The first time Kevin Hale knew the chase sequence in Netflix's The Rip was running too long, he didn't consult a stopwatch. He looked around the room.
"At some point you can just kind of see when people in the room are looking at their watch. Or you're starting to go, okay — maybe we need to. Maybe that's the same beat we already hit. We can change that a little bit."
The chase was originally almost twice as long. Every piece of it was shot well. None of it was wasted. But at a certain point, the scene stopped earning its runtime — and the editor's job is to feel that moment before the audience does. In an interview with Zebra Home Cinema, Kevin Hale — a 30-year collaborator of director Joe Carnahan and the editor on Boss Level, Cop Shop and The Rip — explained how that instinct gets built, how a Netflix thriller actually gets cut, and why he thinks most people have no idea what a film editor really does.
The Non-Traditional Path — From Sacramento TV Promos to Netflix Features
Hale didn't come up through film school. He came up through local TV news.
"I was the guy that did all those sensational-type promotions. 'Watch our 11 o'clock news tonight. Your kids' pyjamas might kill you.' Worked years in that."
Sacramento's local station hired a new promotions guy to work alongside him in the mid-1990s. That guy was Joe Carnahan. They cut promos together for a few years, and then Carnahan walked up to Hale with a script.
"He said: I have this script I'm working on. I think we can all make it here. You want to help me make this movie?"
The film was Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane — Carnahan's directorial debut. They made it for $7,000, shot on film, with the entire crew donating their time. They borrowed the TV station's equipment on weekends. It got into Sundance in 1998 and announced Carnahan as a director.
Carnahan went off to become a name. Hale stayed in local TV for another decade and a half. They remained close friends. Hale cut the occasional commercial for him. And then Carnahan got the call to direct The Grey with Liam Neeson — and pulled Hale in at the bottom of the ladder.
"I was hired as the lowest you can be in the department: second assistant editor. At the time I didn't even know what that meant. I thought it meant I would edit a little less than the main editor. But really, the second assistant editor is an assistant to the assistant editor."
His job on The Grey was printing faxes, three-hole-punching paperwork, loading binders, and watching a professional post-production process unfold at arm's length. From there, he became close with Jason Hellman — the feature's main editor, whom Hale credits as his teacher. Hellman pulled Hale up to co-editor on The Blacklist, the NBC drama starring James Spader, after it became clear one editor couldn't meet the pilot's schedule.
Hale's film CV since: Stretch, State of Affairs, Boss Level, Cop Shop and The Rip. The majority of it is with Carnahan. A thirty-year friendship, and a fifteen-year professional relationship.
Why Editing Is the Most Misunderstood Job in Filmmaking
Hale is candid about something most editors won't say out loud: his own family doesn't really understand what he does.
"Even my close friends and family don't fully get it. And I don't think a lot of people appreciate it — especially because we can all edit on our computers. We're all editing on our phones and uploading to TikTok. It's so accessible now."
That accessibility creates a quiet problem in the industry. Hale has been hired repeatedly to fix low-budget films that a producer's buddy "good with computers" has already cut.
"They say, oh, my buddy, he's great on computers. He can edit this. And so they've cut the film and I come in and kind of clean things up a little bit and help with the story flow."
The distance between knowing how to join two clips and knowing how to cut a film, in his telling, is the distance between typing and writing.
What a professional editor actually does on a feature:
- 1.Receives multiple takes across multiple setups for every scene. One line of dialogue — "hey, how you doing?" — might have 20 viable combinations of angle and performance.
- 2.Picks which angle enters the scene, and which performance carries each beat.
- 3.Builds the scene as an isolated unit — "little islands just sitting there," in Hale's phrase.
- 4.Stitches the islands together and discovers what's redundant. A scene that's perfect in isolation can be flat once the scenes around it exist.
- 5.Sets the pace. Stretches pauses for tension. Removes pauses for pressure. Moves things forward when the watch-checking starts.
- 6.Chooses temporary music that tells the story before the composer has written a note.
- 7.Delivers something that looks like a finished film — a framework for the composer, the sound designers, and the grade to elevate.
"My goal when I cut a movie is to hand over what looks like a complete finished movie — using other music, temp tracks. The composer changes the sound completely, but generally they're going off of our pacing and vibe and ebbs and flows."
The editor, in Hale's framing, is the first audience the film ever has — and the first person whose judgement determines whether the film works at all.
How The Rip Was Actually Cut — Evercast and Seven Months of Post
The Rip shot in six or seven weeks. The post-production process lasted about seven months. Hale's process during production:
- ▪The crew shoots on Monday.
- ▪The dailies ship Monday night.
- ▪Hale gets them Tuesday morning.
- ▪By Tuesday night, those scenes are cut.
"My goal is to stay a day behind the filming. That way, if I'm missing something, I can say: hey, since you're still there in that location, it would be really great if you got me X, Y or Z."
