Editors Billy Rich, Jennifer Bardot, and Eric Litman had the tall task of creating a resonant action-thriller that often moves at a full-throttle pace, with Ridley Scott setting the tone by directing episode one. The trio had to collaborate and carry the thread of the series through to the finale, which they did with aplomb. Aside from working with excellent directors, as editors, they had to make sure that the key relationship between the two drug-dealer heist-masters (Brian Tyree Henry as Ray, and Wagner Moura as Manny) remained the core of the series.
In discussing their work on the outstanding AppleTV+ series Dope Thief, the editing team speaks to the need to balance action, pacing, and a very emotional story of a tragic friendship for a show that is one of the very best of the 2025 TV season.
The Contending: When you’re asked to work on a show and discover that Ridley Scott is the executive producer and directing the first episode, does that raise your enthusiasm level?
Billy Rich: I’ve worked with him before, so I was brought on by him. That wasn’t the surprise element for me, but I was, of course, happy to work with him.
Jennifer Barbot: Yeah, I’ve worked with him before. I worked with him on Raised by Wolves, but it was always amazing to get another call to work with him again.
Eric Litman: I worked on Hot Zone: Anthrax a few years prior. So I knew the Scott Free people. And then when I saw the trades that the show was being filmed, and it was in Philadelphia, which is where I’m from, I thought, I gotta get on the show. Ridley was the extra bonus behind all that.
The Contending: Ridley Scott’s direction of the first episode is my favorite piece of work from him in some time. Billy, that first episode is the tone setter for the rest of the series. What were you and Ridley aiming for in terms of the editing and the feel of the show?
Billy Rich: You always have an idea of what something’s going to feel like when you read the script, and then footage comes in, and it’s always something else. So you’re always starting from scratch a bit as the footage comes in. I think that was particularly the case here because obviously Ridley has a very strong point of view, Brian (Tyree Henry) had a very strong point of view and was also a producer on the show, and so I think the tone is something that we definitely spent a lot of time working on on the first episode. One thing that shifted a lot from how the show was originally conceived was that the pilot was written with a lot of flashbacks. In the original script, they played like full scenes. Not so much through the series, but in the pilot specifically, they were shot and played as full scenes. I think we discovered in the edit that they worked better ultimately to be used as glimpses to inform the present state of mind of the characters, rather than involve the audience too much in a literal backstory, a sort of peripheral storyline that had to be followed. That’s the thing that changed a lot tonally through the various edits of the first episode.
The Contending: Is the maintenance of continuity between episodes when you’re changing directors, and sometimes changing DPs, and you’re changing editors ever a challenge? I’ve spoken to editors who’ve told me that on a specific project, there was no discussion at all between editors. Conversely, I have talked to editors who collaborated significantly with those who preceded or followed them on a series. How did the three of you work to maintain continuity throughout this season?
Billy Rich: (Show creator) Peter Craig had a strong sense of what he was looking for, so that was always the guiding element. I think we all watched each other’s episodes and had actually quite a bit of discussion amongst each other and vis-à-vis the producers and Peter. I think everything folds back on itself and informs each other. I liked the way that really worked in episode two or four or whatever. I’m going to try to set that up better in my episode. Obviously, in terms of tone, I think we got our footing in the first few episodes, and then you have a template to go forward, even when that tone is a process to find.
Jennifer Barbot: I remember we had a lot of conversations, especially Billy and I had a lot of conversations also, because we were not just trying to find the tone, but we were trying to make the story as interesting and clear as possible. We would talk about a lot of things and say, okay, this happens here and can we set it up better? Or maybe I should do this subsequently because this is happening now. We’re focusing on this in episode one, so let’s try to make this stronger in episode two. It’s a very nice group of people to work with. You don’t always get that. It felt really good and collaborative, and we could have conversations, and it was just really nice.
Eric Litman: I came in at the tail end while you guys were doing one and two. Jennifer and I have known each other for a number of years, so it was easy for me to call her and say, “Hey, how did this get received? How did that get received?” And I was able to calibrate that towards what I was doing. Billy was deep in the pilot, and I watched that a few times, and I loved that episode. So we bonded over the love of what he was doing. It was a great collaboration. And, of course, Peter and our directors were good sources of information on where the show was going.
