Awards Daily talks to Academy Award nominee Pamela Martin about how Richard (Will Smith) and Oracene’s (Aunjanue Ellis) memorable “Are we a team?” scene was almost edited out of King Richard.
Between The Fighter, Battle of the Sexes, and now King Richard, film editor Pamela Martin has become known for sports movies.
“I do love sports,” says Martin. “I played a lot of sports growing up, and I feel like it’s such a microcosm of learning how to deal with the world, playing sports as a kid. You learn how to win and you learn how to lose gracefully.”
But despite her experience cutting sports movies, she was reluctant to take on King Richard, even if her experience on the tennis-themed Battle of the Sexes might have prepared her for it.
“It was the one reason I had major hesitation about doing the job. It’s a lot of work to cut sports, and I know the pitfalls, etc. I thought, ‘Oh my god, am I ready to do this again?’ The idea of it was a little exhausting to me. But what attracted me to it, aside from the script—which was by far the best I’d read in a long time—was that Rei [director Reinaldo Marcus Green] was very adamant about not using sportscasters in those matches.”
Marcus Green didn’t use the sportscasters because one, these matches were not actually televised, so sports commentary didn’t exist, and also because he didn’t want to rely on what has become a movie cliche for sports movies.
“So it’s a challenging idea, but at the same time, more interesting because I could use a lot of the same tools I’d used to compress time, which is extremely important when cutting sports. Knowing I didn’t have this one major tool made it more of a challenge and I knew I’d have to look at it in a different way. King Richard is about the family’s experience during those matches, particularly Richard and Venus’s. It freed me up; I wasn’t going to be doing the same thing again.”
Richard and Oracene Williams & The Two Key Scenes that Highlight Their Relationship
One of the most unexpected and interesting dynamics in the film is that between Richard (Will Smith) and his wife Oracene “Brandy” (Aunjanue Ellis). In other sports movies with a male lead, the wife is often relegated to the sidelines, but in the “Are we a team?” scene, we first get a glimpse of this unique relationship at play, where Oracene calls out Richard on making decisions without involving her in the process.
“At one point, we wondered if we needed this part of the scene, and we removed it from the movie. And the first time we showed it to any friends, which was about Week 4 into the director’s cut process, and they were like, ‘Oracene! Oracene! Oracene! What else do you have?’ We didn’t immediately see how important that scene was, but we quickly figured it out!”
So Martin and the team added the scene back in, noting that while Oracene is a listener and very observational, when she speaks, it has a strong impact.
“We’ve seen her looking at him sideways as this thing goes down, but to hear her call him out, that was a really important thing to have throughout the movie because it’s such a good counter-balance to Richard.”
Later on, Oracene really fires back at Richard in what has become known as “the Kitchen scene,” one of Martin’s favorite scenes, which she edited to make even more impactful. When juxtaposed against the backyard scene, it offers a strong payoff.
“Early in the argument when she’s making the peanut butter sandwiches, she says, ‘I taught her that open stance, [etc.].’ There used to be a line in there from Richard, where he said, ‘What do you want from me? An apology? I’m sorry, Oracene.’ And he was kind of a little snarky and sarcastic. Instead of him mocking her, it was stronger for her to just say, ‘I don’t need your apology,’ without him saying, ‘I’m sorry, Brandy.’ It all played into that whole scene, which is so much about why he’s doing what he’s doing and Oracene calling out how he’s scared that his whole plan may fail and maybe this is why he’s holding her [Venus] back.”
Through her editing, Martin was able to showcase this interesting dynamic and really help shape these moments that highlight supporting characters like Ellis’s.
“I love her character so much. You really can’t have this movie without her. I think Aunjanue killed it.”
