Picture Credit: Netflix
How to Get to Heaven From Belfast isn’t just a mystery. It’s a mystery, on top of a mystery, that’s on top of yet another mystery. It’s all handled with grace and good humor by the show’s creator, showrunner Lisa McGee, known for the hit comedy Derry Girls. It’s the series that first brought McGee and editor Nigel Williams together.
Williams edited episodes four through six of How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, when the plot further thickens, the stakes rise, and the heroes of the show – longtime friends
Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) and Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) – delve further into the past and present murder mystery. It’s a lot of plot that is a lot of fun in the hands of McGee and Williams. Recently, the editor spoke with What’s On Netflix about editing the comedy and action in How to Get to Heaven From Belfast.
As an editor known for comedy, how was tapping into suspense for How To Get to Heaven From Belfast? What was guiding your choices there?
I guess just my love of movies has just helped steer me through this path. It’s funny, when you’re a comedy editor, you’re told you can’t really cut drama. I’ve been up for so many drama jobs and they go, “No, you only do comedy.” But it’s such a bizarre thing to keep hearing because so much of my comedy has got big drama elements in it, and I’d argue it’s a lot harder to cut comedy than it is drama.
Why is there that misconception, you think, about editors handling drama?
I dunno, I think it’s almost seen as the poor brother of drama, because drama has so much money and so much more time that you’re allowed to spend on it. Whereas comedy, certainly in the UK, I cut a comedy on quite tight budgets. If it’s a BBC comedy, you’re kind of head down and go for it, and then it’s out the door.
Whereas drama, you get time to finesse and go back, and there are so many more people involved. So money is a huge issue, I think. But I know I can cut drama, like Episodes. I cut episodes in America and we were able to finesse and had the money and the time to really work on that. It had really dramatic moments in it. But people don’t remember that. They remember the laughs.
Then did you take real joy in cutting the drama between Dara, Robyn, and Saoirse in How To Get to Heaven From Belfast?
It was great. This show had everything. It had comedy, it had these amazing scripts that Lisa had written, this intricate puzzle. She described it the other day as Scooby-Doo meets Colombo, like a mystery within a mystery. And these women who are kind of inadequate in their lives and in mystery hunting, and they sort of bumble through these eight episodes trying to get it all done. It had explosions, jokes, drama, car chases. I mean, what more could an editor ask for?
How To Get To Heaven From Belfast Season 1. Caoilfhionn Dunne as Dara Friel, Roisin Gallagher as Saoirse Shaw, Sinead Keenan as Robyn Winters Cr. Christopher Barr/Netflix
And you get to cut from the explosion to the heroes on an inflatable banana in the ocean. How was building the suspense there, on the boat in episode four, to landing that joke?
The whole boat scene wasn’t actually shot in Portugal; it was all shot in Malta. It was all to do with time of year, and the weather wasn’t as good in Portugal at that time of year. So the crew went out to Malta to do that.
It was the last episode out of my block that I’d got to cut, but it was the last piece of the jigsaw. I’d cut all the other scenes and I was waiting for these multi-scenes. So my director went out and shot the boat and then the explosion. So in my first episode, episode four, there’s a car explosion, which was all done for real. We had three cameras on it, and it turned out we only needed one shot of the car driving off and the explosion in the distance. But all that was for real. But the boat stuff was VFX, or most of it was VFX.
And then when they’re on the raft sort of floating off at the end, that was shot in a tank in Belfast with the kind of gas fire thing in the background that created the flames. And then VFX got hold of that, and I put this dramatic music on in my assembly. It wasn’t dramatic, but it didn’t have a fun element to it. And then when Lisa saw the cut, she said, “I know just the song for this.” She ended up putting this Vengaboys euro-pop track over it, which is kind of her trademark. She did that in Derry Girls as well.
Given that you’re all telling a pretty intricate mystery, with a lot of jigsaw pieces, is there much room to finesse the mystery in the cutting room?
