UKRAINE: ON THE FRONT LINE
fear of the moment clouded his vision. The military position was completely new to him, he didn’t know the soldiers’ purpose, the camp looked a mess. As they arrived, they were fired on by a tank and spent the first ten minutes in a ditch. “I couldn’t orientate myself and Hummer was a bit thrown. I felt it was unprofessional and slip shod.” His fixer disagreed. “He said, ‘actually I think those guys are really efficient, they’re really doing it, really effective’. Tom had the same response.”
Police patrol on the zero line, the closest position to the enemy “The way I cut is slightly
idiosyncratic...I would pretty much fine cut it straight away. For me, I need to understand the tone to know whether or how it’s
going to work and whether it’s going to fit.”
TOM DIXON-SPAIN EDITOR
Sometimes it was hard for Lambert to see the wood for the trees. “In my head, it’s in a massive mush of stuff. But the ability that Tom’s got to isolate, to draw on the conversation and what we’re doing thematically and be quite laser sharp, finding a visual or narrative articulation of a theme and taking it on two
steps....That’s when edits really work, when Tom can hold big ideas, but is measuring every shot and scene and interview against those ideas and if they don’t pass muster they are gone. He’s ruthless like that.”
There was a clear story about one of the special forces leaders, called Hummer, who goes to the zero line - as close as the trenches go to the enemy lines - to see what his civilian- turned-soldier brother is facing.
SEARCH FOR AN ENDING
Towards the end of the film, Dixon-Spain spotted a very short sequence with Hummer seeing off the next group of hastily trained rookies going to the front. “We’d got to the point where we’d fleshed out Hummer’s story about his brother. And the lynchpins for any film are where does it start? Where does it end? I was searching for an ending, and this sense of a novice mission encapsulates what this film is about, which is about volunteers who don’t know what they’re doing….”
In the scene when Lambert arrives on the zero line with Hummer, Lambert explains that the
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Having got the cut to 75, 80 minutes, “you can see those sequences for what they are within the film rather than individually,” says Dixon- Spain. “That’s the down-side, I am working quite chronologically, I’m fine-cutting scenes I might not use.”
That’s where his ability to be ruthless comes into its own. “One of the things I like about working with Tom is his complete impatience with anything that isn’t working,” says Lambert.
The result is their hour-long film Ukraine: How to Win a War (working title) which will air on BBC Two at the beginning of January.
“The story we had was about Hummer’s brother and the impact on him,” explains Dixon-Spain. Lambert’s view of the rushes was coloured by his impressions at the time, but the editor had the advantage of being outside, looking in. “In the event of editing that sequence - pulling and cutting it - what it was saying to me is ‘these are a bunch of people who aren’t trained, but that are totally dedicated and almost fearless and that’s the Damascus moment for Hummer’.”
For Lambert, it was a revelation. “Watching the scene he cut was seeing what had happened clearly for the first time, as I could watch without fear. And it was stunning to see what these guys were doing.” It immediately presented the commentary line that the whole film turns on. “I couldn’t have found that pivot until Tom had almost made sense of the experience for me.”
After Lambert returned to the UK, the city of Kershon was successfully captured. One of Roman Kostenko’s staff sent a clip of Hummer signing a flag on entering Kherson which they used to wrap the film.
The edit took eight weeks.
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