Billy Rich: A lot of what the discussions were about trying to wrap our heads around a pretty complicated storyline. But the things that I think are the strongest elements in the show, which are really these two characters, were, in a way, the easiest part to deal with and didn’t involve that much discussion because the performances were so strong. It was very clear from the beginning that this was about good people who repeatedly made terrible decisions. I think that they sold that so well. A lot of the stuff that we were trying to plan, like this is going to happen in seven, so we have to see it here, we were wringing our hands over the whole time. But it’s probably the least noticeable thing in this series because what you’re really paying attention to is just spending time with these two people. I feel like we spent a lot of time clearing room to allow the audience to enjoy the relationship.
Jennifer Barbot: Because they were so good. They were so good from the get-go.
Billy Rich: We just didn’t want to distract from that. Okay, don’t raise that question because we want the audience to be looking here. A lot of the discussions we had were how to not get in their way.
Eric Litman: I also tried not to read too far ahead. I would watch the episodes prior to mine that I was cutting, but I didn’t really want to know exactly where they were going because I wanted to stay grounded in what was happening in my episodes.
The Contending: Dope Thief is, at heart, a tragic love story between Ray (Brian Tyree Henry) and Manny (Wagner Moura). Take away everything else. The action, the genre, and the thriller aspects, Ray and Manny are the core of the series.. The thing that I always ask myself when I watch a film or show in any genre is that if you took away the genre elements, if it was an action film and you took away the action, if it was a horror film and you took away the horror, would you still have a movie? Would you still have people that you would want to follow? Editing for performance, particularly with those two, Brian and Wagner, who have such great expressive faces, making sure not only that you’re showing the person talking, but you’re showing the person reacting. I think you found something in the editing that gets to the core of these characters.
Jennifer Barbot: That’s really good to hear because that’s something that I definitely strive for. I’m sure we all did. Something that stands out to me about Brian is that he is fearless, and he will do whatever is in service of the character and of the story. It’s unbelievable. Particularly in six, he had vomit coming out of his mouth. He was on the floor. He was sweating, he was screaming in pain, and it was all believable. It was all believable from the dailies. It wasn’t like I had to help him make it believable. It was there. As we said, I just wanted to not get in the way. And then the way Wagner reacted to him, everybody around him was very strong.
Eric Litman: We had a scene with Ray and Manny in the truck at the end of four after the big shootout, and they’re both just decompressing about what had just happened to them, this horribly traumatic event. Manny’s just saying I give up. I’ve lost Sherry. I’ve lost everything in my life. I wanna die. And he’s holding a grenade. The two of them have this emotionally charged scene. They both just went there. To add to Jennifer’s point, they’re both fearless, and they just give a thousand percent to their performance. It was such a great scene to cut because I also cut episode seven, and in that scene in episode four, where Ray is trying to talk Manny down from killing himself, he says, ‘It’s just you and me. It’s just you and me, dog.’ Then in seven, when they’re in the bus on the way to the trial, they’re now incarcerated and they’re both yelling at each other, but there’s this deep love for each other, and they’re trying to explain where they’re coming from in terms of their relationship with each other. Ray, now he’s just a broken man, he says, ‘it’s just you and me’ again. It’s a great callback that he was able to incorporate that same sort of performance into that scene again.
Billy Rich: What I found really interesting, specifically about Brian’s performance, is how much you get just from his eyes and his face without any dialogue. Probably my favorite sequence to cut in the pilot is where he’s been given a tip for this house to go do this bust that goes terribly wrong. There’s a several-minute section where he goes through this process of considering it, thinking about it, having these kinds of flashbacks: AA meeting, relapse, all this stuff. And there’s really not any dialogue. It’s all his performance, and it’s watching somebody talk themselves into a terrible decision, and this kind of self-sabotage. We played at one point with putting ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement) over it to clarify some things, and then we stripped it all out because it was so much stronger just watching him wrestle with it. There were also moments throughout the series where you would see him say one thing and his face would be saying something different. I thought that was really interesting.
The Contending: When I wrote my review of the series, I began thinking about Brian’s career, and it is a very real possibility that he is among the four or five best male actors on the planet right now. He is that good.
