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Writer/Director Celine Song Talks Post on Oscar-Nominated Past Lives

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By Iain Blair

In her directorial film debut, Past Lives, South Korean-born playwright Celine Song has made a romantic and deceptively simple film that is intensely personal and autobiographical yet universal, with its themes of love, loss and what might have been. Past Lives is broken into three parts spanning countries and decades. First we see Nora as a young girl in South Korea, developing an early bond with her best friend, Hae Sung, before moving with her family to Toronto. Then we see Nora in her early 20s as she reconnects virtually with Hae Sung. Finally, more than a decade later, Hae Sung visits Nora, now a married playwright living in New York. It stars Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro.

Celine Song directing Greta Lee

I spoke with Song about the post workflow and making the A24 film, which is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. It also just won Best Director and Best Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards.

How did you prep to direct your first film? Did you talk to other directors?
I talked to some amazing directors, but what they all said is that because only I know the film that I’m making, the way it’s going to be prepped is a process that only I can really know. You need really strong producers and department heads, which I was so lucky to have. I was able to draw on their experience and advice for every step of the way.

You shot in Seoul and New York. Was it the same sort of experience or was it different going back to Seoul?
The filmmaking culture is very different in both places. In New York, there is a very strong union, and in Korea there isn’t one. Also, the way that you secure locations is different. In New York, if you want to shoot somewhere, the mayor’s office knows about it. Korea is still a little bit like guerrilla filmmaking. You show up to a location and try to get it right. You can’t really get permits for things in Korea.

The story takes place over three separate timeframes. Did you shoot chronologically?
No. We shot everything in New York City, and then we had a set built for the Skype section. Then we went to Korea, prepped it for another month and shot there for 10 days.

You and your, DP Shabier Kirchner, shot 35mm. What led you to that decision?
It was my very first movie, so I didn’t know how hard it was going to be. I don’t have experience shooting on digital or film. I don’t know anything. I think part of it was first-timer bravery. I don’t know enough to be afraid. That’s where the fearlessness came from. But it was also informed by the conversations I was having with my DP. We talked about the story and how the philosophy of shooting on film is connected to the philosophy of the movie, which is that the movie is about time made tangible and time made visible. It just made sense for it to be shot on film.

Celine Song on-set

You come from the theater, where there is obviously no post production. Was that a steep learning curve for you?
Yes, but you do have a preview period in theater, when you see it in front of an audience, and you keep editing in that way. But more importantly, I’m a writer. So part of post is that I don’t think of the movie as just what I see on screen and all the sound design and every piece of it. To me, it is a piece of text. So just as I would edit a piece of my own writing, I feel like I was looking at the editing process very much like editing text.

Then of course in film, it’s not just the writing on the page. It’s also sound, color, visuals, timing… So in that way, I really felt that editing was about composing a piece of music. I think of film as a piece of music, with its own rhythm and its own beat that it has to move through. So in that way, I think that that’s also a part of the work that I would do as a playwright in the theater, create a world that works like a piece of music from beginning to end.

With all that in mind, I honestly felt like I was the most equipped to do post. I had an entire world to learn; I had never done it before. But with post, I was in my domain. The other thing I really love about editing and VFX in film is that you can control a lot. Let’s say there’s a pole in the middle of the theater space. You have to accept that pole. But in film, you can just delete the pole with VFX. It’s amazing.

Did editor Keith Fraase, who is based in New York, come on-set at all in Korea, or did you send him dailies?
We sent dailies. He couldn’t come on-set because of COVID.

What were the biggest editing challenges on this?
I think the film’s not so far from the way I had written it, so the bigger editing choices were already scripted. The harder bits were things that are like shoe leather — the scenes that hold the movie together but are not the center of the emotion or the center of the story.

One example is when Nora is traveling to Montauk, where we know that she’s going to eventually meet Arthur (who becomes her husband). We were dealing with how much time is required and how to convey time so that when we meet Arthur, it seems like it is an organic meeting and not such a jarring one. I had scripted all this shoe-leather stuff that we had shot – every beat of her journey to Montauk. We had a subway beat; we had a bus beat. We had so many pieces of her traveling to Montauk because I was nervous about it, feeling it was not long enough. But then, of course, when we actually got into the edit, we realized we only needed a few pieces. You just realize that again, the rhythm of it dictates that you don’t need all of it.

Where did you do all the sound mix?
We did it at all at Goldcrest in New York.

Are you very involved in that?
You have no idea. I think that’s the only place where I needed more time. We went over budget… that’s a nicer way to say it. That’s the only part of the post process where I really was demanding so much. I was so obsessed with it. The sound designer’s nickname for me was Ms. Dog Ears. I know different directors have very different processes around sound, but for me, I was in that room with my sound designer Jacob Ribicoff for 14 hours a day, five days a week, and sometimes overtime, for weeks. I wouldn’t leave.

