Úna Ní Dhonghaíle, ACE, had never heard of Trudy Ederle before signing onto edit Young Woman and the Sea.
The editor worked remotely from Dublin while director Joachim Rønning and the cast were filming in Bulgaria. It was her first time working with Rønning and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. As such, she was quick to work on things during the first three weeks so that they would know she was on the same page. She would sometimes send footage back on the same day as receiving the rushes. Ní Dhonghaíle also discusses the initial edit, the biggest challenge that came in editing the film, and gave a quick teaser on the upcoming Paddington in Peru.
Trudy Ederle became the first woman to successfully swim across the English Channel in 1926. Born to immigrant parents, the swimmer overcame adversity in a society that frowned upon female swimmers. Two years before swimming across the Channel, Ederle competed for Team USA during the 1924 Paris Olympics. If the film is any indication, the female swimmers didn’t have the same training as their male counterparts. Ederle came home with a pair of bronze medals in both the 100m and 400m freestyle races. Sometime thereafter, Ederle comes across Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham) and becomes inspired to swim the 21 miles between France and England.
Joachim Rønning directed Young Woman and the Sea from a screenplay by Jeff Nathanson. The film stars Daisy Ridley, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Stephen Graham, Kim Bodnia, Jeanette Hain, Glenn Fleshler, Sian Clifford, and Christopher Eccleston.
Young Woman and the Sea is currently streaming on Disney+.
It’s so nice to talk with you again for the first time in three years. How are you doing?
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: I’m great, thank you. I was so happy when I saw it was you interviewing me. So lovely seeing you again, Danielle.
Yeah.
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: Belfast.
I know. It’s been a while. How did you first become attached to working on Young Woman and the Sea?
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: Jerry Bruckheimer and Joachim Rønning reached out to me. I think they might have seen Belfast and that was Ken Branagh’s passion project. This is obviously Jerry Bruckheimer, Joachim, and Jeff’s passion project.
I’ve never worked with them before. I read the script, which was magnificent. I was really excited and had a lovely interview with them. We just really connected on the same page. Joachim explained he wanted to shoot it in real open water. I thought that was wonderful because I think that gives the truthfulness to the performances and for the audience in the cinema, it just feels real, particularly a film like this that’s shining a spotlight on the bravery of a young woman who had defied the odds and broken records. I think once we were chatting together, we realized from a cinematic point of view, we sort of shared the same sensitivity. I was really thrilled when they offered me the job.
How much did you know about Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle before working on the film?
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: Danielle, I had never even heard of Trudy, which is, I think, one of the reasons why we wanted to make this film and why Jeff, Jerry, and Joachim had fought for so many years with Disney to bring it to fruition. I had not heard of her, and when I read the script, I couldn’t believe it.
I then did Google. I knew Glenn Stout had written the book, which I read during the process of making the film. I didn’t read it before making the film because I wanted to just work off the bones of the script and the performance that Daisy was giving, and the other actors. I have a passion myself as a filmmaker working on films that are telling stories of people whose voices have not been heard, or who have been marginalized or removed from the history books. So again, this was a perfect project for my feeling of what I’d like to do with filmmaking in my lifetime.
I know it was interesting to watch how the coach treated the female swimmers at the Paris games compared to the male swimmers.
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: Yeah, that inherent bias. That’s what I say about this movie—for me, this is a film about this particular woman but I think it’s for all of us in this world, anyone who has a dream that they want to follow. Don’t let anyone stop you. Follow your own bones or whatever vocation you have in life, and just have the courage and hopefully the support of loved ones to follow your dream. I think that’s a very important message in this day and age that we can all be pigeonholed, and say as a filmmaker myself, who’s a mother trying to make sure that—I’d like to do big blockbuster action films, for example. Everyone in our own lives, we should continue to strive and fight for what we want to do, and with respect to others.
This was your first collaboration with filmmaker Joachim Rønning. What was it like to work with him during the editing process?
