Déborah Braun,
script consultant
A perspective forged by editing
“Once upon a time… and a world is born. Stories have always fascinated me — invented, and yet so true…”
Franco-British, having grown up in Cannes, I was immersed in cinema from early on. As a teenager I was already a member of several film festival juries. Five films a day — that was happiness. Films, but also books of every kind: classics, contemporary fiction, short stories, thrillers, science fiction, and later theatre. I never tired of walking through their worlds and living alongside their characters. That is where I live.
During an internship at the Namur Festival, I discovered the practice of editing — the “third writing” of a film. A revelation. After studying Cinema, Arts, Communication and Language Sciences, and attending directing workshops with Jack Garfein (Actor’s Studio), I became a film editor, trained by Yves Deschamps, who passed on his knowledge to me. For nearly twenty years, I worked with directors and their producers — often the same ones, project after project — with a single question in mind: what are we telling? Because the film lives in the answer.
In 2017, I began collaborating with Noëlle Mesny-Deschamps, founder of the first screenplay development company in Europe (I.D. International Development) and the éQuinoxe writing workshops inspired by the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. I discovered screenplay development — and became immediately passionate about it.
Naturally, I moved from the third writing of a film to the first — the one on which everything is built. I became a script doctor and screenplay consultant. That is how 90pages script consulting was born.
“I enter each screenplay the way one enters an unknown place. I explore it physically too. Volumes and sounds, textures and sensations, emotions. Intuitions, reflections, analyses, conversations, brainstorming, certainties, stories…”
I have worked with Wim Wenders, Jean-Loup Hubert, Pierre Jolivet, Alain Layrac, Jean Odoutan, Frédéric Jolfre, Emmanuel Robert-Espalieu, Sophie Fino-Berger, Etienne Chatilliez, Raphaëlle Catteau, Philippe Azoulay, Jérome Raynaud, Pierre-Henry Salfati, Gilles Paquet-Brenner, Samuel Luret, Nathan Nicolovovitch, Ivan Goldschmidt, Fabien Chalon, etc...
I have worked for AZ You Like, ZED, Little Bear, Storia Télévision, Terence Films, Bande à Part, Telsete, Dum Dum Films, Nelka Films, Point du Jour, Idéale Audience, 45RDLC, LDM, IN Production, Morgane, Vincent et 7 Amis, Hugo Films, Terre Neuve, Zeta Productions, Seconde Vague, etc…
What editing taught me about screenplays
They say editing is the third writing of a film, and it is entirely true.
Before cutting, you always read the screenplay first — to know what you are telling, and therefore what you are looking for in the rushes. You work with the raw material of the shoot, which is never quite the same as the material of the screenplay. There can be bad surprises, but also beautiful discoveries, unexpected and magical moments. The direction, the performances, the sets, the costumes… The shoot is, in its own right, the second writing of a film. It is from this second writing, on the foundation of the first, that the third is built.
This is where the story reveals itself — in its duration, its tension, its silences, its ruptures. Scenes are moved, lines are cut, a glance is added…
I have learned to read a screenplay with the experience of what it becomes once shot — of how it transforms. I know what doesn’t hold, what gets lost, what is too vague, what was promising but was not yet on the page.
This experience in editing is the foundation of my script doctoring practice. I do not come to the screenplay through narrative theory or institutional development: I come to it through the making of the film itself.
A screenplay is living material that runs through the making of a film, while remaining its point of reference. It is rewritten on set and then in the editing room — so that it may grow through its metamorphoses, rather than collapse under the weight of its approximations.
It must be the story and its map, at one and the same time.