“Something just clicked” the first time he edited a film, says Varun Viswanath.

He was in his early 20s at the time, living in Singapore, working as a headhunter and making short films on the weekends, with a group of former college mates.

“I ended up editing all night one Sunday. The next thing I knew it was Monday morning and I had to put on my tie to go to work,” he says, laughing.

Now 41, Viswanath has just been nominated for an Emmy for his work on the Taika Waititi-Sterlin Harjo show Reservation Dogs (its three seasons are currently streaming on Disney+ Hotstar). He and Patrick Tuck are in the running in a category titled Outstanding Picture Editing for a Single-Camera Comedy Series.

“On the day the nominations were announced, my wife (Nina Sen, 41, a CFO) and I had had a particularly rough morning getting our three-year-old son to school. I was driving home after dropping him off when Patrick called and told me we had been nominated,” Viswanath says. “I thought he was referring to the show as a whole, which we had expected because the critics loved us and this was our final season. Then he clarified that the two of us had been nominated… and that was a huge surprise. I didn’t think that we, behind the scenes of this show, would get this attention.”

Born and raised in Bengaluru, Viswanath’s journey to this point has had quite a few detours.

At 18, he moved to Singapore on a scholarship, to study electronic engineering. By the time he graduated, prime jobs in this field were moving from the island nation to China and he didn’t want to move again. So he joined an investment bank, then a corporate talent-scouting company.

Alongside, he and his friends from college formed the theatre group Precocious Puppets. “Theatre was something I had been interested in since school,” he says. “I’d be the 12-year-old in the control room of the school auditorium yelling out instructions. I always enjoyed being the stage manager.”

When Precocious Puppets decided to pivot to film (their production company is called Bad Alliteration), Viswanath’s role changed. “Being an engineer meant that I was less afraid of new technology,” he says. And so he ended up with the responsibility of editing the group’s films.

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“The control and precision that you can use to change the trajectory of a story… to hone it a little bit more… to speed it up and make it more frantic or hold on longer and make it more ominous, I was so enamoured by that control,” he says. “Outside of making enough money to pay my rent, this became all I wanted to do.”

In 2009, Bad Alliteration made a feature film — Insomniac, about a writer who may be losing his mind, as he races to finish his book — that had a small theatrical release in Singapore. And Viswanath began to consider a shift to filmmaking as a career.

He applied to Master’s programmes in film production in the US, looking to build on his sales and corporate experience. He also applied to the American Film Institute’s (AFI) editing programme in Los Angeles, because a friend who was helping him with his applications told him he should never stop editing; he had a special skill.

He gained admission to the Master’s at AFI, and it turned out the friend had been right. His thesis short film, Samnang (2012; about a Cambodian immigrant working at a doughnut shop in California), was nominated for a Student Academy Award.

After the course, Viswanath settled in LA, working in all formats: TV shows, indie features, web shows, music videos. He edited episodes of mainstream hits such as Arrested Development and I Am Not Okay With This.

But it was the Taika Waititi vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows that was his big break. It earned him a nomination for Best Edited Comedy Series at the ACE (American Cinema Editors) Eddie Awards in 2021. And, when Waititi began work on his next series, Reservation Dogs, Viswanath joined the crew.

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Set in rural Oklahoma, the show is a coming-of-age tale about a group of Native-American teenagers living on a reservation and desperately trying to get out, all the while dreaming up magical new lives in California.

Waititi, who won an Oscar, a BAFTA and a Grammy for his 2019 film Jojo Rabbit (about a boy whose imaginary friend is Hitler), is of Aboriginal New Zealand and Jewish descent. His co-creator on Reservation Dogs, Harjo, is a member of the Muscogee and Seminole Nations.

There was a time when Viswanath worried that they may not see him as the best person for the job. “I’m a big-city kid who’s only lived in cities with five million people or more and here I was trying to help them tell a story set in an entirely different world, about a group of people who aren’t often seen in the popular media. We were also on a very tight schedule, as most TV shows are, and often as an editor I was making decisions about the story on behalf of Sterlin,” he says.

He was in his element as he juggled the elements of drama, suspense, comedy and the supernatural that permeate the show. He could identify instantly, he says, with the idea at the heart of it: “that all of this — funny, serious, magical — lives together. This is what everybody’s lives look like.”

It was a joy to work on because it was masterfully written, he adds. The addition of wild-card characters such as Uncle Brownie in Season 1 and Deer Lady in Season 3 made tonal shifts easier. “Uncle Brownie, a stoner who is stuck in the past, helped us bring in intergenerational comedy, while with Deer Lady we go into this punk-rock psychological action space. That whole episode has a ’70s-style acid-trip-with-aliens vibe to it. As editors, it’s so much fun to figure out how to fit in an episode like that, while telling the same story.”

Viswanath is now working on a Hulu comedic crime caper titled Deli Boys. Starring Asif Ali, Saagar Shaikh and Poorna Jagannathan, it is about two brattish Pakistani-American young men who must figure out how to run the criminal undertaking they didn’t know their father headed, until his sudden death.

An untitled Amazon Prime documentary on Asian immigrant groups in Texas fighting anti-Asian hate is in the works too. And Viswanath is teaching a course in editing at AFI. The job of the editor is to be the first critical audience of the film, he likes to say.

“With every frame, we’re asking: is it clear what’s happening and, just as importantly, are we happy with how it’s making us feel.” That acts as a vital bridge between the director and the audience.

“The components you’re working with are technically just audio and video, but the dimensions are so much wider: it’s the actor’s performance, the camera’s performance, the camera science, the lights, and what the background characters are doing.” It’s everything, really.

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