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: It was wonderful. We were shooting in Bulgaria. My assistants were in London, I was in Dublin, and Joachim and the team were all out in Bulgaria. We were working remotely during the shoot. I was able to pull together the scenes and cut them quite quickly. I was using my instinct to get through them, because we had to then put sound design and some temp music to send back to Joachim and Jerry. They had never worked with me before so they probably wanted to keep an eye. On the first three weeks, especially I was sending scenes, sometimes even on the same day that I had received the rushes, just to show that everything was working beautifully, and that gave them the courage, I suppose, and confidence to know that I was on the same page as them.
When we came together in the cutting room, he’s just a brilliant person. He’s a really lovely guy. He has great empathy. All the men on this film have great empathy.
I know it’s a story about a young woman but I sometimes have said about Alien, the way Sigourney Weaver was cast—I believe it was originally written for a man and they didn’t change the dialogue. I feel that with this movie, this film has people behind it with huge hearts, regardless of gender, they had great sensitivity.
Myself and Joachim, we had similar feelings of wanting to interrogate the script, see how we could change things. It was a little bit too long, the first assembly. We had to begin collapsing scenes and we worked just really well together. I could come up with ideas and he was very open. Confident people who you know what they’ve done, they can be very collaborative and more open to discussions of reinventing maybe the structure or experimenting with creating more montages. We did several montages in this film, and I think, knowing the material and knowing that we could just pick this image and that image, we could condense and collapse. That was a vital tool of storytelling to help us get to the Channel swim faster. It was great fun. Great people, great fun.
How long was the initial edit?
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: The initial director’s cut was 16 weeks. The assembly—they were shooting from April until—I have to go back, because this is all now in 2022. I think it’s April until June. July, maybe. I was in Dublin, April until July, then July until January in London. The director’s cut was 16 weeks after wrap, but we actually watched it—when Joachim wrapped, I had one week to pull it all together and we actually screened it in a cinema so that Joachim had a week break and then he could just watch the movie on the big screen—the full thing with beautiful sound design.
My assistants, Nick Davis and Timmy, they were helping me build the sound constantly, so we had something that was really strong and looked great sixteen weeks later. Jerry obviously was involved. He had been watching things as we worked because we were all very collaborative. We had to show the producers and then we did test audience screenings. We just were on a rising wave. Pardon the pun, we got very good feedback from our test audience screenings. That’s when I think Disney gave the great news that they were going to give a limited theatrical release.
How long was the initial runtime before it got edited down?
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: The first cut, I think, was 2 hours, 37 minutes. The the script supervisor had predicted it might even be 2 hours, 50 minutes. My first assembly was quite tight. It wasn’t flabby. It was actually a really good watch, but there was a lot more in it. There are scenes that we have lost and there are scenes that we had to collapse. That’s where, I think, as an editor, it’s always good to really watch your material.
I have a very good memory so then I can think of an image. If we are losing an entire scene—we had a beautiful scene with Jenny Wisemuller. We were able to maybe take a few things from those stolen moments and create them into the montage. The scene in Coney Island after the Olympics—we could repurpose material that maybe had a green screen for the ocean, and we could repurpose it and use it as Coney Island. We were forever being inventive and watching what we had. The performance of Daisy Ridley was exquisite. Following the Trudy story was the gateway to making the best version of this film. Scenes that we dropped, although they were brilliant in their own right, they may have been more about the sister or another element, so it just meant that they very naturally fell away.
Is there a scene or sequence that provided the biggest challenge?
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: I think the biggest challenge in the editing was possibly, apart from honing it down, it was the Channel swim itself. How to weave that together in editorial, where I could make sure it didn’t feel compartmentalized, because she had different elements that she had to go through. The journalist almost touched her in the water, the jellyfish, the fog, the darkness. I had to make sure that that didn’t become episodic so that was the challenge, I think, for me. Trying to find the musicality in the rushes and keep that flow and using the device of the journalists so we could go back to the journalists.
Jeanette Haim, the mother, who was wonderful. She was in the recording studio with the locket of her sister so we could keep these elements that I could juggle with to keep the audience leaning in and not feeling that it was too easy. That was the other thing—how to make sure that we weren’t too triumphant all the way through. We had to try and create that feeling of is she actually going to make it, and even though the audience might have known, coming into the cinema, that she was going to make it, you always have to play with that subtext to make them think, well, maybe she didn’t make this version. That was really a great challenge.