I would stay there because I just know that sound is one of those things that holds the film together. Also, with this movie, the sound design of the cities and how different they are and how it’s going to play with the compositions — I had such a specific idea of how I wanted those things to move. Because again, I do think of a film as a piece of music. So I was pretty crazy about it. But I don’t want people to notice the sound design. I want people to be able to feel like they’re actually just standing in Madison Square Park. I want them to be fully immersed.

Obviously, it’s not a big effects movie, but you have some. How did that go?
I think it’s a bit of a subjective thing. Actually, looking at it, I’m like, “Well, does that seem good to you?” I’m showing it to my production designer and my DP and I’m like, “This looks OK to me, but I wonder if it can be better. Would you look at it?” So I relied on many eyes.

I give credit to Keith, but also to my assistant editor, Shannon Fitzpatrick, who was a total genius at catching any problems with VFX and having such a detailed eye. I think she’s one of the only people who really noticed things that I didn’t notice in the VFX. I’m like, I think that looks fine, and then she would say point to this one thing in the corner that’s not working. There are people at A24 who’re also amazing at catching sound and visuals because that’s their job. They’ll point out what sounds strange or what looks strange. So you have so many people who are part of the process.

Who was the colorist, and how involved were you with the grading?
It was Tom Poole at Company 3, which is where we edited and did color and everything. I love the process because I showed up after Shabier and Tom had already gone through the whole film and graded it. They did amazing, beautiful work. Then I would come in and give notes about certain scenes and then we’d do them. Of course, while they were grading it, they’d send me stills, and I’d give notes on the stills before going into the suite. Also, Shabier and Tom have worked together a lot, so they already kind of had a rhythm for how they wanted to color the film.

What sort of film did you set out to make?
Since this was the first film I’d directed, I felt like the main goal was to discover the language of my movie. It was beyond just trying to tell the story the best way I could, from the script stage to the post. I think that was the goal throughout. But the truth is that I really wanted the language of the film to be my own language, and I wanted to learn and have a revelation for myself of what my movie is.

I know it is partly autobiographical. How much of you is in Nora?
It really was inspired by a true event of sitting between my childhood sweetheart, who had come to visit me from Korea, and my husband who I live with in New York City. So this is very autobiographical, and the feeling that I had in that very personal moment is the inspiration for the whole film. But then once you turn it into a script, which is an objectification process, and then you turn it into a film with hundreds of people — and especially with the cast members who have to play the characters — by that time it has become very much an object. Then with post, it’s about the chiseling. It’s about putting together an object that is to be shared with the world.

A film is so different from writing a play. Was it a big adjustment for you?
I know theater because I was in it for a decade, probably more, so I knew the very fundamental difference between the way a play is made versus how a film is made. For example, I was taught that in theater, time and space is figurative, while time and space in film is literal. So that means there are different kinds of strengths and weaknesses in both mediums when it comes to telling a story that spans decades and continents. And, in this case, because my joke is always that the villains of the story are 24 years and the Pacific Ocean, it actually needs the time and space to be seen literally… because there needs to be a reason why these two lovers are not together. So the children have to be literally there, and Korea and New York City have to feel tangible and literal.

I assume you can’t wait to direct again?
Oh, I can’t wait. I want to wake up and just go to set tomorrow. That’s how I feel. I’m trying to shoot another movie as soon as I can.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Poor Things‘ Oscar-Nominated Cinematographer and Editor

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By Iain Blair

Lavish, audacious and visually stunning, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things tells the fantastical story of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant, daring scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). The film just won five BAFTAs and scored an impressive 11 Oscar nominations, including nods for cinematographer Robbie Ryan, BSC, ISC, and editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, ACE, who were both previously nominated for their work on Lanthimos’ The Favourite.

I spoke with Ryan and Mavropsaridis (aka “Blackfish”) about making the film and collaborating with Lanthimos, who also got an Oscar nom.

Robbie Ryan

You’ve both worked with Yorgos Lanthimos before. Was this process very different, or was it pretty much the same way he always works?
Robbie Ryan: It was my second time working with Yorgos, and I felt like the approach was similar. But I was a bit more tuned in to his thinking process, which is quite loose from a filming perspective. He likes to get the things he needs in place and then elaborate or experiment, maybe search for something new. We’re not too set or stringent in our approach. It’s pretty loose.

What about you, Blackfish?
Yorgos “Blackfish” Mavropsaridis: We have been working together for almost 25 years. I know his approach, and I know that during the assembly I need to put things in order according to the script. That’s not the main work… it’s just for me to understand the material. Then, when he comes back, we start looking at the sequences and trying things.

Yorgos “Blackfish” Mavropsaridis

I’d say it was an easier process for Poor Things in the sense that I know him so well. And we had to focus on a specific character, which gave us the path to follow. Of course, having said that, films are not easy in that sense. We always try to deconstruct the script to take it off the paper and make it more interesting. We also involve the viewer in different ways than a classical Hollywood film does.

