Cutting together a ballet series shot across two countries, in multiple languages, with a cast in the dozens, Étoile was never going to be easy.
For editor Zana Bochar, as well as her father, supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Ron Bochar — both of whom worked on the creators’ previous series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel — the challenge began with scope: “It’s one thing to have a show shot in Paris, as well as in New York, with very different recording techniques in both places,” says Ron, in conversation with Zana and dialogue editor Sara Stern at the Deadline Studio at Prime Experience. “But it was also just the scope of the amount of dancers, the amount of people in the show. It was more than I ever thought possible.”
See the conversation here and scroll down for photos from the event.
Further complicating the experience, for Zana, is the fact that much of the show’s dialogue would be in French, a language she doesn’t speak. Moreover, she’d have to find a way to balance the extremely quick pace of dialogue marking a trademark of the show’s creators, while leaving enough room in the edit for the French to be subtitled and understood.
“In terms of editing it the first time, we had a script with the French dialogue next to the English, and you would just try to follow along. Try to pick a word you could [recognize],” she says. “It wasn’t like Mandarin or something that’s really hard to understand if you don’t speak it; you could at least hear syllables you could recognize. And we would just follow along and cut a version based on how you’d think it should be cut.”
The process was supported by an apprentice editor, who understood not only French but also the particular vocabulary of the world of ballet. “She’d tell you, ‘You missed a line,’ or ‘They repeated the line twice, but you couldn’t tell because they put different emphasis on different words,’” the editor explains. “It was really a lot of trial and error at first. And then eventually you got into the flow of like, ‘Okay, this is how French sounds. This is how the emphasis comes.’ And it definitely got easier as the show went on.”
Zana Bochar, Sara Stern, Rob Bochar at the Deadline Hollywood Portrait Studio at Prime Experience 2025 on May 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Sara Stern at the Deadline Hollywood Portrait Studio at Prime Experience 2025 on May 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Rob Bochar at the Deadline Hollywood Portrait Studio at Prime Experience 2025 on May 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Zana Bochar at the Deadline Hollywood Portrait Studio at Prime Experience 2025 on May 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Zana Bochar, Rob Bochar at the Deadline Hollywood Portrait Studio at Prime Experience 2025 on May 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
For Stern, the big challenge of the job was preserving voices while managing the noise coming with everything from the ballet studio to city streets. Finding the sweet spot can sometimes be a matter of surgical precision, as “you can go too far with processing stuff,” she says.
Ultimately, all were pleased with how the season turned out — no one more so than Zana, who on Étoile got the chance to tackle her “first big actual series.”
“To actually have seen the whole show through — and working with Tim Streeto, who was the other editor on the show — just being able to bounce things off each other, watching other stuff, working together after I worked with him as a mentor for so many years, to actually just be partners with him was really just amazing,” she says.
