“Saturday Night” is a tick-tock movie like few in recent memory. The new film, directed and co-written by Jason Reitmanconcerns the very first broadcast of “Saturday Night Live” on October 11, 1975, and the story unfolds in real time during the 90 minutes before the show begins.

“Jason described it very well: you balance truth and myth. But the main takeaway is the feel of what it means. could I felt like I was that night,” co-editor Shane Reid tells Gold Derby about the film. “So time constraints are something that we are aware of and use, but we don’t allow them to dictate how you want to feel in the film.”

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Featured Gabriel LaBelle as creator of “SNL” Lorne Michaels and featuring a parade of young talents playing the famous Not Ready for Primetime Players (including Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroydand freshly won an Emmy Award Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris), “Saturday Night” is based on several interviews with Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan made with several people involved in the first broadcast of the sketch comedy show.

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“What’s interesting is that when we started asking people about their memories, they started sharing stories that happened throughout that night,” Reitman told Indiewire of the process. So, for example, while Michaels found the future writer of “SNL” Alan Zweibel at a bar, this happened months before “Saturday Night Live” first aired, not just minutes before the show aired on NBC.

“It was a fun challenge, where I think about how Jason and Gil wrote the script and how the cinematographer Eric Steelberg I shot the film, it just lived and breathed that tone,” co-editor Nathan Orloff explains the process. “It was up to us to try and do our best to live up to what they were doing on set. When we got off that train and things weren’t at that level, we could always go back to the tone they originally set.

“Some things can overlap in time. Some things happen on separate floors. So we did our best to stay the course,” says Reid. So one of the things he and Orloff added in the edit was timestamps that show the audience where things stand as 11:30 p.m. looms as the toughest deadline. At the world premiere of “Saturday Night” at the Telluride Film Festival, these visual gags, where the clock slowly ticks from one minute to the next, drew some of the biggest laughs.

“It was a device that we did our best to stick to with the real-time clock. But there was a little fluctuation based on what we might need,” says Reid.

“Saturday Night” boasts one of the largest sets in recent memory, with several characters bouncing around the reconstructed rooms of Studio 8H inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza (recreated on an Atlanta soundstage by an award-nominated production designer Oscars. Jess Gonchor). For Orloff and Reid, one of the biggest challenges was making sure each character and performance stood out and had emotional beats that Reitman and Kenan were sure would land in the third act of the script.

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“It was unlike any other film I’ve worked on,” Orloff says. “There were times when we were cutting back a scene, and it wasn’t until we looked at the whole thing from top to bottom that we realized we hadn’t served a particular character well enough. You wouldn’t know this character was missing and how he worked until you saw the whole thing because of the giant set. So it was a very interesting challenge. Because normally you can kind of compose it on a smaller scale. But here it was like, ‘Oh, this sounds wrong now, because in the two scenes later, when we pick up with Garrett, for example, it has to match this thing that just happened.’

The third act of “Saturday Night” resolves several emotional issues and concludes the many character arcs – including things like Garrett Morris feeling adrift in his role on the show or John Belushi (played by Matte Wood) signing his talent contract to appear on the show. But while the viewer might expect these plateaus to slow the film down, that never happens. Orloff and Reid – and the script – manage to keep the pace going while letting the beats breathe just long enough to make an impact.

“I always think of editing as how you edit writing,” says Orloff, adding that if you have a paragraph where every sentence is the same length, it makes for uninteresting reading. “The more things vary, the more it creates in us this dynamic that is simply more human in storytelling. So I look at the scenes in the same way, where we can dive into this emotional rhythm between Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennot) and Lorne, and then bam, you’re on the move again. It was just a matter of us dealing with it and not letting it drag on for too long. But it is also a testimony to writing. They didn’t overwrite these scenes.

It’s also a testament to the “Saturday Night Live” philosophy. The film opens with Michaels’ famous quote: “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; It’s still going on because it’s 11:30.

“The tension is still there,” Reid says of the third act. “The public is aware that we must continue to move forward because time is the enemy. »

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