Robbie, is it true you shot this whole thing in a studio in Budapest?
Ryan: Yes, that’s correct. We shot 35mm celluloid and used a bunch of stocks. We shot some old VistaVision as well, which is a lovely format, and black-and-white and Ektachrome.

What were the main challenges of shooting a film like this, where nearly everything was constructed? I assume you were quite involved with set design and the like, which is unusual?
Ryan: Yes, we basically did 12 weeks of prep on this film. That was so we could build the sets and watch their design. The production designers, Shona Heath and James Price, built five or six big sets and used Unreal Engine to create them in 3D. Yorgos [Lanthimos] and I would look at what they were building in a 3D world. It was amazing to walk onto that set a few weeks later and see it for real. It looked exactly like those sets built in 3D. That was the world we prepared, and it was amazing.

So you were able to previz it all like that?
Ryan: Exactly, as Unreal Engine is previz in a way. It’s a 3D program that lets you look around at every angle. For instance, for the ship, you could really look at every corner, and if one corridor on the ship was a little bit too skinny, we could make it a bit bigger so we could fit a dolly on it. There was lots of that sort of preparation, and it helped a lot.

How did that affect your lighting approach?
Ryan: It took a little bit more work from a lighting perspective. I had to light it a bit more because we were indoors and in studios. We took the same approach that we did on The Favourite, which was not to use lights on the set. We lit the studio sets with a sky outside all the buildings, and that gave me confidence that I was going in the right direction because that is the way Yorgos [Lanthimos] likes to work. We just had to create something that resembled a real environment in an interior space.

Blackfish, were you on the set at all?
Blackfish: No, I was in Athens from the beginning. The only time I went on-set was for The Lobster, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience for me. I prefer to see it objectively as it comes in rather than go to the set and get influenced by the atmosphere, the actors and all these things. So I stayed home in Athens, and they sent me dailies. I’d get the negatives and black-and-white the next day, but the Ektachrome took a couple of days more since it had to go to Andec, a lab in Berlin, and then to Athens. But it was a really fast process. Yorgos and I don’t talk at all when he’s on-set, or very rarely.

Robbie, I know you’ve worked with colorist Greg Fisher at Company 3 before. How early on did you start working with him on LUTs and the look for this?
Ryan: We didn’t do that actually, and that was a bit of a mistake. We had a dailies grader in Budapest, which was driving Yorgos [Lanthimos] a bit mad. Film doesn’t need so much grading now. But Greg did a lot of work with us from the very beginning, helping us out with early tests about nine months before we shot. But then, when we went to Hungary, we used a Hungarian lab and a Berlin lab. They were doing the dailies for us there, and it wasn’t quite what Yorgos [Lanthimos] was expecting, so he got a little bit frustrated by it.

The bottom line is that we should have done a show list, but we didn’t know that’s what was meant to be done, so we kind of learned the hard way. The film still looked nice in the rushes, but it just wasn’t quite what we thought it would be. When we went into the final grade with Greg at the beginning of last year, we spent three weeks grading the film. He’s got quite a thorough process. We went through every sequence one by one and didn’t review the whole film until we got through all the sequences. We spent a week and a half going through everything, then we watched the whole film back, and then we went deeper again. Yorgos likes to go quite deep into the color grading. Just recently, we made a 35mm print of the film. That was an interesting coda to the whole grade process, and it was quite a lot of work as well.

Robbie, how long was the shoot, and what was the most difficult scene to shoot and why?
Ryan: We shot for about 50 days. The scene when Bella comes out of the hotel and walks around Lisbon was pretty difficult because it was a big lighting kind of environment. The set was great, and it was amazing to walk around, but it was difficult to photograph, so I think we struggled a bit on that.

Blackfish, walk us through the editing process when you sit down together with Yorgos.
Blackfish: Two weeks after shooting finished, I had an assembly ready, but it was so long there was no point watching it as a whole. We just went through sequences and then refined the scenes exactly as they are in the script order. We took care of the actors’ performances — which one Yorgos liked best and how the emotions were interpreted in each scene. When we have a good assembly or first cut, then we start experimenting, somehow deconstructing what we have done, discussing, “What if we start with this scene, not the other one, and then what does that give us for the next scene?”

Then there are points where the exposition takes many scenes to develop. For example, there’s a dinner scene with Max, Godwin and Bella. In the assembly, the scenes appear in linear order in the continuity of time and space, so we found ways in the edit to go to previous scenes and then cut them in, or go to later scenes to create a sequence. We developed this method of intermixing scenes and making them a sequence on Dogtooth and have been using it ever since — and very interesting ideas arise. For example, you can say the same thing in the scene — or say it even more forcefully with a thought — if it’s combined with dialogue from another scene. Of course, that’s quite difficult.

