Whoa!
Before a trailer starts on YouTube
they call them bumpers.
Because if a trailer just started the way, you know
it does right after the green card
where we kind of get into the story and we meet our characters...
people might turn it off.
But if you've been given a taste
oh, it's going to get crazy by the end!
So that's the thinking behind that.
So I'm Bill Neil and I'm a trailer editor
and I work at Buddha Jones.
That is a project where we worked from dailies...
where we didn't get a cut of the movie at first.
And so I just watched dailies
as they came in, as they were shot.
And you start to get kind of a sense
of what the movie's going to be
and you start to kind of get a feel.
"But that's why back at the Haywood Ranch..."
The song is Fingertips by Stevie Wonder.
Jordan Peele suggested to use that song.
You know, we're playing it almost diagetically at first.
"We had skin in the game."
Like diagetic means, like it's part of the scene
and then she's dancing to it
and then do a little kind of fun editorial tricks
where like, on the beat of the music
you try to have his hoofs...
kind of hit the beats.
And then we cut outside to Daniel with the horse
and making the music really kind of echoey
and it's kind of creepy.
And then go to that super quiet, big, wide shot.
The other thing I do there, I have the crickets...
and then I have the crickets
stop chirping and it just goes quiet.
I'm taking a cue
from the movie The Fog:
John Carpenter's The Fog.
There's a moment in the fog
where right before the evil fog rolls in there's crickets
and then it's a wide shot of the house and they stop chirping.
And then the fog kind of rolls in.
So I kind of took it from that.
It's an homage, I guess.
Or I'm stealing. I'm not sure.
And then after that, we have the big
"From Jordan Peele" kind of come down.
And I guess it's known now that
it's kind of Jordan Peele's alien movie
but at the time
wasn't for sure what the heck was going on.
And I thought the big thing coming down...
"From" underneath the "Jordan Peele"
I felt—because normally "from" would be on top
of the name Jordan Peele.
But...
I flipped it because it reminded me of the way
the spaceship looked in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
when it came down.
And also that shot of that house
reminded me of the shot from "Close Encounters"
when the little kid gets abducted.
We start deconstructing the song of "Fingertips"
and just using the rhythm from it.
If you ever heard that song, this is very deconstructed.
And then we add a lot of sound design and layers and rises...
and stuff underneath.
A rise is—it's a piece of music. It's—
[mimics tone going up and also getting louder]
and kind of getting bigger and bigger and bigger
and louder and louder and louder.
[tone going up and getting louder]
In the early days, when I was cutting trailers
there are basically no trailer sound design libraries
and I'd want something like a rise and I'd be like
"I want something that sounds like
that Beatles song, A Day in the Life."
Because at the end of that, it has a big, huge rise.
Now there's about a billion and a billion differnt kinds of like
choirs...
and synths...
and huge orchestras and hits and everything you can imagine.
Not even just music, like just sound effects libraries.
There's like, like a little kid laughing.
And I've used this sound effect a lot.
[Ominous, piano tone overlayed by child's laughter]
[explosion sounds and crackling]
[percussive marimba tones and timpani]
"Attack!"
"Russia."
[percussive marimba tones and timpani]
"Oh."
Stanley Kubrick had, like
some of the best trailers of all time.
That's so innovative.
I mean...
I've always looked at that as one of those crazy
you know, kind of groundbreaking trailers.
That's back in the 60s when, like
the French new wave was starting to have an effect on Hollywood.
And that was embracing that crazy, non-linear, weird editing.
Almost overboard.
Back in the 60s, they didn't have
trailer houses really doing it.
I think there were people on the lot doing that
or the filmmakers were doing it.
"You have a date with Carrie."
Carrie is...
it's a lot of VO.
"A girl who lives in that creepy house."
The thing about the Carrie trailer
that I always say is that it kind of gives away...
every big moment in the movie.
"For Carrie, it will be a dream come true."
"For everyone else, it will be a nightmare."
You see who dies.
You see what happens to her at the prom.
You kind of see everything.
So when people complain about trailers
giving away everything nowadays...
I mean, like, well look at the "Carrie" trailer.
The other fun thing about the "Carrie" trailer
is if you see like— there's a part in it
where they have a wipe in the frame...
when the blood is poured on her and it wipes the frame red.
And although in the movie
it does kind of—the lights all go red
they kind of go red after that.
But I think they had to do that because
the MPAA has to approve all trailers
for general audience viewing.
