It was all done in-house.
Whoa! Before a trailer starts on YouTube they call them bumpers. This is because if a trailer just started the way it usually does, right after the green card where we get into the story and meet our characters, people might turn it off. However, if you give them a taste of what is to come, they will be more likely to stay. That is 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. I watched dailies as they came in, as they were shot, and started to get a sense of what the movie would be like.
The song used in the trailer is Fingertips by Stevie Wonder. Jordan Peele suggested to use that song, playing it almost diagetically at first. We had skin in the game. We used some editorial tricks, like having the hoofs of the horse hit the beats of the music and then cut outside to Daniel with the horse. We also made the music echoey and creepy. We had the crickets stop chirping, taking a cue from the movie The Fog by John Carpenter. We also had a big “From Jordan Peele” come down.
We then deconstructed the song of Fingertips and used the rhythm from it, adding sound design and layers. We also had a rise, which is a piece of music that goes [mimics tone going up and also getting louder] and getting bigger and louder. In the early days, when I was cutting trailers, there were no trailer sound design libraries. Now there are a billion different kinds of choirs, synths, huge orchestras and hits.
We also looked at Stanley Kubrick’s trailers, which were some of the best of all time. They were so innovative, embracing the French new wave style of non-linear, weird editing, almost overboard. Back in the 60s, they didn’t have trailer houses doing this, it was all done in-house. I think there were people on the lot doing it or the filmmakers were doing it when they made the trailer for Carrie, which gave away a lot of the movie’s big moments. It was a dream come true for Carrie, but a nightmare for everyone else. You could see who died and what happened to her at the prom. This was a far cry from the trailers of the 90s which relied heavily on voiceover and formulaic introductions. Don Lafontaine, the “king of voiceover” had his own limo and drove from booth to booth. He was a professional who could nail whatever nuance you wanted.
Sound and music are the soul of a trailer, and the Carrie trailer used this to great effect. For example, when it went to black, you could hear a girl running and screaming, followed by the sound of a chainsaw starting. This is one of the most memorable parts of the trailer. Sometimes we get a rough cut of the movie, but not always. We usually get to start viewing dailies as soon as they start shooting. We rarely work with a final cut of a feature. For example, in the trailer for “Halloween”, the line reading Jamie has of “So I can kill him” is a different take than the one used in the final movie. We also edited the end scare of the trailer differently than the final movie.
The beginning of the “10 Cloverfield Lane” trailer is a fun, goofy song. It’s called a rug pull, where it starts off one way and then something changes. Rhythm is used to match sound effects and movements with the music. This technique was also used in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and is called “click click whir whir”.
A metaphor for trailers was told to me by a studio exec named Tony Sella. It’s like trying to sell a jigsaw puzzle. To do this, you can only show four pieces of the puzzle on the box.