Sometimes you have to go through a lot of edits to find it, to refine it, but in the end, we get it to where we want it. We try to get around problem areas and keep the phrases or the moments that we need and then cut them with other things to pick up the pace. That editing technique also creates internal combustion. It provides momentum so the viewer doesn’t get ahead of us. We sometimes need to surprise viewers, and it has to do with how we think or how we want the viewer to feel or think at that moment. So it’s a whole procedure.

How long was the edit in the end?
Blackfish: It took about eight months.

What was the most difficult scene for you to get just right?
Blackfish: Technically, it was the dinner-and-dance scene. The actors had done a lot of movements. The camera was moving all the time, and there were also some static shots. The difficulty was to keep the eyeline correct in the 180-degree space so as not to lose the audience. It was difficult to find the best performance moments. All the other things, of course they’re difficult, but it’s different to edit a difficult scene like a dance. It’s also more fun and more satisfying.

Did you use a lot of temp sound?
Blackfish: Not at all. The music was done much earlier than the filming, and composer Jerskin Fendrix had written the theme of the film. Of course, it was not the final music, but we had the same thing played differently or with a single instrument or with a big orchestra, and we had a lot of options to try. We could cut the music if we wanted to speed it up, or at other times we could edit the film according to the music. So having the music gives you a lot of good opportunities. As for the sound design, my assistant always uses external sounds. We need to have that for me and Yorgos to see how it works, to make sure there are no gaps or anything. We cut on Avids with Nexis storage, and we had about 12 terabytes.

Robbie, I assume you had to coordinate with visual effects on-set, as there’s quite a lot of VFX.
Ryan: Yes, we had an on-set supervisor from Union Effects who did all the VFX [and picked up a BAFTA for their work], and he would let us do what we wanted. For instance, Yorgos [Lanthimos] didn’t want to use greenscreen, so when we were filming the hybrid animals, even though the VFX guy liked the idea of using greenscreen, we didn’t do it because we could just rotoscope it. We shot it twice, one animal first, second animal second, and then that was comped in together.

Yorgos was trying to do it with older cinema technology, like backdrops and moving-image backdrops, and we had LED walls as a backdrop and painted backdrops. I think that was really a nice way to do it because the actors felt like they were a little bit more immersed and didn’t have to worry about getting it right for VFX, which sometimes happens.

That was a really nice atmosphere to work in. Yorgos has such a knowledge of cinematography and what you can do VFX-wise; he was confident that he would get it in post, and they did, indeed, get it in post. They went through quite a long process of trying to perfect all that, there were quite a few incarnations, and it was a very VFX-heavy job, but they got there in the end. Union did a great job.

How would you each sum up the experience?
Ryan: It’s been a long journey, and it was never in any way boring. It’s always been fun. Yorgos likes a fun film set to work in. He doesn’t like to have any sort of tension at all, so we have a crew around us that are very relaxed, and I really enjoyed it. We worked hard, and sometimes it didn’t go right, but we always found a way, and it was a really exciting film to work on.

Blackfish: It’s new all the time and interesting working with Yorgos. We’ve almost finished editing the last film he and Robbie shot in New Orleans, and I guess he’s planning the next one in May. So I’m going to continue the experience.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Holdovers

The Holdovers Oscar-Nominated Kevin Tent Talks Editing Workflow

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By Iain Blair

Editor Kevin Tent, ACE, has had a long and fruitful collaboration with director Alexander Payne. Their first film together was 1995’s Citizen Ruth, and he’s edited all of Payne’s films since, including the Oscar-nominated Sideways. Tent earned his first Academy Award nod for his work on The Descendants.

Kevin Tent, ACE. Photo by Peter Zakhary

Tent was just Oscar-nominated again, this time for his work on Payne’s new film The Holdovers, a bittersweet holiday story about three lonely people marooned at a New England boarding school over winter break in 1970. I spoke with Tent about his workflow and editing the film, which got five Oscar noms, including for Best Picture.

How did the process start with Alexander?
When he first had the idea, he didn’t even have a full script yet with writer David Hemingson. I read the first few drafts, and it was in very good shape, even early on. I would give him my comments on the script and stuff like that, and he’d take them or not. Then when they began shooting, I started cutting right away.

Alexander told me you went to the set on his very early films like Citizen Ruth, but not really since.
Yeah, as usual, I stayed here in LA for this film, while he shot in Boston. I do like to go to the set just for one day to say hello to the actors and everyone, but after you’re there for 20 minutes and have nothing else to do, you’re like, “What the hell am I doing here?” So I don’t spend too much time on-set, and anyway, there’s so much work to be done at the cutting room, as I’m doing an assembly while he shoots.

I assume you’re in constant contact during the shoot.
Yes, we talk every day, at least once a day. I usually send him cut scenes for the weekend if he wants to see them, but on the last couple of movies, he hasn’t wanted to watch cut scenes while he has a weekend off. I think he’s got too many other production issues on his plate to have the time to do that.