He doesn't send Carnahan cuts while they're shooting. Carnahan, in Hale's description, gets spun out by seeing edits during production — the director's brain enters editing mode and starts second-guessing the shots he just captured. So Hale assembles the entire editor's cut in isolation, and Carnahan watches the full thing for the first time when filming wraps.
Then the notes start. Carnahan is known among his collaborators for giving extensive notes — more than any other director Hale has worked with. It takes Hale roughly a week to implement the first set. Then another round. Then another. After two or three full passes, the pair sit together and work frame-by-frame.
On The Rip, sitting together was complicated by geography — Carnahan lived some distance from the cutting room — so they used Evercast, a remote editorial collaboration platform.
"Basically he's at his house with his laptop or his big-screen TV. It's connected right to my editor. So I open the program, and he sees right on the screen what's happening on my timeline. Then we have a FaceTime or Zoom conversation on top of it. It's like he's in the same room — but the virtual same room."
The pair spent hours on Evercast, tweaking individual frames. Sometimes a single frame made no difference. Sometimes it made all the difference. Hale describes putting "every scene through the ringer" — Carnahan would express happiness with a scene, then come back a week later asking to blow it up and try something new. The goal, always, was to see whether a better version existed.
The Chase That Was Twice as Long — Pacing Discipline in Action
The chase sequence in The Rip feels precisely calibrated. That's not an accident. The chase as filmed was nearly twice the length of what you see on Netflix.
"They shot so much. That original chase was, like, twice as long — and I think still just as entertaining. But at some point, enough is enough. So we really had to kind of whittle it down."
How does an editor know when enough is enough? Hale describes it as a gut check, informed by watching the room.
If you're sitting with a few people in the edit suite and you start catching wrists flicking toward watches, the scene is cooked. If you feel yourself drifting to the same rhythmic beat the scene hit two minutes ago, that rhythm can be compressed.
This is the opposite of an over-cut, chaos-by-default action style — which Hale diagnoses specifically as the Quantum of Solace problem.
"You don't want to cut too fast, where you're just like: wait, what just happened? You need to find that balance."
Good action, in his editorial philosophy, preserves:
- ▪Geography. The audience knows where everyone is, where they're heading, and what the space looks like.
- ▪Story. Action scenes are still scenes. A motive, a stake, a consequence — these don't stop just because bullets start.
- ▪Forward momentum. The scene keeps moving, but not so fast that geography and story are sacrificed.
One of Hale's favourite references for action editing is the famous street shoot-out in Michael Mann's Heat — no music until the very end, all natural sound, but the audience understands at every second that these are a coordinated team executing a job.
When Director's Cut ≠ Studio Cut — And Why The Rip Was Both
One of the quiet truths of modern feature filmmaking: the version audiences see often isn't the version the director wanted them to see. When there's a gap, the physical-media director's cut is where that gap gets closed.
On The Rip, there was no gap.
"What you see is the director's cut. That's the producer's cut. Everybody was just… not to say there weren't discussions about scenes and the best ways to do things. Of course there's always those conversations. But it was never contentious. Everybody just wanted to make the best movie."
On an earlier Hale–Carnahan film, Cop Shop, the gap was real. The producers wanted a specific length; they had opinions that didn't sync with Carnahan's. The released version reflected the producers' cut. Hale confirmed that a director's cut of Cop Shop is currently in the works for DVD release — so a longer version, closer to Carnahan's original vision, is on the way.
The distinction matters for anyone building a serious physical-media collection. A Blu-ray labelled director's cut isn't a marketing flourish. It's usually the version of the film that exists because somebody fought for it after the theatrical release was locked.
Editing Action Without the Quantum of Solace Problem
Hale's framework for cutting action, distilled:
| Principle | What it looks like on screen |
|---|---|
| Set up geography | The audience knows where everyone is before the chaos starts |
| Keep the story alive | Action beats carry motive and stakes, not just kinetic imagery |
| Match the shooting style | How the scene was photographed dictates how it wants to be cut |
| Trust the performers | If the fight choreography is real, hold the shot; cuts support, not replace |
| Watch the room | When people start glancing at watches, the scene is past its best |
He singles out Hong Kong action cinema as a counterpoint to American cutting conventions. In a Donnie Yen film, the performers are so technically capable that the editor's job shifts — fewer cuts, longer holds, less editorial influence on the action itself.
"With the movies out of Hong Kong, there is not nearly as much editing, because those people are so skilled. Your edits don't matter as much to help the action. You're just supporting it rather than driving it."
For Western action, the rule is different: the cuts are doing a large share of the storytelling. The job isn't to be invisible — it's to be deliberate. Hale's test is whether the audience understands what happened after the scene ends. If they don't, no amount of kineticism has earned the runtime.
