Plainview was very slow to open up. I could tell he came in wanting to be open but has never been put in a position where he would be on the record to express the things that truly troubled him. As I reviewed content from each session I realized he was giving more and more each session. He was less guarded as we spent more time together. Which actually made the editing process harder. I no longer could breakdown segments into themes on a subject matter, I had to treat the segments more like peeling the layers of onions. Plainview would give me explanations through his guard and then on another day give me a little bit more with a new context that served as a vehicle to a larger revelation that I discovered. Plainview Kiet actually suffers from a crap ton of inner turmoil and trauma.
The initial cut of Episode two came in at 47 minutes. Which was far too long I knew cuts needed to be made. This audience will not have the patience for 47 minutes of talking no action. I had to make some major cuts and I had a nice flow to where things were headed and the next thing you know the MacBook charger committed suicide. The damn thing just stopped working with 30 percent battery left. This would be the second charger to go within a year and I was surely not going to pay 100 bucks for a new one from Apple. 9 days later thanks to Amazon I received my replacement. That was a painful thing because I do so much of my creativity on the Macbook and I was stuck.
There is one scene I wanted to keep but used it as a tradeoff to keep a story I felt was more important about his relationship with Space Station Not Human owner Tevin Jacques. I will use that deleted portion for bonus content later and it is about his use of the N-word in his music as an Asian artist. Heads will roll but its the conversation fans wanted me to have with him to justify his reasoning. Another more obsessive nature of the edit occurred after I submitted to being done I watched it over and over and said to myself “lets back the early half with even more b-roll to keep energy high going into the second half when things get more serious. There is one beautifully emotional moment where we get to share the reuniting of Plainview and his mother for the first time in over a decade.