He doesn’t watch dailies anymore either, and it works out really well because by the time he comes back to the cutting room, he’s going to look at the dailies with fresh eyes. And I know the footage fairly well by then because I’ve been through it and cut it. So we’re both kind of on an even playing field when we start to cut together.

I know he shoots very precisely, so it’s not like there’s a ton of material you have to wade through and cut?
Right, he was really focused on his coverage on this, which was good. He’s always super-smart about coverage. He doesn’t want to burn out his actors on wide shots and masters and stuff like that. So he gets what he thinks he needs to get us in and out of scenes. Then he spends a lot of time letting the actors find their footing and their characters and give their performances.

Holdovers

He’s a four-to-six takes guy on average, but he allows his actors to take their time and get these great performances. It’s our job when we get to the cutting room to try to condense them and make them efficient… pace ’em up, that kind of thing. We’re getting great raw material, and then our challenge is usually trying to get it all moving and flowing together.

He told me that you’d work on the edit at his home in Omaha for a while and then come back to LA when you had to spend a lot more time here for post?
Yeah, we would go there for a month, come back to LA and then go back again. I was there for Citizen Ruth and About Schmidt. I like it back there, and we had a good time. He’s got an awesome place.

We would cut there using Jump Desktop — we’d log into that and do all the editing. It was remarkable. It’s just the most amazing thing. And we were able to cut away on the computer in California from his place in Omaha. We would then use Evercast for work sessions with associate editor Mindy, Alyssa, music editor Richard Ford and sound supervisor Frank Gaeta. The whole process was efficient and phenomenal.

The whole thing from shooting to finishing was probably nine months. So not overly long. Then we spent a month or so doing the final mix and the DI and all that stuff.

This is Alexander’s first period film, and I loved all the dissolves you used that you don’t see in movies so much anymore.
Yeah, that’s true I think, but we love them. They’re so beautiful. They create emotion, and I was a fan of them even before Alexander and I started working together. I always thought they were amazing, and we’ve been doing them forever, going back to Citizen Ruth. We also did some really long dissolves in Election and in About Schmidt, which has a bunch of really beautiful dissolve sequences when his wife dies. There’s a huge, two-minute dissolve sequence of Warren Schmidt after she passes.

What was the most difficult scene to edit?
There were a couple. It would seem like they were simple, but we spent a lot of time on them. First, the scene where Paul gets fired at the end and takes the hit for the kid. I wouldn’t say we struggled, but we were constantly finessing it, going back and taking things out and putting things back and trying to get it just right. That one took us quite a while.

Then there were scenes that were a little long that needed condensing just to get them right. The first scene, with Mary and Paul watching The Newlywed Game, was a challenge because it had a fair amount of dialogue that we lost. That was a tricky scene because it had a lot of stuff going on in it. It had emotion about her son and her anger with the kids at the school. There were a lot of different transitions and stuff going on characterwise, and that was a challenge in that little area.

I assume you did a fair amount of music temps?
Yes. Mindy Elliott, who’s been our assistant forever but got an associate editor credit this time around, was the first one who imported music from The Swingle Singers, which is the a cappella Christmas music we hear. It was a great call because I was having trouble “hearing” whatever the music would be in the movie. That ended up being a huge element we embraced — using that type of music throughout.

At points it’s ironic and kind of funny, and at other times it’s very poignant, and it became a really important musical element in the movie. We also worked with our music producer/supervisor Richard Ford, and he’s brilliant. He also started bringing in lots of music, including scores from Mark Orton, whom we’d worked with on Nebraska. That became our score sound of the movie. Then we threw in all our fun ‘60s music — that’s just a free-for-all.  It worked great, but then you find out it costs $100,000, and you can’t get it. That happens all the time.

Obviously, it’s not a big visual effects movie, but there are some. Were you doing temps for those as well?
Yeah, we had things like comps and fluid morph, but the visual effects were really all about evening out the snow. There were certain scenes that needed it, like when all the people are leaving the church and there’s snow coming down. Believe it or not, that scene was shot on the same day as the scene where all the boys are talking out in front of the truck. It was blue skies in the morning, then it was snowing like crazy, then a couple hours later, it was all blue skies again.

Crafty Apes did the visual effects, adding snow, wetting the road, putting clouds in the sky, adding some snowflakes at points and trying to make it match a little closer to what was shot earlier in the day… those kind of things.

Tell us about the post workflow and the editing gear you used.
We cut on Avid Media Composer 2018, supplied by Atlas Digital aka Runway Edit. While in production, associate editor Mindy Elliott, assistant editor Alyssa Donovan-Browning and I worked from our homes, and we worked with separate projects, which we kept updated via Dropbox. We had separate drives as well.