Doesn't allow you to show actual red blood.
You can't, you know, for a regular green band trailer
which is meant for all audiences, you can't show blood.
That is just one of the best trailers ever.
It's so good!
That sound design is amazing.
[high pitched rising tone increasing in intensity]
That alien [vocalizes a howl].
[high pitched tone continues]
That screaming sound.
Nowadays, we kind of call that like a signature sound
which is kind of a repeated sound that you kind of
you know, kind of latch on to.
I sort of really kind of focusing on signature sounds
like with the trailer I did for "Texas Chainsaw Massacre".
The sound I'm talking about is this this crazy camera—
[vocalizing, imitating the high-pitched sound a camera's flash makes]
[high pitched, mechanical whine]
And I loved the original
and I wanted to kind of make reference to that.
"This film is positively ruthless
in its attempt to drive you right out of your mind."
[high pitched, mechanical whine]
So, when I was a kid
I loved, like, those horror— viny records of sound effects.
Like "Sounds to Make You Shiver".
[evil, witch-like laughter]
Disney's like, "Haunted Mansion".
[thunder and rain effect]
And so I guess maybe that kind of inspired me a little bit
you know, in terms of being too focused on the sounds of horror.
"When the world is in trouble..."
In the 90s, there was a lot of VO [voice over]
and a little bit more of a formula.
"The most brilliant commander in the Soviet navy..."
"From the sewers of Gotham..."
I mean, it's a cliché to say "In a world...".
"In a world where both of our cars were totally underwater..."
"and advanced technology..."
"1500 active volcanoes in the world..."
We worked with Don Lafontaine
who was the the King of VO.
He's the one you always associate with "In a world...".
He was really cool.
He was always professional, but he was like the number one.
And he had his own limo.
And he would be driven from VO booth to VO booth.
There are people who try to break into the business
and then you'd give them a shot.
And there was such a difference between...
you know, a Don Lafontaine who would nail it.
"They destroyed everything he had..."
He would nail whatever kind of nuance you that you wanted
and somebody who just didn't know how to do it—
And it seems like it's easy, but it was really hard.
You have such a short time in any trailer to kind of...
engage people or get people to lock in.
And I think sound and music and sound effects...
they're the soul of the trailer.
There's another part in that trailer that uses sound that—
where we go to black.
We stop everything, we go to black.
And we do have a couple cards
that say, like "From producer Michael Bay"
but we have the sound of this girl running and screaming
and it's in the black.
And you hear these these footsteps...
[heavy footsteps and the sound of breathing]
And then it's quiet and then—
[chainsaw motor starting]
chainsaw comes through.
And that's another one of my favorite parts of it.
So sometimes we get a rough cut of the movie.
50% of the time we don't even get a rough cut.
We get to start getting dailies as soon as they start shooting.
We're rarely, if ever, working from a final cut of a feature.
And "Halloween" I would say...
the line reading Jamie has of...
"So I could kill him."
"So I can kill him."
...in the middle of the trailer is a different take.
"So I can kill him."
And then I think we edited the
the end scare of that trailer
where the the girl...
is trying to close the closet door and then Michael appears.
That is edited differently than it is in the final movie.
And I remember I saw it and I was like
"Oh, they cut that differently than I thought they would."
Well, the beginning of the "10 Cloverfield Lane" trailer...
is, you know, kind of just a fun, goofy song.
They seem like they're having fun.
It's not really like jokey together.
They've called it a rug pull
where it starts off one way and then it changes.
The rug pull in that is a little bit more gradual.
A normal rug pull is, you know, "Oh my God, it looks funny."
It's funny. And then bam, something changes.
"I can talk to Santa."
"All right, revelers."
"Welcome to your worst Christmas ever."
"Let's go!"
Using sound effects or movements, punches...
in beat with the music and time with the music.
It's all over the place.
Rhythm is such like a basic human sense...
that when you kind of tap into that in such a kind of cool way
way with the punches, I mean
I use a little bit in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood".
I call it "click click whir whir".
Because it's kind of what it is.
It's this kind of use of rhythm and rhythmic cutting.
One metaphor I want to say about trailers.
This was told to me by a studio exec named Tony Sella.
So this metaphor about trailers is like.
It's like trying to sell a jigsaw puzzle.
And in order to sell the jigsaw puzzle
you can't show the whole picture on the box.
You are only allowed to show four pieces of that puzzle.