned out too gimmicky, drawing too much attention to itself, so Mirrione added some cuts. Another amateurish shot was improved not only by quick cutting, but by Mirrione’s decision to drop in dialogue he lifted from a deleted scene. Then, in certain key scenes that needed to be repeated due to the story’s unusual structure, the editor had the idea to remove unnecessary information from the second iterations in ways that Liman says he wouldn’t have had the guts to do.

The film also benefited from being edited concurrently with principal photography. While cutting the car chase in Los Angeles, Mirrione was able to call Liman, still on location in Las Vegas, to tell him what additional shots he needed. Later, Liman would call Mirrione from the set for more coverage advice. Even in post-production, Mirrione would wish for additional shots and Liman would grab a camera that Panavision had let him keep over the summer and get those extra shots. One of those was an insert showing the start of a hotel fire. They ended up setting their production office on fire to do that re-shoot.

While Go had the luxury of a budget about twenty times the size of Liman’s previous indie, Swingers (also edited by Mirrione), there is a ton of useful information about guerrilla filmmaking on this commentary. Less than a year after the DVD’s release, Mirrione went on to win the Oscar for his work on Steven Soderbergh's Traffic and would again be nominated for Babel. It’s easy to see why after hearing what he brings to the table.

What have your filmmaker-editor collaboration experiences been like?

Dan Margules is a screenwriter and co-founder of San Diego Filmmakers. His award-winning short film, Begleiter, is available in a Special Edition from Amazon.com or happy-the-dog.com -- with three audio commentaries, at least one of which mentions the contributions of his editor.