Our dailies were provided by Harbor in New York and London, and each morning — sometime between 2am and 6am — they would send us a downloadable link.  I would check my email around 4am, and if I had a link, I’d start the download and then go back to bed. Around 8am, Mindy would use TeamViewer to log on to my computer and copy the organized dailies bins, etc. onto my local drive. Mindy and Alyssa also had local drives. We communicated constantly using a dedicated Telegram Messenger chat, and whenever I needed anything or there was new media (small amounts), we used TeamViewer and Dropbox to download and import it.

Once Alexander was back in town, we moved into a more traditional cutting room in North Hollywood, and we switched over to a Nexis shared media storage in the same building as our cutting rooms. Once we were finalizing the cut, we moved permanently back to LA to finish, and we mixed in Santa Monica with our longtime mixer, Patrick Cyccone.

Were you involved in the DI at all? Did you go to the sessions?
I didn’t go so much on this one because our DP, Eigil Bryld, was shooting in New York, and Alexander and Eigil did it at Harbor in New York with colorist Joe Gawler. I would see it, and when they were done, I’d go and we’d screen it.

What makes it such an enduring partnership with Alexander?
I think we’re both pretty easygoing guys, and we’re both always looking to enjoy life. We take our work seriously, but we don’t ever let it get ugly. We have a good time when we’re working together, and we work hard, but we keep a positive attitude. I guess we’re just very similar in that respect. And we’re pals after all these years, so it’s not even like going to work when we work together. We basically are doing our job and having fun.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Poor Things

Union Provides VFX for Oscar-Nominated Poor Things

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Union VFX provided 177 visual effects shots for Best Picture nominee Poor Things, which was directed by Yorgos Lanthimos through Element Pictures for Searchlight. Poor Things, written by Tony McNamara, is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray. The plot focuses on Bella Baxter, a young Victorian woman brought back to life by the unorthodox Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Hungry to see and experience the world, Bella runs off on cross-continent adventures with debauched lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), and in time she grows steadfast in her stand for equality and liberation. Both Stone and Ruffalo got Oscar nods for their work on Poor Things, which picked up 11 nominations in total, including for Best Director.

Poor Things embraces authentic artificiality, blending a classical sensibility with a fantastical and science fiction-driven aesthetic. These surreal settings were crafted with Lanthimos’ vision in partnership with production designers James Price and Shona Heath, cinematographer Robbie Ryan (BSC, ISC) and the Union VFX team, led by creative director Simon Hughes and VFX producer Tallulah Baker, who were involved in the film from the earliest stages of preproduction.

Creating this fanciful place required a wide variety of complex and technical VFX that, whether subtle or obvious, fell seamlessly into the weird and wonderful world of Poor Things. To facilitate the numerous techniques involved, Union designed a variety of bespoke workflows specifically for the creative and diverse VFX required throughout the feature.

The sheer size, scope and breadth of the film’s production begins in a largely self-contained mansion set that expands to increasingly gargantuan scales throughout the film as Bella furthers her journey of discovery, both internally and externally.

This journey brings Bella to London, Paris, Lisbon and Alexandria, which look like works of art in their own right but also function within the story and fabric of the film. The decision to shoot on film — in a combination of both color and black-and-white, with periodic use of fisheye lenses — added layers of complexity and challenges for VFX, particularly when creating and extending the environments.

LED Screens
Tim Barter was Union’s on-set VFX supervisor during the shoot in Budapest, where 11 giant (70m by 90m) wraparound LED screens were used to project some of the film’s fantastical environments virtually during filming.

These “inky” sky and ocean environments were created referencing the work of artist Chris Parks. The team created CG ocean simulations and renders designed to work as 50-second clips at 24K; 11 accompanying digital matte painted skies with added cloud movement; and additional stylistic, moving atmospheric effects.

These “inky” sky and ocean environments were created referencing the work of artist Chris Parks. The team created CG ocean simulations and renders designed to work as 50-second clips at 24K, 11 accompanying digital matte painted skies with added cloud movement, and additional stylistic moving atmospheric effects.

Poor Things

LED backdrops gave the actors something to act against that wasn’t a greenscreen. This approach also provided beautiful reflections and a more impressive final result.

Miniatures and Environments
The decision to use miniatures was deliberate in terms of the look of the film, so the VFX environments had to be sensitive to this. Ensuring that the scale of the CG water worked in relation to the scale of the miniature was particularly challenging — especially when combined with live-action footage shot on-set.

The Alexandria environment involved vast establishing shots that pull out as wide as possible. The Union team used lidar scans of the miniatures as a starting point for this fully CG environment, which includes CG water, sky and palm trees as well as a fully CG boat, a CG cable car and a lot of FX simulation to enhance the atmosphere, including dust and chimney smoke.

The London environment was shot with an 8mm lens, so it was particularly stylized. The movement in the sky had to reflect the ocean, with water displacement and undulation. Tower Bridge was created as a miniature, and the London rooftops referenced 1950s filmmaking, so the team added various period signs of life to match the look of the film, including chimney smoke elements and fireworks. This environment also required creating CG zeppelins.

