What to Cut?

FIVE THINGS I LEARNED MAKING THE Casting Crowns DOCUMENTARY - PART 3 of 5

“Home By Sunday” the Casting Crowns documentary I wrote and co-produced premiered last night. It’s my third feature-length documentary but I still had a lot to learn about storytelling.

I’m sharing five things this project taught me. You might like this if you are interested in knowing what to take out of a story and what to leave in … or if you want to find out what we took out of the Casting Crowns film.

3. WHAT TO CUT?

Have you seen Apocalypse Now? Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 epic war movie is considered one of the best films ever made. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won the awards for Best Cinematography and Best Sound.

But when the project was handed over to editor Walter Murch, it was a total mess.

Production had wrapped. The actors had gone home. The set was emptied. And 1,250,000 feet of film (back then it was actual film) was handed to poor old Walter Murch. THAT’S 230 HOURS!

But Murch got to work. He cut and cut and cut the film. (At the time the process involved actually cutting scenes out of the physical film.)

A year later, he transformed Apocalypse Now from a 10-DAYS LONG mess into a two-and-a-half-hour Oscar winner.

How did he choose what to cut?

Knowing what to omit is one of the most important—and hardest—part of telling a good story.

It’s hard because it means taking what could be perfectly fine parts of a story and throwing them on the cutting room floor. In writing it’s called “killing your darlings.” Those turns of phrase or well-crafted parts just have to go if they don’t serve the main story.

(Oh, how I wish they would have cut out that entire Coach Beard’s crazy night episode from Ted Lasso.)

We had to make some tough decisions with Home By Sunday. While we had nowhere near the 230 hours of film that Walter Murch was given, we still had a ton of footage. And Mark and the band had 20 years' worth of great stories to tell!

Did you know Casting Crowns played at a music festival in North Korea? They are one of the only American bands to ever get to play there. And man, some incredible things happened on that trip. They sang “Amazing Grace” in front of the leader of that country!

Mark Hall has some incredible stories of ministering to kids in his youth group. There was a particular one that happened during the pandemic that I would have loved to have been able to tell.

Andy Williams, one of their former drummers, was tragically killed in a motorcycle wreck after he left the band. It would have been touching to have been able to include the impact that had on the band in the film.

Casting Crowns has mentored countless other prominent Christian artists and helped them learn how to navigate art, success, and fame while avoiding the pitfalls.

Mark Miller from Sawyer Brown and Stephen Curtis Chapman gave some interesting insights into Mark Hall’s vocal style. Matthew West talked about the songwriting approach. There were more fan stories than we could count.

All of these were amazing stories. But we had to make the difficult (and at times heartbreaking) decision to leave those out.

How did we choose?

We outlined the main story arc—the main moment of transformation--and followed Kurt Vonnegut’s advice and cut out everything that didn’t support that main story.

Vonnegut, the famous American sci-fi writer, tells young writers: “Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.”

For us, if a scene or shot didn’t move us toward the goal of the main story, it had to go. By removing things, we were able to give the rest of the story room to breathe. And by allowing the story to breathe, it was able to take on a life of its own.

So while it would have been amazing to have the film go with Casting Crowns to North Korea it wouldn’t really have added to the main plot and the rest of the movie would have suffered by this side adventure. (I’m looking at you Coach Beard.)

Working on this project reaffirmed for me, that when it comes to storytelling, what you take out is just as important as what you leave in.

And I am so thankful that we have video editing software and don’t have to literally cut and tape together actual film.

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