I’ll be honest, these scripts were so tight, and Lisa has obviously spent years honing this. She wrote this as a play when she was at university. She was at Belfast University, and it was like a one-and-a-half-hour play about these women who then got to meet each other in later life. And then when Derry Girls became a big hit, she reconnected with her school friends and thought, oh, maybe I should revisit this. So that’s how it all came about.
She’s lived with this for a long time and then structured this whole murder mystery around it. So the scripts were there, they were brilliant to read and had you hooked. And there wasn’t really a lot of restructuring with scenes. And my episode six, which is the flashback for the young school girls, we had a few building blocks there that could move and flow a little bit more easily, but everything else was pretty much as Lisa had written it.
Such a talented writer. It’s a complex mystery but it moves very gracefully. How’d you both pull off that pace?
Well, it’s all about the scripts. I mean, it is a cop-out answer, but it’s so true that you read these scripts. She’s kind of got all these Post-it notes on her kitchen wall and she’s shuffling things around, but by the time it gets to us, it’s so honed and so funny. She knows when to drop in her joke and she knows when the drama beats happen. So in the edit, you don’t really do an awful lot of that. She knows in her head how well it’s going to flow.
Given all the comedy you have cut, are there some tried-and-true rules in editing jokes?
For me, I don’t think there’s any rhyme or reason for how you cut comedy. Certainly the assembly stage — do you call it rough cut in American assembly too?
Yes.
So the assembly stage, in my head, it’s all about keeping it as tight as possible. I know that execs are watching, and I don’t want those alarm bells to be sounding like, oh, this is really slow or whatever. I do keep it really tight at the assembly stage, and then I open it up as the story, as my jigsaw puzzle builds.
Then I’ll experiment with the zinger line, the funny line, the punchline. I’ll experiment with it on a close-up or a wide. My instinct often says, oh, let’s stick to a close-up. But often you put it on a wide shot to see reactions, and that’s the one.
So there’s no rhyme or reason. You just got to do it. You just feel it in your heart. And I think I’ve got an okay sense of humor of the everyman in the street. So my instincts are normally pretty good.
Especially with this cast. Did you find yourself wanting a lot of wide shots and three-shots really showing the comedic timing between Dara, Robyn, and Saoirse?
The confession booth in episode five springs to mind. It’s my favorite episode. It’s the chase from Portugal through Dublin, and they end up on a chat show where Saoirse takes painkillers and then kind of freaks out.
But the chase through Dublin was so fun to edit because we had a wide shot of the real St. Patrick’s Day parade that someone had shot six months earlier but thought it might be handy to use. It was just a reference point for the set.
Picture Credit: Netflix
How’d the chase build from there?
Once the set people got hold of it, we built this whole thing around this one shot, thinking, oh, we’ll go back in a year’s time and get more shots of St. Patrick’s Day. But it works so well that we didn’t need to do that. When you get to episode five, bear that in mind.
It’s just like one big wide shot sells the illusion of the whole big parade that is happening behind the women. And within that sequence, just as they’re about to run off down the pub, there is a little Easter egg of a Derry Girls girl dressed in a school uniform. Blink, you’ll miss it, but it’s there.
What’s the art behind cutting a good, funny footchase?
The coverage of the shots is what it’s all about. You want enough to just pace it all up. But there are also shots of jugglers and people on stilts — things like that. It was a chase that only Lisa could write.
When the characters run into the Irish pub, there’s a band called The Mary Wallopers singing in the bar. They’re quite big here — a really good band. It’s kind of a folky Irish band, but they agreed to be in the show as well. If you know your music, that’s a great little crescendo to that scene.
You’ve now worked with Lisa on Derry Girls and How To Get to Heaven From Belfast. What else do you really appreciate about not only her writing but her as a collaborator?
She’s amazing. I first got asked to edit Derry Girls in 2017 and I couldn’t do it. And then they asked me for series three of Derry Girls, which I was able to do, and that’s where I first met Lisa. And she was so good at it, she just really appreciates the editing craft.
She stood up when she got a BAFTA and gave a shout-out to me and the other editor. No one ever does that. I’ve never had it on any other show. It’s just a lovely thing to do.
How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is now streaming on Netflix.