The Paris environment was shot as part of the studio build in Budapest and then enhanced in VFX by adding a more surreal CG sky and associated elements.

The Lisbon environment was also shot with an 8mm lens. The set was extended in CG, again with very stylized skies and the film’s signature surreal look. The character Alfie’s mansion was also a miniature within a fully CG environment. It required a huge amount of garden detail, such as covering shrubs and greenery, to create the gritty outside space.

Hybrid Animals
Another less than ordinary element of the Poor Things world is the hybrid animals, created by the doctor’s experimentation. These quirky creatures are present throughout the film, wandering around the grounds like barnyard creatures while reflecting the 1920s look of the film, movement and cinematography.

There are seven different hybrids in the final film, but the VFX process involved creating many more before the final seven were selected. The director wanted to find as much of an in-camera and 2D-solution-based as possible to embrace the random physical nuances of animal movements that are inherently difficult to capture in CG. Union’s solution was to overshoot, coming back with multiple takes and multiple animals and then testing different combinations to see which animals and moments worked well when combined together.

Poor Things

“It started with a series of test shoots with an animal trainer, which narrowed down the selection prior to the second unit shoot, as some animals just didn’t want to behave at all,” says Hughes. “When it came to combining them, some proved more difficult than others due to a combination of their independent movements, the camera moves and distorted lenses.

“There was a significant degree of rebuild, and some CG was used to help with the joins. And 3D scans of the animals were used to help us align the different elements and create the textures and scarring where they join together,” he continues. “The scar designs were based on paint-over concepts to preserve the naturalistic movement of the real animals while still creating a more fantastical layer of ‘strangeness’ in keeping with the film’s tone.”

There’s also a Frankenstein moment in the film, when Bella is brought back to life by the doctor. It required a large amount of power, electricity, lightning treatments and sparks. These were complex and involved a lengthy process to ensure they were sympathetic with the look of the film.

Union used Foundry Nuke for 2D work (compositing and more) and Autodesk Maya and SideFX Houdini for 3D-based work on the film.

American Fiction

Director and Editor of Oscar-Nominated American Fiction Talk Post

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By Iain Blair

Nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Lead Actor, American Fiction is writer Cord Jefferson’s impressive directorial debut. It’s a dramedy satire that stars Jeffrey Wright as Monk, an erudite and frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from stereotypical “Black” entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own, which, to his disdain, becomes a huge critical and commercial success.

Cord Jefferson

Jefferson himself earned a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for American Fiction for his adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure.”  I spoke to him about making the film and navigating post. Editor Hilda Rasula (French Exit) joined the conversation.

You’d never directed a film before this one. How did you prep? Did you talk to a lot of other directors?
Cord Jefferson: I talked to other directors, and I did the Martin Scorsese MasterClass. (Laughs) I felt like it would be worthwhile to spend some time listening to him. I read “Making Movies” by Sidney Lumet. I prepared by reading and studying and talking to friends of mine who were directors. But directing is something that you can’t really understand until you do it. It was sort of like trial by fire. It was just kind of getting in there and doing it. So I prepared myself as much as I could, but really what I focused on was just the script. I was like, even if I didn’t know what I was doing with cameras or with lighting that day, and I felt out of my depth with the technical stuff, I knew the script and the characters at a fundamental level. That allowed me to make all the technical decisions I needed to make based on just my pure understanding of the story we were trying to tell.

Hilda Rasula

How early on did you start working with Hilda?
Jefferson: Hilda was onboard before we started shooting in Boston. She wasn’t on-set, unfortunately. Hilda, how far before principal of photography did we start working together?

Hilda Rasula: We started meeting six weeks before shooting started. Then for the shoot, I was here in LA and getting the dailies. There wasn’t a lab in Boston for us to go to, so they were flown to Atlanta every day for processing and then sent to us.

How did the process work? You must have been in constant contact, right?
Jefferson: Hilda would send emails occasionally at night and say, “I looked at the dailies, and here’s what I think we should be shooting for tomorrow’s scenes” and stuff like that. But outside of that, there wasn’t much time to have conversations, unfortunately. It was very run-and-gun.

Rasula: And with the time difference, it was just tough. Also, my dailies were always running a little more than a day behind because of having to go to Atlanta and then to LA. So essentially, the whole editing didn’t start until post.

Cord, how steep a learning curve was post for you? Were you in shock?
Jefferson: (Laughs) Yes, of course. I had two director friends who said, “When you go and watch the editor’s first cut, you are going to feel like, ‘Oh my God, what have I done? This is a nightmare. This is absolutely the worst thing that I’ve ever done, and I’m so ashamed.’” And that’s everybody’s feeling when they see the first cut of the film. You just need to work past that. I think that I was so afraid of that that I didn’t watch the first cut.