Jennifer Barbot: I completely agree with you. I’m not just saying that because I worked on this; he is genuinely incredible. There’s never a false beat. Never. Not once.
Eric Litman: He came into the cutting room while we were in post a number of times to help us record some lines that just were not clear or add new lines, and his story sense was just incredible. He would make suggestions, and some of them were even better than what we were thinking, to help make a point land even more. He had a lot of lines, and he just banged them out real fast. And the performance didn’t seem like it was a lot of effort on his part. He was able to deliver very quickly, and he gave us a lot of options to choose from.
Jennifer Barbot: It’s exactly what you’re saying. I remember asking him how he could do ADR so quickly and so well, and he said, “Oh, I can just drop into Ray like that.” It’s so impressive, because he is very different than Ray in person, the walk, the physicality, everything.
Billy Rich: He is very different than Ray in person. Some actors, you see them in person, and you’re like okay, you’re kind of playing yourself.
Jennifer Barbot: Nope.
Eric Litman: No, totally different.
The Contending: To speak to Wagner, whom I first discovered him in Narcos. And I didn’t recognize him years later when I saw Civil War. His primal scream scene in Civil War is something I will never forget. But he’s doing something very different here, and it’s because his character is more desperate. He’s got a girlfriend, he’s got a baby on the way, and he’s also a junkie. So, however consistent or inconsistent Ray may be, Manny’s on a different trip, trying to make a family. Was there anything you needed to do to ensure the connection between the two characters wasn’t lost? Ray is an entirely different personality. Manny is manic at a high level much of the time. They’re working at different frequencies, but the frequencies have to connect. How do you make that happen for you as editors?
Eric Litman: In episode four, there’s a scene where Ray discovers Manny in the hotel bedroom. He’s decided to smoke crack, and the smoke detector goes off, and Ray comes down and he’s yelling at him, and Manny is totally incoherent. He’s high and he’s out of it. I went back to one of the scenes I saw in your episodes, Jennifer, episode two, where, after the big shootout scene, Manny takes a hit of something. He went from being a scared guy to his whole face being almost distorted. I was stealing from that a little bit when I was cutting that up, the scene in the hotel room, because I wanted to make sure there was still a connection for the audience and that they could relate to these characters, that they’re not so far out of the realm for the people watching. I wanted to hone in on that to make sure that we connected with Manny in a sympathetic way, that he felt such guilt for what had happened. I also wanted to make sure that the hyper paranoia and fear from Ray was coming out in his performance. To answer your question, no. There wasn’t a lot that I had to do. Their performances were incredibly strong. But it was something that I was very mindful of when I was putting those scenes together.
Jennifer Barbot: Let me say something about Wagner. When you say Wagner, what I think of is in episode six when Sherry comes back, and we don’t know who’s in the car, and he’s very tense. The reaction, his recognition that it’s Sherry who gets out of the car, is so phenomenal. It’s so believable, it’s so heightened, yet it’s so believable. I feel like we as people can identify with this because either we’ve had a reaction like this or we know someone who is like that. We all know someone who’s had this sort of crazy, over-the-top reaction, and then he starts to cry. And she’s comforting him. It’s just the gamut of every emotion that a human being can experience in the span of a minute and a half. When I saw that, I thought, okay, he’s incredible.
Billy Rich: I agree with what everyone has said that their chemistry was excellent and natural and didn’t require a lot of help. In the pilot, because Manny’s character was recast, they did re-shoot a number of sequences, and in some cases, they were entirely re-shot, and in some cases, they were re-shot in pieces. So there was a fair amount of mixing and matching, and it required some creative editing to make everything feel cohesive, but it wasn’t about the performance. It was just about the nature of how some of that was shot.
The Contending: I want to talk about a couple of specific scenes. First one goes over to you, Eric, and that is the firefight at the quarry. That sequence jangled my nerves. Civil War was the last thing that made me sit in my seat and go “Oh God, can I handle this?” But that sequence with the lunacy of the leader of the biker gang (Cyrus, played by Adam Petchel), who gives a great one-episode performance, that sequence is complete mayhem, and there’s this sense of controlled chaos. You don’t know where some of the bullets are coming from, but you start to figure it out. The behavior of some of the characters is so heightened because they are in a firefight, and then you have Manny and Ray just trying to figure out a way to survive. How did you get all that swirling dervish of a sequence to be appropriately chaotic, but followable for the audience?
