What Happens in Vegas

Director: Tom Vaughan

Cutting Vegas was probably one of the most fun gigs I’ve ever had. Rob Corddry and Zach Galifianakis’ improv had me dying laughing on a daily basis. Cutting it was painful: for every brilliant joke on screen there were six other equally hysterical ones that had to be left on the cutting room floor. I worked out of New York City for three months of shooting, then went to London for three months to edit with Tom. (I highly recommend living in London for a few months, and highly recommend getting someone else to pay for it!)

Drunk Montage

When the film played at the premier, this sequence actually got a nice round of applause from the audience. At the afterparty, one of the actors told my family, “You just usually don’t get editing like that on this kind of movie.”

My first assembly of the sequence was actually quite linear. After the director, Tom Vaughan, saw it for the first time, he told me to “mess it up.” He said he wanted the sequence to capture the feeling of what it was like for these characters as they got progressively drunker and drunker over the course of the evening.

I selected, edited, and beat-matched all the music myself… it was so crucial to the sequence I felt strongly that I had to handle the music at the same time as the picture. But as crazy as the sequence gets, there’s not a wasted frame, and everything in there is actively telling a story.

The Farewell Trailer
The Farewell Film

Trailer