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It: Welcome to Derry Editor on Muschiettis, TV vs Film Editing & More

Editor Esther Sokolow (The Flash) spoke with us about her work on Andy and Barbara Muschietti's It: Welcome to Derry, pacing, and more.

Esther Sokolow has been active in Hollywood for over 15 years since her days as a production assistant. She has since evolved into visual effects, script supervising, and editing, with notable credits including Sony's The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) and Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), as well as Netflix's The Guilty. Recently, she's been a frequent collaborator of director/producer/writers Andy & Barbara Muschietti on their projects, like The Flash (2023), as assistant editor, and It: Chapter Two (2019). Sokolow spoke with Bleeding Cool about her latest venture in HBO's It: Welcome to Derry, which functions as a prequel to the It films, which is based on the Stephen King novel; her creative relationship with the sibling duo, advantages working in TV have over film as far as narratives go, balancing narratives among the ensemble cast, and coordinating with her co-editors.

It: Welcome to Derry Editor Esther Sokolow on Helping to Bring the HBO Prequel Series to Life

When you got involved with It: Welcome to Derry, was it something that was the plan all along since you got to work with Andy and Barbara for It: Chapter Two?

Yeah. I was actually working on The Flash (2023) with Andy and Barbara at the time, and this was a year before we even went into production on It: Welcome to Derry. Barbara came into my office and pitched me coming on board as an editor on the show, which was a dream come true, so I knew well ahead of time.

What's it like working with the Muschiettis and their various projects, and establishing that slow build at the beginning of the series and into what you're working with now?

Yeah, Andy and Barbara are siblings, and that core of family spreads to everyone else on the team. They're intentional in who they work with, having a family feel from the start with every department, and we all became really close. They set that tone really on to make everyone feel comfortable, engaged, and they're a wonderful partnership, and it makes everyone feel that energy.

Having worked in both the film and the TV side of things, do you find that it's a little more advantageous to work on series like this to handle the pacing on the editing side of things compared to when you work on films with them?

One of the things that's so beautiful about King's novel is how it takes its time, how you get these explorations of characters that aren't necessarily always going to be central to the main plot. That's difficult to balance in a feature setting where you need to focus on your core hero's journey, keep propulsion and tension for a two-to-three-hour runtime. In a TV environment, you can take your time. It's eight hours of a show, and we explored the parents of not just the Losers Club of this era. We got to explore a lot more of the underbelly of racism and dairy. All of those were themes in the novel, but didn't get their moment to shine in the film version.

What was the most difficult part about just balancing the narratives and making sure that, since it's an ensemble, they get their adequate time?

Yeah. Weaving together when you wanted to, when we wanted to check in with each character, was something we finessed in the editing process. Sometimes what makes sense on the script, once you start stepping back and looking at the pacing of the episode, maybe we're with the kids too much. When we get adults in an episode, it feels lopsided.

Maybe we love the kids so much that we need to make sure that we're peppering in the military storyline so that even if people don't understand why they're living with those characters, if it happens early enough, you go, "Okay, I'm on for the ride. I'm going to get to know Leroy (Jovan Adepo) a little bit better and go on that journey, so we did a lot of stepping back. Andy and I work with scene cards, where we print out an image per scene on the wall, and it allows us, not just on the timeline level or watching it, but visually in the room. You can step back and look at what the shape of the episode is, and so sometimes Andy and I would move scene cards around and go, "Maybe if we move Leroy's story up or Dick Halloran's story into this place, it'll change how the pacing of the episodes feels," so we did a lot of curating.

Was there much coordination aside from working with Andy? Did you sync with the other editors, such as Glenn (Garland), Matthew (V. Colonna), and Grant (Wooldridge), regarding which parts and sequences to focus on to ensure it's a cohesive unit?

Yeah, so we were always watching each other's cuts. I was having Glenn in my room, showing him my cuts, asking if this or this was working. Matt as well, and then Matt's assistant, Grant. I was also very much leaning on my amazing assistant Janie Gaddy, who was my right-hand woman in everything creatively. We were working out of the Warner Bros studio in person, and so you could hear through the walls. You could hear other people watching their cuts, and they could hear me watching my cuts. You always had that energy of how everyone's feeling creatively. I shared a wall with Matt, and he's amazing. He has this big booming laugh, so you could hear through the walls when he's going, "Yes, we did it! We cracked it!" He was very animated and engaged, so it was a collaborative team experience. We didn't just focus and tunnel into our own creative work, although of course, there are moments where that's appropriate. We were obviously a team, and that goes back to how Andy and Barbara set that tone of family. It was a real family experience on the post team.

The season finale of It: Welcome to Derry, which also stars Taylour Paige, James Remar, Stephen Rider, Matilda Lawler, Amanda Christine, Clara Stack, Blake Camreon James, Arian S. Cartaya, Miles Ekhardt, Mikkal Karim-Fidler, Jack Molloy Legault, Matilda Legault, Chris Chalk, Peter Outerbridge, Madeleine Stowe, and Bill Skarsgård, premieres December 14th on HBO.

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