Eric Litman: That’s a good question, I don’t know (laughing). That footage was coming in in pieces and parts. I think they shot that over two or three days. Marcela Said was my director on that episode, and immediately when I saw that footage, like they had people on fire. I’ve done a lot of shows with action and stuff. I can’t ever think of a show where they practically set somebody on fire that I’ve worked on. So already I knew this was going to be a next-level sequence. So when we put that together, the concept of staying with Ray and Manny, I didn’t want to be with the shooters, and that’s sort of how it was shot. As the firefight progressed, we started to move out of the levels of the quarry. As we were moving out of the quarry, we slowly explained where the shooters are positioned, just enough to get the information that they’re surrounded. But we didn’t want to go into too much detail about what was really happening there. We wanted to stay in the confusion, the fog of war, of Manny and Ray. There was a lot of really good material there. We definitely toned that because we could have gone in a lot of different directions. We could have gone absurd and comedic in a firefight like that, or go with where we ultimately ended up going.
Marcella saw all these vultures flying around, and she called me that day after shooting and said, “Make sure you use the vultures.” I don’t know where, but just make sure you use it. I figured this would be like one shot that I’m going to have to search for. She shot close to twenty takes of it, and it was all excellent stuff of vultures circling. Somehow, she and I came up with the idea that Ray is at the edge of the quarry before this is about to start, and he looks up and sees the vultures. It was a good metaphor of what’s about to happen in that moment. To her credit, she was thinking about all kinds of poetic ways of adding tension to that scene. It’s a scene that I’m thrilled with. And then they went back, and Richard Hughes, one of our producers of the show, shot some over-the-shoulder dirty footage of the shooters to give us more of a sense of geography and give us enough explanation of what’s happening in that scene. Also, the sequence where they’re driving up and they’re listening to music and they’re painting the bikers are painting their faces white, there’s a shot where Ray turns around and he has this look on his face like “Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?” We toned that scene so it didn’t become comedic. We wanted it to be scary, and we had to cut on the exact frame. There was a lot of discussion about those shots and how to use them properly. I’m thrilled how it turned out. But yeah, simple cuts like that took a lot of work.
The Contending: Something that a lot of editors have told me, and I’ll be curious to see if you agree with this, is that it’s easier to shoot action sequences than it is to shoot the interplay of a one-on-one conversation or even in a room where multiple people are talking. Would the three of you agree with that, or do you have differing opinions, or does it just depend?
Billy Rich: It depends. I approach them in a similar way, though. Action sequences that work well are cut like dramatic sequences anyway. You need to understand what the characters are thinking, why they’re doing it, and if the person sees what’s happening. It’s different, but a different version of the same thing. One isn’t inherently more complicated than the other.
Billy Rich: I always try to make sure there’s an arc.
Jennifer Barbot: It’s how it’s shot. If I have many pieces, then you can make an action sequence feel very tense. But if I don’t have a lot of pieces, if it’s shot in a oner or something like that, then there’s not a lot that an editor can do.
Billy Rich: With dialogue scenes, there’s just less to cheat with sometimes. You can’t go to some third place or fourth place.
The Contending: I’ve been a Ving Rhames fan for a long time. I thought he was one of the best actors on earth for about fifteen years, and that doesn’t mean he is not great now. Right around 1999, he had just stopped getting the great roles that he had been getting previously. In episode six, with Ving and, Brian suffering from his infection, the haze of Brian’s viewpoint lasts most of the episode. The one episode plays differently because he is so woozy and out of it and losing it. With that episode being different than the others, what methods, techniques, and what efforts did you make to make it stand out in the way that it was supposed to, but also not lose the through line of the series?
Jennifer Barbot: I would credit our director, Jonathan van Tulleken, who’s incredibly talented. He gave me a lot of wonderful pieces to use. He’s very good with performance, and he’s also very good with action, which is hard. It’s hard to have a director who can do both so well. He gave me a lot of those almost fisheye shots on Brian that were so close. We talked about when we would use those and how to introduce them. We were mindful of wanting to have a place to go in the episode, and we pulled them out fairly quickly in the first scene when he’s unconscious in the chair, and he’s talking to Ving, and then Theresa (Kate Mulgrew) comes in.
