Baby reindeer Editor Peter Oliver believes the pacing of the 11-time Emmy-nominated miniseries is one of the reasons the black comedy-thriller works so well. He doesn’t want to take sole credit for it, though. The series’ harrowing fourth episode is the one that earned Oliver his first nomination, an honor he shares with Benjamin Gerstein.

“I originally wanted to make it more hectic, to make it seem more like a jump cut, but the director Weronika Tofilska slowed it down considerably,” he explains, agreeing that it was the right decision. In terms of mood and tone, one of the stylistic references she gave Oliver early on was Danny Boyle’s 1996 film Trainspotting.

While the seven-part Netflix series focuses primarily on the pursuit of Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd) by Martha Scott (Jessica Gunning), a lawyer with a troubled past, the nominated fourth episode is primarily a flashback to Dunn’s grooming, drugging and sexual abuse by a mentor.

“We worked a lot on the drug scenes,” Oliver recalls, saying they wanted to avoid it being “over the top.”

“We also didn’t want it to be too slow or too fast,” he adds. “The same goes for the scene where Donny tries to escape the apartment. The abuse elements were also very tricky.”

According to Gerstein, the pair felt “an enormous responsibility” to tell the deeply traumatic part of Gadd’s story, and the rhythm of the episode was crucial to keeping the audience engaged.

“Richard had written so many of these changes of pace into the script, the playfulness and joy of the Edinburgh sequences contrasting with the despair and horror of the abuse scenes,” he reveals. “We are very proud of how this episode has sparked conversations among victims of abuse. I know from speaking to friends and online that the complicated portrayal of the consequences of abuse resonated with many people and gave a voice and airtime to stories that people often keep to themselves.”

Tofilska and Gadd, the creator of the show, whose real-life experience inspired Baby reindeerwas involved in the editing. “They wanted to make it a work of art,” Oliver adds. “You never try to fool the audience with a scene or an episode; you let the natural progression happen and do justice to the performances.”

While many assume that editing is primarily about visual elements, Oliver carefully layered the audio data to create the Baby reindeer‘s story.

“Sound tells the audience as much as image, and you can tell a lot more of the story subliminally,” he explains. “There’s a lot of atmosphere in the bar scenes. In the first episode, there’s a moment where Martha is at the bar and says her birthday is coming up. I did a lot of that by adding laughter and chatter, and I had a jukebox track playing in the background that had the lyrics ‘She’s in disguise.’ It was so quiet and subtle when you hear it.”

The show took longer to edit than many of Oliver’s previous projects, partly because the show included so much of Gadd’s life, but he embraced the idiosyncrasies of the process and made it a unique experience.

“We sat with him in those moments and asked, ‘Is this how you imagined it?’ It’s almost a documentary. There’s a lot of voiceover too,” the editor concludes. “We were in the editing room and Richard didn’t have room for it. There was no booth, so he had to record it in the hallway. I still wonder what people must have thought of him recording the voiceover over and over as they walked past.”

This story first appeared in an August single issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine and subscribe, click here.