During the January week that saw him nominated for a BAFTA and an Oscar for his editing work on Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, Irishman Jonathan Redmond has a bit of news for RTÉ Entertainment.
He didn't plan on being a film editor.
"It definitely wasn't a lightbulb moment at all," he says from his home in California while he tries to get his head around his place on the red carpet this awards season.
Like many, what happened was the Dubliner hopefully set out on one path, only to arrive somewhere else that ultimately felt like home.
Growing up in 1980s Sandycove, the camera was his thing.
"My mother ran the Gallery of Photography there in Dublin for many years," he recounts. "She used to hold photography workshops in the house and I kind of grew up surrounded by photographers. I've always had an interest in visual mediums, so to speak. I always wanted to be a photographer or work in film in some way."
From little acorns grow... He got a job with a company called Camera Rentals Ireland and, sure enough, Irish networking did its girlfriend's-sister's-boyfriend thing - literally in this case - and Redmond was introduced to someone who made his living as an editor.
"A guy called Brian McCue, really talented - used to work in Windmill Lane then went freelance and was editing U2 videos and stuff like that," he continues. "He'd a big show coming up and he needed an assistant editor to digitise tapes. He knew I had a keen interest and a visual eye, so he offered me a job as an assistant. That's how I started."
It wasn't long before Redmond was smitten with the craft.
"I didn't really know much about editing. I mean, who does if you're not really necessarily thinking about it that much when you're watching movies?! I quickly realised, 'This is really cool' - I had a knack for it. I was probably a useless assistant editor but turned out to be a reasonably good editor! Brian taught me lots of things and I was working with him for quite a few years. That gave me a skillset that was really useful and I went to Australia."
Backpacking was about to become something bigger as, at this point in the story, the start of the Noughties, the stars aligned again.
Elvis director Luhrmann came into the frame.
"Brian was using a reasonably obscure editing system called Lightworks, which had a very niche position in the editing world," Redmond explains. "So when I went to Australia, Baz was actually cutting Moulin Rouge! on a Lightworks system. When push came to shove and they needed extra help, I turned out to be the person that they asked to join the team. And 23 years later, I'm still working with Baz."
That 23-year working relationship nearly didn't happen, mind. Not because of first impressions or time or money, but because of something funnier, as Redmond ruefully recalls.
He wasn't a fan of musicals.
"My first meeting was actually with an American post-production executive called Aaron Downing. He was telling me about the project and it was Baz Luhrmann. I wasn't that familiar with Baz to be perfectly honest. He said, 'It's a musical' and that kind of immediately put me off! I thought, 'Oh God, do I want to do this?!' Aaron was like, 'You must be crazy to even think about not doing this!' Eventually, he persuaded me that this would be an exciting project and a great opportunity - and he was certainly right."
Downing's insistence that Redmond and Luhrmann would make the perfect collaborators has taken the ex-pat and the Australian auteur through Moulin Rouge!, Chanel ads, The Great Gatsby, TV series and now on to Elvis - their biggest adventure and years in the making before it arrived in cinemas.
"I first started working on this project about five years ago when Baz just had the idea of making an Elvis film. Back then, I had tremendous freedom, it was all about research and kind of experimenting with picture and sound - if Baz was going to do this, what would be the Baz factor? We had a great music team and we started experimenting with the music. We were lucky enough to get incredible access to Elvis' recordings through his record label, RCA. Back then, we were basically scratching the itch."
Scratching that itch with fellow Oscar-nominated editor Matt Villa and Luhrmann meant Redmond also had a golden ticket to another vault - Elvis onscreen.
"There's a huge amount of audio-visual material with a man like Elvis Presley. He made twentysomething movies, all his great concert films, documentaries and so forth. We did a deep dive into all that material back then. That affected the script as well. We came up with the ending of the movie five years ago."
Ah yes, that ending. It was Redmond who found the footage for that not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house finale. However, when it's put to him that he deserves the plaudits for the showstopper, he modestly replies, "To a certain extent" and moves on, simply saying that time in the film's creation was "a lot of fun".
The shoot was "kind of a different story".