So we built it in a way that felt strong at the top of the show, but still have a place to go at the end. When Brian’s on the couch and then she puts the antibiotics in his wound, all of those pieces and all the coverage of the characters, it’s so dynamic in there. And then Brian stands up and runs upstairs, and then the whole shootout at the end. It was a lot of dailies, but a lot of very interesting, wonderful pieces. Sometimes when you’re in the moment, you’re just thinking about what’s the next cut and what’s the next cut and what’s the next cut? And then you have to go back. I always say it’s like peeling an onion. I do a first pass, and it’s kind of a mess, and then I do another pass, and it gets clearer. I just keep whittling it down to help it feel as tense as possible and keep the story between them as honest as possible.
The Contending: It was great seeing Mulgrew stepping out of her Star Trek character, and the relationship between her and Ving, because they don’t get much time to establish their connection, but they don’t need it. They talk in other sequences about how they feel about each other. But when they’re together, you must believe that the connection they spoke about exists in person. I think that comes through with their mutual concern for Ray. Was there anything with Kate and Ving, prep-wise, that mattered to you, to make sure that their relationship was coming across within a limited time?
Jennifer Barbot: Not that I know of. I did go to Philadelphia, and I wasn’t able to speak with Ving, but I was able to speak with Kate. I asked her something similar. I was very impressed because I felt like I understood their history right from the get-go. I believed that they had a history, and I understood their history. And she was so nonchalant about it. She said, “Oh, it’s just what I do. This is my job. I’m an actor, and this is what I bring.” She was off the cuff about it.
The Contending: They’re wonderful together. Eric, I want to speak to a scene you shot with Marin Ireland. She has been an actor whom I’ve always found to be underappreciated. She’s always been hovering just at the edge of greater fame, and her performance is just astonishing. I love the sequence where you show her skipping rope, and then it cuts to her going through files, documents, etc. She’s getting back in the game. It’s like a Rocky training sequence in a way.
Eric Litman: I’m from Philadelphia. I’m a huge Rocky fan. I’m glad you brought up Rocky because when I was cutting those sequences, episode seven has a lot of montage, and my assistant and I would joke that this was our Rocky IV, which just gave us some fun. Our attitude was no pun intended with Rocky, just go for it. We would do what felt right rhythmically to tell the story. Where are we emotionally in her journey? That was the crux of that training montage: to show that she’s still struggling mentally, but there’s a physical element to help her get herself out of this mental anguish that she’s in. It wasn’t just a music video; we were telling an important aspect of her story and trying to get her from point A to point B relatively quickly. Each one of those shots was intercut to tell that, to show that she’s getting herself back in the game. A majority of her performance in the show, she was without a voice, so she had to convey whatever she was going with her eyes, or looks, or not looking. We found that if we just lingered on her for an extra beat or two, it would say everything we needed to say. So we kept those things in mind when putting that sequence together. I’m thrilled with that sequence, in particular.
The Contending: Jennifer, in episode eight there is a sequence where Mina (Marin) and Ray have the bedside showdown and then I think the final episode moves at a little bit of a slower pace and it seems intentional, certainly to me, and it works until we get to the shootout in Mina’s RV. It was interesting to watch Ray and Mina, who are on different sides of the coin, but they have an almost inherent understanding of each other from the moment they have the conversation in the hospital. So when they are in the flaming RV shootout, there’s a point where Ray says to her, “We are not gonna die today,” or something like that, that they form a connection too in a very short period of time, and it’s completely believable. When you were editing those two sequences to sell, the actors did the selling too, but you also had to edit it so that it’s believable to us that they would feel that way. Can you talk about transitioning that scene to the RV shootout?
Jennifer Barbot: Peter and I worked on that scene a lot, and we went through it line by line and figured it out. Like you said, this episode’s slower until we get to the Winnebago, but we talked about pacing it out and making it feel as real as possible. Even when we had Marin come in, how long it took her to come in, how long it took her to watch him (Ray/Brian), what he was doing, how he was feeling, how we were feeling. We spent a very long time on that scene just trying to make it real and not worrying about whether it felt long or slow or anything like that. We believed that our audience earned these moments with these characters and that they would want to be with them for this amount of time. We trusted our audience that we had set up the story enough throughout that we earned this time there.
