How Editor Andy Jurgensen Found the Right Balance of Tone and Momentum for ‘One Battle After Another’ [VIDEO INTERVIEW]
“Time doesn’t exist, but it controls us anyway.”
That hilarious answer to the key question Bob Ferguson can’t remember to receive the rendezvous point is, coincidentally, the best way to describe the feeling of watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest epic, One Battle After Another. For the audience, asking them to step into a two hour and forty-minute film is never a small task, but when you are in the hands of a master filmmaker like Anderson, you can feel the time just slip away as he has you in the palm of his hand with his thrilling narrative. The constant, moving pace that keeps you on the edge of your seat from scene to scene is also due, in large part, to the phenomenal work of the director’s longtime collaborator and editor, Andy Jurgensen, and his navigation of making this sprawling epic come together as one. Born and raised in Orange County, Jurgensen developed a fondness for cinema from his aunt and uncle showing him older films, as the couple were archivists for the Motion Picture Academy. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara in 2004, he spent the next decade getting jobs in the film business, answering phones at a production company and becoming a post-production assistant. It was in 2014 where he caught his big break when he met Anderson as the director was making Inherent Vice, becoming an assistant editor on that feature and his follow-up, Phantom Thread.
From there on out, Jurgensen has become a go-to staple within Anderson’s work, both within the film world with Licorice Pizza and One Battle After Another, as well as the director’s side projects within the music video world for artists like Joanna Newsom, HAIM, and Radiohead. But it’s his work on One Battle that is the crown jewel within his career, expertly weaving the multiple tones, totality of the narrative scope, and emotional connection that makes One Battle After Another the best film of the year. In her review of the film back in September, our own Sophia Ciminello praised Jurgensen’s “propulsive editing,” which fully demonstrates the urgency found at the core of “the defining American film of the decade.” Jurgensen and I recently sat down to talk about the scale of his work on the film, his relationship with Paul Thomas Anderson, how it evolved over time, finding the right tone and balancing it.
We also discuss the incorporation of the director’s famous needle drops throughout the film alongside composer Jonny Greenwood’s score, how filming on Vista Vision challenged his job, his use of cross dissolves, the infamous match-cut from the past to the present involving Willa (Chase Infiniti), and speaking about how relevant One Battle After Another feels right now. Coming right off receiving his first ever Academy Award nomination, Jurgensen was more excited about the whole team getting their moment in the sun, referring to the people he works with on Anderson’s crew as a “family” that he’s glad to be a part of. But it’s the PTA family that should be proud of Jurgensen’s work here in making something that seems like an impossible task on the page transform into a smooth ride down the river of hills that audiences couldn’t stop revisiting.
Andy Jurgensen is ACE-nominated and Oscar-nominated for Best Film Editing for One Battle After Another, which is currently available to stream on the Academy platform as well as HBO Max.
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How Editor Andy Jurgensen Found the Right Balance of Tone and Momentum for ‘One Battle After Another’ [VIDEO INTERVIEW] 
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