What does a music editor actually do? And what gets lost when no one explains it?
What does a music editor actually do – and what gets lost when no one explains it?
Filmed on the island of Lopud during the 2025 Ponta Lopud Film Festival, this is a conversation between music editor and NYU professor Suzana Perić and film critic and broadcaster Mark Kermode – two people who have spent their careers listening closely to film music, from opposite sides of the room.
They talk about the music editor as a translator between film language and musical language, how Suzana uses temp tracks as an educational tool while protecting composers from ever hearing them, the single sentence Jonathan Demme gave Howard Shore for The Silence of the Lambs, and what composers like Anna Meredith and Eiko Ishibashi reveal about where film music is going.
No moderator. No script. Just two artists, on an island, in conversation.
Guest biographies
Music Editor & NYU Professor
Suzana Perić
Suzana Perić is a Croatian-American music editor and associate professor at NYU Steinhardt. Born in Zagreb, she studied film arts at Columbia College Chicago and has worked on films like The Silence of the Lambs (1991), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Lady Bird (2017), and Barbie (2023). She won Golden Reel Awards for The Lord of the Rings (2002) and Jane (2018). A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Perić is also involved in the jury for the Academy Award for student films.
Film Critic & Broadcaster
Mark Kermode
Mark Kermode is a British film critic, broadcaster, writer, and musician. He co-presents Screenshot on BBC Radio 4 and the podcast Kermode & Mayo’s Take, and is the writer and presenter of the BBC series Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema. His writing has appeared in publications such as Time Out, NME, Sight & Sound, and Fangoria, and from 2013 to 2023 he served as chief film critic for The Observer. Alongside film criticism, he plays double bass and harmonica in the blues/skiffle band The Dodge Brothers.
