10-05-2025
What challenges did RI native Michael Shawver overcome editing the movie 'Sinners'?
NORTH PROVIDENCE – If you stay for the credits at the end of the hit movie "Sinners," you'll see the name of 41-year-old North Providence native "Michael P. Shawver" fill the screen.
Shawver, who graduated from Ponaganset High School and now lives in Woodland Hills, California, with his 9-year-old son, Ben, is credited as the editor of "Sinners," a wildly popular and multifaceted film that ultimately gets classified as a "vampire movie."
"A lot of people don't really realize how much goes into editing a feature film," Shawver told The Providence Journal in late April. "Most movies, I'm on for 10 months to a year, 12-hour days. An editor has their hands and helps out in every different department. Ultimately, we're sort of the gatekeepers of the movie in a way and plot out the emotional blueprint for the experience of the audience. We're the first audience."
He got his love of movies from weekly family movie nights at home with his parents, Paul and Barbara, and older sister, Jessica. But it quickly snowballed from there.
"When I was around 12, my parents bought one of those big chunky VHS camcorders," Shawver said. "I would take that camera out and go make whatever movies I could with my friends. I fell in love with and got addicted to that feeling of creating something, and then showing other people."
With that, the die was cast.
"That ability to do something that came from me that could affect other people was really profound for me," he said. "So, as a teenager, I talked about making movies most of my life."
After majoring in communications studies at the University of Rhode Island, he Googled "best film schools in the world" and packed up his car and headed to the University of Southern California in 2008.
That's where he first teamed up with Ryan Coogler, making possible later collaborations such as "Black Panther," "Creed," and this year's "Sinners."
"I had met Ryan in a directing class, and he was just making things that were above and beyond anybody else at the time," Shawver said. "He was making things that would make you think and feel things and change your mind and open your eyes about things and different walks of life. I realized I can have the same joy of storytelling and creating from editing and helping someone who is doing things at a different level than myself."
"To be honest, the biggest obstacle has always been sort of myself and my anxiety," Shawver said. "It's a big responsibility to create and be artistic under deadlines. As an artist, putting your work out there to the world, there's always a bit of, 'Is this good enough? Am I good enough?'"
But the challenges of editing aren't just psychological.
"In terms of actually like the physical, technical aspects of editing, it's keeping everything in front of you and being mindful and being present," he said. "Editing is, it's a puzzle. But you don't have a picture on the box in front of you to tell you what the answers are. So you have to be in tune with what the story needs to be, what you want the audience to feel."
Editors will watch the movie hundreds of times while working on it, almost constantly tweaking, putting material in or taking it out. And then they show it to a producer or director or test audience, who may find that it doesn't work and needs even more tweaking.
"I don't know how many hours officially were shot, but we were there 55 days or so, and each day there would be anywhere between six to eight hours of footage. There could be anywhere between three to 10 hours of footage per scene," Shawver said. "That is one of the difficult things: How do you pick those moments?"
And "Sinners" had the added complication of actor Michael B. Jordan playing twin brothers, Shawver said. "Instead of choosing one take, I have got to have two takes, and do they match? Does the performance match? Do the twins feel different enough?"
"In general, per scene there's hours and hours of footage that sometimes just have to get boiled down to a minute and a half, two minutes."
"If you can have people lost in it and have a relationship between themselves and the movie in terms of their own experiences, their own hopes and fears, you know that's when you're winning," said Shawver. So he said he trained himself to watch raw footage that way, as the movie's "first audience."
"If it makes me feel happy, sad, tear up, afraid, scared – anything, those are the pieces," he said. "So then those become my puzzle pieces, and then the rest is, 'OK, how do I get to these moments? How do I build up to make this moment the best thing?' It's a lot of trial and error."
"I do want to write and direct a movie that takes place and is shot in in Rhode Island," he said. "I think Rhode Island is the most untapped resource for film making. The fact that you can go from the beach, and then 10 minutes later you're in the woods, and then 10 minutes later in the suburbs, and then you're in the city, and then another 10 minutes you're on a farm. The locations are beautiful. The history, the old buildings and hidden railways and factories and all that. It's just such a beautiful place."
He'd like to work on the remake of "The Thomas Crown Affair," starring and directed by Michael B. Jordan.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: What went into making and editing Michael B. Jordan's 'Sinners'?
