Making the Cut: Editor Chad Sipkin on Sofia Coppola's New Fashion Doc

The film celebrates creativity and friendship

Early in the film Marc by Sofia, the new Marc Jacobs documentary directed by Sofia Coppola, the fashion designer talks about the fear he feels when he starts planning a new collection, even though he has done it many times before.

Does Chad Sipkin, who cut the film, ever feel fear or apprehension at the start of a project? “Looking into the unknown is scary,” the veteran editor tells Muse. “But figuring it out is inspiring.”

The veteran editor poured his creativity into sculpting Marc by Sofia, which is classified as a documentary but isn’t a conventional talking-head film. Rather, it’s an artful meditation on the creative process and inspiration that leads up to the unveiling of the designer’s fall/winter 2024 collection. It’s also an intimate film made possible by the trust Jacobs has in Coppola, with whom he shares a decades-long friendship.

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Sipkin, who owns New York City-based integrative studio known as Consulate, and Coppola go back more than 25 years to when he cut the White Stripes music video she directed for “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” featuring Kate Moss. Since then, they have worked together on a variety of short-form projects, and Coppola maintains an office at Consulate.

As is typical of their collaboration, the director provided Sipkin with references to give him a sense of what inspired her and where she wanted to go with Marc by Sofia. She expressed her desire to make a film that was abstract and collage-like with an emotional conclusion.

Sipkin dove into the dailies before he began editing. He spent more than a month sifting through the footage and filled an entire notebook with material, including things that Jacobs and Coppola discussed that resonated with him. He also made hundreds of screenshots and created “this crazy collage” on a wall at Consulate.

Only after all that prep and lots of discussion did he start cutting. “Once you get into it, the process is quite elementary to get yourself to a first assembly. I think it’s very much akin to being a chef. You shop it, then you prep it, then you put the dinner together, and that’s how it always works for me somehow,” the editor explains.

The first rough cut was completed in about three months. “Then it was a process of coming up with further tangents, asking: What happens if we get off at this exit, spend some time in this town, how do we come back? That kind of thing. Figuratively, not literally,” Sipkin says.

One of Marc by Sofia’s most fascinating sequences finds Jacobs reminiscing about shopping at New York City’s Bergdorf Goodman with his grandmother. Sipkin captures the era when buying clothes was a glamorous affair, immersing us in an experience that was formative for the designer. Sipkin credits Kate Cunningham, a friend of Coppola’s, with sourcing “extraordinary still photography of women from that time, and it enabled me to make this sort of really cool montage.”

The editor also makes good use of clips from the 1967 psychological drama Belle du Jour starring Catherine Deneuve “because it used all of [Yves] Saint Laurent’s clothing, and I knew that it was a big movie for Sofia and for Marc,” he says.

Plus, he weaves in archival footage of artists, including Bob Fosse, Elizabeth Taylor and Cindy Sherman, who influenced Jacobs. We’re not just looking at clips. The material has impact, and Sipkin sees it as “a dynamic character” in the film.

Footage of a rogue fashion show Coppola orchestrated on the street in Manhattan back in the ’90s captures the era and offers a glimpse of an up-and-coming Coppola tapping into her creativity.

In modern day, Coppola first pops into Marc by Sofia around the 19 minute mark. She strides into a shoot carrying a tripod. It’s a fitting onscreen entry for someone known as a hands-on filmmaker.

Coppola didn’t necessarily want to be in the movie, which is her first foray into documentaries. But Sipkin recalls telling her, “Sophia, you have to be in this movie. This is as much you as it is him.”

Ultimately, the film took about nine months to edit, with Sipkin and Coppola riffing throughout and Sipkin working closely with his trusted edit team.