‘One Battle After Another’ Editor Andy Jurgensen Shares Secrets From Paul Thomas Anderson’s Masterpiece

“One Battle After Another” has finally come home.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s whirligig action movie epic, which is currently nominated for a cool 13 Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Director, is now available on your physical media format of choice – DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Ultra-HD. If you saw the movie, about a former revolutionary named Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) who makes a desperate attempt to save his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti) from the clutches of an old adversary (Sean Penn), in theaters, chances are you are ripe to revisit. And the 4K UHD version is the closest you’ll get to sitting in front of a VistaVision presentation, with sterling picture and sound. (It’s an early candidate for home video release of the year.)

To celebrate the release, we spoke to editor Andy Jurgensen, who is also Academy Award-nominated, about some of the movie’s biggest moments and some of our biggest questions. Buckle up. It’s going to get hilly.

Waiting for Benicio Paid Off

As you have undoubtedly heard, the production went on a three-month hiatus while they waited for Benicio del Toro to finish filming his other Anderson movie of the year – Wes Anderson’s excellent “The Phoenician Scheme.” This happened after the first six weeks of shooting, after much of the prologue was shot in Sacramento.

“We had about two months where Paul and I could work on everything that had been shot up to that point. We had a good cut at that point,” Jurgensen told TheWrap. “We knew the little holes in the movie and that was really helpful to kind of inform the rest of production.”

One of the things that they realized was that they needed to reshoot the beginning of the movie – all of the stuff with the revolutionary group the French 75 meeting and the assault on the border camp. “We shot at some other location and it was a little unclear that it was an immigration camp,” he said.

They also reshot the sequence between Teyana Taylor and Penn in his trailer.

“It was at a completely different location. We didn’t go back to it. We needed it to be clear that there were immigrants in cages,” Jurgensen explained. “It didn’t set up the French 75 well enough. And the first meeting between Sean and Teyana could have been better. This is something that is so great – Paul will just say, ‘Okay, we’re going to pivot.’ Luckily, we were able to get the few extra days and it was just part of the second half of the shoot.”

Jurgensen said that sometimes Anderson will shoot “alt versions of scenes or different ways of doing stuff, in case something just needs to be a couple of lines or silent, we have the option.” The idea is that if a scene has to be reconstituted or put into a montage, they’ll be set. You always have to be prepared. Just like the French 75.

The Studio Didn’t Ask for Radical Changes

During the long post-production process on “One Battle After Another,” it was reported that Warner Bros. was working with Anderson to make the best, most commercial version of the movie. But Jurgensen said that there wasn’t severe meddling.

“We trimmed it down and that was just our normal process,” he shared.

According to Jurgensen, Anderson doesn’t like to test his movies, but it was something that Warner Bros. wanted to do. Anderson agreed, partially because he wanted to know that it played well as a comedy, and, as Jurgensen said, “There are some sensitive things in the movie, both racial things and political things. It was going to be interesting for us to test it in different parts of the country.”

The tests confirmed that “the humor was working. And luckily, it did confirm, when you’re kind of trying to figure out, How can we push it a little further? How can we do things?”

The studio was not trying to enforce an ultimatum and didn’t pressure them to cut anything. “They were supportive. I think the test screenings helped us because they were reacting so well to it,” Jurgensen noted.

There Was an Extra Scene With Teyana

At a screening we had attended, Taylor made a reference to an additional scene that was cut from the movie, where her character calls Regina Hall’s character (another member of the French 75) to rescue her daughter with Bob. We had assumed that this was in the main section of the movie, but Jurgensen said it was in the prologue, with Taylor calling Hall to escape with their infant daughter Willa, since Penn’s villainous character Lockjaw was on the loose.

“She is on the phone, calling Regina’s character and Lockjaw is in the background. And basically she’s talking in code speak, being like, ‘You have to take the socks out,’ basically the code word for Willa,” Jurgensen said.

The scene was ultimately sacrificed, he said, to keep the movie’s nonstop, propulsive pace.

“That scene with Regina and Teyana had to go because you don’t really need it. It’s tough, because that prologue is setting up so much and setting up Teyana, that she only really appears in that and at the very end. It needs to be substantial enough. You need to feel her throughout the entire movie. So you really have to set her up properly,” Jurgensen explained. “It was a balancing act of figuring out, how can we be lyrical with the when she gives birth and the postpartum depression and how things get layered to keep moving forward. And then after the first sort of camp sequence too, there’s a passage of time where we’re showing the explosions and things like that. That went through different versions.”

What they landed on perfectly establishes the tone of the movie, the characters and the world that they’re inhabiting. Well done.

“Dirty Work” Was Always the Song

One of the more unforgettable moments in “One Battle After Another” is when, after the prologue, we cut from the baby version of Willa to the teenage version of Willa. You can hear Teyana give a sparse amount of narration (“16 years later, the world had changed very little”) and then, one of the greatest needle drops in recent memory – Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work,” which appeared on the band’s 1972 debut album “Can’t Buy a Thrill.” It’s a huge moment – impactful and emotional, accompanied by the perfect song choice.

But was that song always in that exact place?

“Yes, in fact, we, even when we were watching dailies, he played it like during even that, like when we watched him smoking in the car with the teacher. We played that to get the feeling of how it would be,” Jurgensen said. Initially, there were other bits of narration earlier in the film, which he and Anderson jettisoned. But Taylor’s narration during the time jump always remained.

We wondered if Jurgensen was surprised that this has emerged as a standout moment from a movie almost exclusively made of standout moments.

“What we were trying to do, to be honest, was to make sure that it worked as best as possible, especially with the music,” Jurgensen said. “It’s the end of the prologue and we’re showing her leaving through to Mexico and Lockjaw the note and it was trying to figure out the sequence of all those shots in order to build it to be the best, then with Jonny’s score and how we would just drop it out for that shot of Willa.”

There Was Never an Extra Scene Before the Big Chase

One of our theories, especially on rewatch, was that there was an extra scene that was removed before the big chase through the hills at the end.

To explain: there’s a very hard cut to Willa being chased by a member of the white supremacist group the Christmas Adventurers (played by the great John Hoogenakker). We see her in a car and then him right behind her. And we wondered if there was a scene of him going to the campsite of the 1776, a white nationalist group that was initially hired to kill Willa, seeing that everyone was dead and then realizing that she had gotten away in a stolen car.

But this was scene was never shot.

“We talked about it but I think the idea was that they’re all-powerful. They’re all knowing. They know. He knows Avanti [the tracker initially tasked with finding Willa], he would know the car potentially. You could make the argument that he did go to the camp and saw what had happened or had maybe gotten a call from one of the guys or something,” Jurgensen said. “That’s what we were okay with.”

Mystery solved.

“One Battle After Another” is available on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K UHD.

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