Music as an Editorial Tool, Not a Finishing Layer
Hale edits music as aggressively as he edits picture — even at the temporary-track stage, before the composer has written anything.
"I really try to use the music a lot. I don't like to blanket it in. I edit the music as much as I edit the visual, just to really punctuate the right moments. I might go a little too far sometimes. Then the professional composer kind of chills it out, but makes it better."
The temp track isn't filler. It's a pacing proposal. When the director and editor agree on a temp track, they're agreeing on where the emotional beats land, where tension rises, and where the music gets out of the scene's way. The composer inherits that proposal as a brief — not a literal instruction, but a shape to work inside.
This is one of the underrated benefits of temp tracks: they communicate rhythm before a single original note exists.
What an Editor Watches on Their Own Time
Hale is a physical-media collector, which matters to him for two reasons. First, the films in the collection are the ones he watches when he wants to be reminded of why he does this job. Second, they're the demo material he uses to test any sound system.
His shortlist of action references:
- ▪*Heat* (Michael Mann). The bank-robbery shoot-out — all natural sound, no score until the end — is a reference he cites repeatedly. He picked it as his favourite edited-but-not-by-him scene for a podcast on editors' favourite cuts.
- ▪The Bourne trilogy (edited by Christopher Rouse). The apartment fight in The Bourne Supremacy — the one where Jason Bourne exits through a window — was the first film Hale bought specifically because of its editing.
- ▪*Training Day*.
- ▪*True Lies* (James Cameron).
- ▪Indiana Jones — the Spielberg canon generally.
- ▪Donnie Yen's films. The Prosecutor's subway-train fight is what he points people to most recently.
- ▪John Woo re-releases. Hard Boiled, The Killer, and Bullet in the Head have just been re-released on 4K UHD — Hale was genuinely surprised to hear it.
It's a telling list for a working feature editor — action-heavy, performance-driven, edited-forward. Not an arthouse in sight.
Key Takeaways
- ▪The Rip's chase was cut down from a version almost twice as long. The editor's job is to feel the moment a scene stops earning its runtime — often before the audience does, and often from watching the room rather than the monitor.
- ▪Kevin Hale didn't go to film school. He came up through Sacramento local TV promotions, met Joe Carnahan there, and has worked with him across thirty years and five features.
- ▪On The Rip, Carnahan never saw a cut while filming. Hale assembled the entire editor's cut in isolation; the pair then worked through multiple rounds of extensive notes, eventually collaborating frame-by-frame over Evercast — a remote editorial platform that mirrors the editor's timeline to the director's home.
- ▪The Rip's released version is identical to the director's cut. When a director's-cut Blu-ray exists separately from the theatrical release, it usually means there was a real disagreement between director and producers. That was the case on Cop Shop, and a director's cut is in the works.
- ▪Action editing is a discipline of restraint. The Quantum of Solace problem — cutting so fast the audience loses the geography — is the failure mode Hale actively guards against.
- ▪The editor's temp track isn't filler. It's a pacing proposal that the composer inherits as a brief.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who edited Netflix's The Rip?
Kevin Hale edited The Rip — his fifth feature collaboration with writer-director Joe Carnahan after Stretch, Boss Level, and Cop Shop. The two have known each other for roughly thirty years, dating back to when they both worked in a Sacramento TV station's promotions department in the 1990s.
How long did it take to edit The Rip?
The film was shot in six or seven weeks. Post-production ran roughly seven months. Hale stayed one day behind principal photography — whatever the crew shot on Monday, he had cut by Tuesday evening — and delivered a full editor's cut shortly after filming wrapped.
What is Evercast and how was it used on The Rip?
Evercast is a remote editorial collaboration platform that mirrors the editor's timeline directly to the director's screen while they speak over video call. On The Rip, Carnahan was based some distance from the cutting room, so he and Hale used Evercast to work through notes and frame-level tweaks without him needing to be physically present in the edit suite.
Is there a director's cut of The Rip?
No separate director's cut is planned for The Rip because the released version is already the version Carnahan and the editorial team signed off. Hale confirmed that the theatrical/Netflix cut and the director's cut are the same film. A director's cut of Cop Shop, however, is currently being prepared for DVD release.
How does a film editor decide when an action scene is too long?
By Hale's own account, it's a gut check informed by room behaviour — watching for people glancing at their watches, feeling when a beat is repeating, recognising when geography has already been established and further repetition is adding fatigue rather than tension. The Rip's chase was cut down from roughly twice its released length using exactly that judgement.
What's the difference between a director's cut and a theatrical cut?
A theatrical (or streaming) cut is the version approved for release, usually reflecting compromises between the director and the producers or studio over length, pacing, or content. A director's cut is the version the director would release if they were the sole decision-maker. Sometimes they're identical, as on The Rip. Sometimes they diverge significantly, which is when a director's cut Blu-ray becomes the definitive version.
