Sunday Coffee
Deleted scenes from All the Feels: Post-sync in Spike Jonze's Her
Is talking on the phone such a natural habit that it’s easy to fake it without feedback? When a character is on the phone in a movie, I wonder if they have someone reading lines off-camera. Do they just talk to the replica smartphone in their hand and imagine someone on the other end? Probably actors have their own preference, and the pacing can be adjusted to suit the cut in the editing room.
That detail made me want to know how Her was shot. Did Joaquin Phoenix sit alone on the set talking and “making the film” so they could put the voice of the OS into it later? Or did someone read Samantha’s lines so he could respond to another actor, feel the push and pull of dialogue?
Making Her Twice
It turned out Spike Jonze worked both ways as he made Her. First, Samantha Morton performed the role from a sound booth while the cast shot their scenes. To increase the authenticity of Phoenix’s response to a character whose only presence is a voice in an earbud, Morton was never in view on set. She and Phoenix never saw each other or acted face-to-face.
But when Jonze began editing, he was unsatisfied. The way things felt in what he’d gotten wasn’t what he’d hoped for. After talking with Morton, they agreed she’d step away from the role. Jonze then hired Scarlett Johansson to voice Samantha. She was shooting Captain America at the time— busy with other projects, as Samantha herself is with other Operating Systems.
ADR and Afterthoughts
The second time Her was “made,” instead of Phoenix acting with someone off set in a sound booth, it was Johansson who took her cues from Phoenix’s recorded performance. The team worked in an ADR studio—Automatic Dialog Replacement—a process usually reserved for fixing technical glitches or line changes. (Think of any moment when a character speaks off-camera; odds are it’s ADR.) I liked finding out that when the technology was introduced in 1969 it was called Electronic Post-Sync. Wouldn’t ADR be perfect for those times a great comeback line hits you hours after a conversation? I’m going to shorthand those I-know-what-I-should-have-said moments as “post-sync” from now on.
What fascinated me most was how the process reshaped everything else. Johansson didn’t re voice Morton’s performance, she originated her own, interpreting Samantha her way. Jonze rewrote scenes to fit her rhythms, and Phoenix returned to recalibrate his own. Inspired by their work, Jonze wrote additional scenes for them. The writing fix quickly outstripped “new pages” and took on a collaborative vitality of its own.
That constant revision reminded me of another kind of post-sync: the writer’s version, where resynchronizing happens inside the script every time a character shifts their weight.
Ironing Out Every New Wrinkle
Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye recounts how Robert Towne, writing Chinatown, faced a similar recursion. “I wrote at least twenty different step outlines,” Towne said. “Long, long step outlines.” Each new idea rewired the whole narrative. Every change meant disassembling and rebuilding the screenplay from scratch. As Wasson observed, Towne’s previous plot “couldn’t always be redacted without difficulty; if abandoned ideas once had narrative value, excising them would capsize all that followed.”
After Johansson’s performance was cut in, Jonze had a two-and-a-half-hour version of Her. Overwhelmed, he handed it to Steven Soderbergh, who returned it twenty-four hours later as a ninety-minute edit. Jonze ultimately made his own 126-minute final cut, but seeing Soderbergh’s streamlined version helped him rediscover what had been lost in the sprawl.
From Film to Digital Memory
If digital flexibility created headaches for Jonze, film’s material excess nearly drowned his former father-in-law. Francis Ford Coppola shot over 230 hours of film for Apocalypse Now, and Walter Murch spent two years editing it, “the longest post-production of any picture I’ve worked on,” Murch said. Adjusted for today’s dollars, Coppola’s film cost about $150 million; Jonze’s, around $32 million.
In 2013, the year Her was released, digital video officially surpassed film as the industry norm. Directors like Jonze, with his background creating music videos, found that digital workflows didn’t just make production cheaper; they altered how fiction could evolve. The medium’s elasticity invited experimentation: try something, see what happens, rewrite, reshoot.
Echoes and Exes
It might sound like that flexibility got Jonze into trouble, but it also enabled the emotional precision that defines the movie. And there’s an ironic echo in the way Jonze and his former wife Sofia Coppola each filmed their divorce. I wasn’t tempted to draw a direct line between the two films, but I kept thinking about the karaoke scene in Lost in Translation. Coppola makes a suave joke out of the Japanese karaoke bar, sending up the music-video aesthetic of Charlotte’s husband John. Karaoke is content in Coppola’s hands. In Her, Jonze turns karaoke into a production technique— swapping one voice for another, just as Charlotte swaps John for Bob. The sly pleasure of Scarlett Johansson playing both Charlotte and Samantha feels like a private wink: the humor of a more urbane director, a contemporary Howard Hawks.
Sometimes a film about a voice in your ear turns out to be a lesson in how artists continue talking to each other—across edits, across years, across the static of their own pasts.