"It's like a marathon, very early starts - 5:30 in the morning, six o'clock - and I was on set most of the time. Editor-on-set is feeding the various different departments. Very long days. At the end of the day Baz wants to see what he's shot, there's lots of reviews. And also, myself and my colleague Matt Villa, who's the other editor on the movie, we were both cutting while we were shooting. On top of the day-to-day demands of the various different shooting departments, we're also trying to do our day job as well! It's very involved, it's kind of a brutal process. It's also very exciting. You're seeing magic happen. It's amazing to see."
All told, editing Elvis took "about a year" - tot up the actual working hours and it probably works out as another five years of 40-hour weeks for the rest of us.
"Probably the biggest challenge was getting a four-and-a-half-hour movie down to two hours and 40 minutes," Redmond reflects. "There was so much good footage. We were working for months and months and months and the movie kept getting longer! That was tricky. After a long time, we got it down to four hours and we thought, 'Ah, this is awesome! We're doing really well!' It's so hard to make things shorter when there's so much good material."
There was no "one big moment" in bringing Elvis to its ultimate duration, "just hard work".
"We were just constantly at it, polishing a stone, polishing a diamond," Redmond says. "Our long movie, while it did play and was very entertaining, is a different film. Part of getting it down to length involved taking three scenes and blending them together and using music to tie them together. The long play wouldn't do that as much. It wouldn't be able to sustain the same pace for four-and-a-half hours, that's just impossible. It would be a very different film. I think Baz constantly gets asked about it. He might get around to it one day!"
In the meantime, Redmond has his biggest night to look forward to, celebrating the film that has connected in so many cinemas and homes around the world - and his work to get it there. If anything, the Oscar nomination seems like a bonus.
"You never want to get your hopes up," he smiles. "It's not very often editing gets reported in critics' reviews, but there were quite a few mentions of myself and Matt in some of the reviews, which does put it on the radar. Certainly, when you're in the thick of it, it's the very last thing you're ever thinking about. We didn't know when we were making this movie was it going to be successful and was it going to find the audience that it did find. You never know. [But] The Baz Luhrmann motto is a life lived in fear is a life half-lived."
After the thrill of his first BAFTA nomination, came the early morning Oscars announcement. Redmond was at home. In bed.
"To be honest, I've been strangely detached from the whole kind of awards process!" he admits. "It's quite surreal to me - still, actually. But my wife, on the other hand, is extraordinarily excited! She was elbowing me in the ribs at 5:30 in the morning and had it up on an iPad, our two babies in the bed with us - we actually had two children during this project! It's just a privilege to be even in the conversation with so many extraordinary other editors, other nominees. They're amazing."
At this point, one of Ireland's newest Oscar contenders beams with pride about his fellow Irish nominees and how far the industry here, and talent from here, have come since he took those first steps in Dublin way back when.
"Stating the obvious, Ireland has always had such a rich history of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and I think that includes film. Neil Jordan, Jim Sheridan, Alan Parker made some terrific movies over the years. In recent years, I think the government probably needs a fair amount of credit for the film incentives and tax credits. I think Ireland was probably at the pointy end of introducing those. Now most countries, including the UK and Eastern Europe, have very rich tax breaks. It attracts a lot of movies. It just creates an amazing pool of talent when movies are made there - and not just Irish stories but international stories as well. It's a great thing for the Irish industry."
"It's so vibrant and diverse," he enthuses. "I mean, one of my favourite films of last year was The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin). When I was home, my mum took me down to Dún Laoghaire to watch a screening of The Quiet Girl. It was such a terrific film, so moving. It's great seeing films like The Quiet Girl being made alongside big television series and Hollywood films in Ireland. It's amazing."
You can cheer the Irish class of 2023 on at the Oscars in Los Angeles on 12 March. Jonathan Redmond is already enjoying a win - people back home realising that he's one of their own. He'd gone about his work so quietly in the background for so many years that, when the BAFTA nominations came out, his green credentials weren't apparent and had to be checked.
"The first I heard was I got an email from one of the publicity people here at Warner Bros kind of going, 'Is he Irish? If so, how Irish is he?'" he laughs.
Very Irish - and up there with the very best.
The 95th Academy Awards take place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday night and will be broadcast on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player on Monday from 9:30pm.
Elvis is streaming now and available in retail outlets.