Then, when we got back to the Winnebago, that whole section changed. It changed many times because there was much more dialogue between them at that point. Like we said earlier, we took away a lot of the dialogue because so much of it was done with their looks, which is how you know you have really great actors, you can do it without the words. There was that moment when he put out his hand to her. I remember watching the dailies; they were both very generous and patient with each other and what was happening. It was very instructive in terms of, again, not getting in the way of what they were doing. Peter and I went through that a lot, and how we could distill it down to what we need to know right at that time, and what we want our audience to feel at that moment.
The Contending: This show has been advertised, if I’m correct, as a limited series, a one-and-done. If someone were to change their mind and say, “What if we can create a second story?” would you all be glad to be a part of it?
Jennifer Barbot: I would love to work with Peter Craig again. I would work with him in a heartbeat. He’s incredibly talented. And I loved Brian. I loved everybody who was on it. Ridley was great, Jonathan van Tulleken. I didn’t get to work with Marcella, but she was amazing. Everyone was so talented. I love these guys. Eric and Billy, I think they’re great. So yes, my answer is yes. I would do it again.
Billy Rich: Absolutely. It was a wonderful team to work with. These are characters that, personally, I could certainly keep watching. I also wanted to pile on the praise for Marin. She was so great in this series. Listening to Jennifer speak about the pieces she was working with in some of the action sequences and how much footage there was to work with, pertaining to your question earlier about setting the tone of the pilot, I just thought it was maybe interesting to mention, Ridley’s footage has such an incredible natural energy that’s unusual and he works very fast. He works with multiple cameras. He lets the actors go; a certain amount of improvisation was happening. What’s unusual about the process is that a lot of times, when building an action sequence or even a dialogue sequence, it’s fat, and you’re trying to create the pacing. Working with Ridley, the pacing is often inherent in the footage. The edit becomes more about deciding what the audience needs to focus on and sometimes carving out moments you might miss because of how things are happening. It is always a fun process and unique in the way he shoots, and I think also helped set the tone for the series in terms of this kind of frenetic movement that it has.
Eric Litman: I would say a resounding yes. I would work with everybody on the show again. It’s not often that you meet people you feel an instant creative connection with, and I found that happened pretty quickly on the show. When I initially came on, everything was Zoom, everything was remote. So I met Peter via Zoom a number of times. We had very good conversations. My initial collaboration was fairly strong with Marcella, my director. I could see pretty quickly that the way we thought creatively, the way we thought in terms of utilizing the footage for the edit, was very in line. And she shot footage that was very, I would say, unconventional in terms of the way she framed footage and the way she got footage, so finding ways to utilize all that was a challenge for me. And it was a fun challenge to take.
I would send her scenes a lot during production, and by her response, by how she’d give me notes, I could see we were perfectly in sync in terms of how we were looking at stuff. It was great, we developed a shorthand almost immediately. When I eventually started working with Peter, we had a number of very personal conversations. What’s your taste in music? What kind of movies do you like? And I could see again, the things we enjoyed watching and listening to were very similar. We were able to have that creative shorthand and develop it quickly. When we’re in the cutting room together, working on things, and trying to condense the edit, just like with Marcella and everybody else, it was a perfect sync. So yeah, if Dope Thief season two came around or any other show Peter is doing, I would be there in a heartbeat.
Billy Rich: One thing that was interesting about Peter is that he thinks a lot about the edit, even during the writing process. Within his scripts, he heavily references or describes very specific ideas for transitions, for sound usage, for montage, for all this kind of stuff. Of course, the final edit doesn’t end up being exactly that, but you can see that he’s constructing this with the intention to use the editorial process to heighten the storytelling.
Eric Litman: I would agree with that a hundred percent. The sequence in seven, the Mina montage sequence, which was also incorporated with the surveillance montage as well, he wrote those beats outs. It was scripted. In the script, it said intercut or montage, something to that effect. When I see something like that, it’s like okay, I have a green light here to just make this work how I editorially think it should work, and he and Marcella both responded really well to that. Peter’s definitely thinking in those terms when he’s crafting a script.
