An editor who learned patience on documentaries and spent it on Taika Waititi, Yana Gorskaya cuts comedy so that scenes run on past their jokes. It is the right instinct more often than not, and she has turned it into a directing career without much fuss.
Fi1m perspective
Watch a scene in Reservation Dogs end. The joke lands and the shot stays, a beat longer than most comedies would allow, long enough for the people on screen to take in what has just been said. That is the habit, and it is where Yana Gorskaya's taste is easiest to see. She learned it on documentaries, beginning with Jeffrey Blitz's Spellbound in 2002, where the job is to find the story in hours of people being themselves, and she carried it into fiction when she started cutting for Taika Waititi on Eagle vs Shark in 2007.
She has edited or advised on nearly all of his films since, among them What We Do in the Shadows (2014), Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) and Next Goal Wins (2023), with improvised material and mockumentary tone as the common thread. When What We Do in the Shadows became a series in 2019, Waititi and Jemaine Clement asked her to cut the pilot, and she stayed to direct 22 episodes across six seasons while going on editing. From there came episodes of Trial & Error, of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022) and of Time Bandits (2024). It is a rare route, the cutting room to the director's chair on the same show, and she took it without anyone much noticing, which is roughly what an editor is trained to do.
The film of hers we like best is Hunt for the Wilderpeople. It moved us more than we expected, and a good deal of what moved us was what the cutting left alone: the awkwardness the film lets linger between Julian Dennison and Sam Neill before either finds something to say. Gorskaya, Tom Eagles and Luke Haigh keep the chapters moving and never trim those exchanges. Reservation Dogs runs on the same principle, and we would add that it is occasionally the slow one. Letting a scene breathe is a virtue right up until the audience can predict it.
Next Goal Wins is the case against. Four editors are credited, Gorskaya among them, and the film has the rhythm of four people who never compared notes; the football is cut so fast we rarely see a move from start to finish. Whose choices those were we cannot tell from outside the cutting room, which is the difficulty with judging any editor on a shared credit. Her Strange New Worlds episode is competent and we did not notice her in it, which on a series built on house style is neither praise nor complaint.
She is, on the evidence, a patient cutter in an impatient trade, at her best when a director trusts her to leave things alone. The open question is what she does when the footage is hers from the start, and What We Do in the Shadows is where to go to find out.
Biography
Yana Gorskaya is a Russian-American film and television editor, director and producer. Born in the Soviet Union in 1973, she immigrated to the United States with her mother at the age of six. She holds a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Southern California.
Gorskaya began her feature career editing the documentary Spellbound (2002), for which she received an American Cinema Editors Award. She has edited nearly all of Taika Waititi’s films, including Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) and Next Goal Wins (2023), as well as other features such as Celeste & Jesse Forever (2012) and Table 19 (2017). She has also edited episodes of series including What We Do in the Shadows (2019), Reservation Dogs (2021) and I Am Not Okay with This (2020).
Gorskaya directs and executive produces What We Do in the Shadows (2019–), for which she has received multiple Emmy nominations. She lives in Los Angeles.
