Kate Tsang’s debut film Marvelous and the Black Hole follows thirteen-year-old Sammy Ko (Miya Cech), who struggles with delinquency shortly after the death of her mother. After meeting Margot (Rhea Perlman), a magician dead set on taking Sammy as her assistant, Sammy reluctantly begins a friendship with her and learns to heal through the expressive art of sleight of hand. Editor Cyndi Trissel tells us how they captured actual magic in the film’s final cut.Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job?Trissel: I was recommended by an editor friend, Ryan Denmark in New York, who I’ve been working with for many years. After some scheduling challenges and logistics with him still living in New York City and me being in Los Angeles, we actually ended up co-editing the film together. I would cut in LA and he would cut in NYC and we would email bins and media back and forth. When it came to working with the director Kate, I worked with her locally at my studio and we would Skype with Ryan at the same time on a laptop, until he had to jump to another project. It was, in a way, remote editing before the pandemic had even started.Filmmaker: In terms of advancing your film from its earliest assembly to your final cut, what were goals as an editor? What elements of the film did you want to enhance, or preserve, or tease out or totally reshape?Trissel: As an editor, I think capturing moments of genuine emotion is always the goal, no matter what genre of film or style, achieving a genuine emotion within each scene and overall is always what I strive for. I remember we worked on the beginning of the film quite a bit, it’s interesting because I have noticed in many projects I have worked on, often the opening scene gets drastically cut up or even omitted by the final cut, and this film was no different. I’m sure some film critic or theorist can do a paper on why that is exactly, but it seems to me that generally, it’s better to get the film started and into the meat of it as soon as possible. Overall, when editing a film, a mentor of mine used to say
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