And then, obviously, when she got lost in the shallows. I love using sound and music when I’m editing, even from the first day of principal photography in my assembly, so knowing that when she has the bravery to say to her father, I’m going to go, and we’ve had that scene earlier where she says to Burgess, whatever you do, do not take me out of the water. We know that she is willing to risk her life for this cause so that was wonderful for me, because then we were able to play with the sound and the sound was very important.
I had my second assistant—she had her head dunking until we did the ADR with Daisy. She was actually doing the breaths for us, so you could hear the freezing breath, and if you watch it again you’ll see, as she swims off, and we have the final lines from the journalist, saying how dangerous the shallows were. We just went with a very nice high note, almost silence, sort of like the calm before the storm, and then when we cut to the shallows, it’s just a hard, abrasive cut. Music is cut, and it’s the wash of the wave.
When I was in the cinema the other day, some people in front of me, they jumped when that happened and then she’s lost in the shallows. I was doing this sort of elliptical style of editing to follow her confusion. I’m really proud of that whole section, and the way we all worked together—me in the early days of trying to find that sound and music pattern. And then, when our brilliant sound team got involved and our brilliant composer, we were all working together to find that shaping so that you could really feel she may not survive this.
When she is beginning to take off her goggles and falling under the water, if you look at it again, Danielle, some of the shots ahead are only brief, maybe 3 seconds. They’re just glimpses. It’s like a fragmented selfish. She’s given herself up to the ocean and then the lights begin and the audience are hopefully shouting at the TV screen if they’re watching it on Disney+ or in the cinema, look behind you and then the music starts again.
I think that was the biggest challenge of making sure that that stayed alive and didn’t feel for an audience watching it, that it was too easy.
Yeah. When I watched the film in theaters back in May, I thought Daisy delivered an Oscar-worthy performance.
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: Yes, I agree. I think she’s just absolutely Oscar-worthy. She was actually quite nervous of open water. She trained so hard so that she could actually swim in the ocean. I could see the rushes. Her lips trembling, but she was still going back in so she raised the bar. She had a great relationship here with Tilda, because we have all these lovely relationships of her and her mother, her and her sister, her and her father.
I just think they all came together. Daisy was magnificent in everything that she did. All of them, I have to say just as a collaborative thing, everyone—you don’t get a film, I think, that feels so good without everyone rising to the challenge. Joachim and Jerry as our leaders and Jeff, they just created a brilliant vibe where we felt a responsibility to the real Trudy Ederle to do justice to her memory and put her name back into those history books.
Yeah. I noticed that you had another film that you worked on that I won’t be able to see until January. (Following this interview, Sony changed the U.S. release date to mid-February.)
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: I know. Come to London or Dublin. Paddington in Peru. Another film, that is trying to showcase the importance of, I suppose, kindness in life. Another Paddington, where your home is where the people you love and who love you. Yeah.
Was that a very quick yes, when you got the offer?
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: Yes, it was. It was. That’s where I sort of chime with Trudy Ederle, and I hope for anyone—like all of us out there, I think life is very short. You only have one life. I like to keep doing different things. I love doing films based on true stories, but I also wanted to do a big animation. I’d love to do a big action film. I just hope that the world opens up to just allowing all of us to follow our dreams and see that no one should be pigeonholed in anything.
That’s really what I did. If you look at my CV, I have quite a varied background. I’ve done documentaries. I’ve done Doctor Who TV thrillers and bromance movies. So it’s something that I hope for all of us out there that we can continue just to keep pushing the storytelling and shine a light on on life, and hopefully Paddington will bring some joy and kindness back onto the table.
It was so nice getting to catch up.
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: You, too! I hope to see you in real life sometime.
Eventually.
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: Eventually, yeah.
You weren’t in LA for the Belfast premiere! The cast and Kenneth were.
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: I know. Let’s get on to all our producers. Take these people behind the scenes (Laughs). I’m proud of everyone I’ve worked with. I’ve been really blessed, and it’s a real privilege to even be here talking to you so thank you.
Thank you so much.
Úna Ní Dhonghaile, ACE: Thank you, Danielle.