American Fiction

In fact, I came in and told Hilda that we weren’t going to watch it all the way through. We were just going to watch what she’d edited. Then we could go through it scene by scene so the scenes wouldn’t all play at once and give me a heart attack. I didn’t think that I could do that, to be honest. So we went through and cut everything together — I think the initial director’s cut was 2 hours and 14 minutes — and then we refined from there. All the color grading and mastering was done by FotoKem, and the colorist was Philip Beckner. I actually loved the whole post process.

Hilda, where did you do the editing and the rest of the post?
Rasula: In the offices of our production company, T-Street, which is Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman’s company. Our post setup was dead-simple. We used Avid Media Composer 2018, and we shared media between my assistant editor, Charmaine Cavan, and me on a Nexis in a neighboring room.

We also had Jump Desktop to keep a bit of a WFH hybrid option open for ourselves, which was useful during dailies. The one unusual aspect of our post setup at the office was that we had a great screening room on-site at T-Street. They have a small screening room that has its own computer with the ability to hook up with Nexis. That computer ran on Avid 2022, so there were occasional translation issues we had to contend with, but generally it was extremely easy to host screenings for producers and for friends and family screenings with relatively little downtime needed to prep the cut. Mandell Winter was our sound supervisor, and we mixed at Signature Post with mixers Alexandra Fehrman and Richard Weingart. We were really happy with the entire sound team.

What were the main editing challenges? Obviously, it has a lot of tonal changes.
Rasula: You put your finger on it. I would say the biggest challenge was the tonal pivots that the movie takes. Being able to go between comedy and drama in the way that it does required some tricky tonal turns, and doing that was a delicate balance. We also spent a lot of time working on pacing and rhythm — sometimes within the scenes beat by beat, getting the comedy timing to be perfect. Other times it was a matter of playing with that teeter-totter of the balance between comedy and drama for the movie to feel really cohesive… so that it didn’t feel like we were going too far into a broader comedy film or a darker drama. We needed to find the perfect balance. And that was kind of like a high wire act at times.

Jefferson: People have asked, how did you manage the tonal balance? And we found that in post. I tried to find it in the script, and sometimes on-set I’d realize that I hadn’t found it in the script. And then a lot of really great stuff ended up being cut out of the movie – great comedy and also really dramatic scenes that make you cry every time you see it. But we realized that despite the greatness of those scenes, they just weren’t the film that we were making. The thing that I told everybody at the outset — and Hilda and I had to stick to our guns on it — was that we wanted to make a movie that was satirical but never farcical.

American Fiction

Rasula: Often, I think when you’re making a comedy-drama, there is an instinct on everybody’s part to say, keep making it funnier. And I do think this is an incredibly funny movie, but being really disciplined with ourselves about holding that line, and also making sure that the drama didn’t get too sentimental, was what we had to carve out in post.

What was the most difficult scene to cut and why?
Rasula: We probably spent the most time talking about and worrying about the multiple endings, trying to figure out what was too confusing for the audience and needing to make adjustments there. Balancing that out was a tricky thing. And ultimately finding the right ending for Monk, what feels right for the character, and what feels satisfying for an audience.

Did you do a lot of test screenings?
Rasula: We did just one official test screening.

Jefferson: But we probably did 15 to 20 friends and family screenings throughout post. That was also incredibly helpful. The biggest problem besides the ending was the very beginning. We kept getting this similar feedback from friends and family: “The movie starts off a little slow. We don’t fully understand that it’s supposed to be funny and that we’re supposed to be laughing at the very outset.” We were beating ourselves over the head with, “How are we going to fix this?” And then one day we all came in and Hilda had spent the night before reorganizing the first 25 to 30 minutes of the film, and a light bulb went off. It was truly like, you found what we needed to do. And correct me if I’m wrong, Hilda, but a lot of the impetus came from friends and family feedback.

Rasula: Absolutely. Feedback from people is so crucial because you’re making a movie for an audience. Basically, everything we do is for the audience, and it’s only through showing it to people that you can really start to get that sense of how it is working and what information is not hitting their brains in the right order at the right time… or their hearts. Those screenings were invaluable since it was very late in the process that we did that restructure, and it’s really only because of things that people were saying that then triggered a lot of discussions.

Did you use a lot of sound temps?
Rasula: This is a very talky movie, so it’s not like an action movie where it required crazy sound design. But we did all of our temp music cutting; we didn’t have the budget to have a music editor or anybody else working on sound through most of the process, so we had to do it ourselves. My assistant editor Charmaine Cavan took care of all the temp sound design while I was doing the temp music editing and much of the temp music supervision in the offline.

Cord, you have few visual effects courtesy of Outpost, Papaya and We Shoot Lasers. Did you take to it quickly?
Jefferson: I took to it pretty quickly because fortunately T Street has a really good relationship with some great VFX people – Rian’s movies tend to be way more VFX-heavy. Our VFX supervisor, Giles Harding, is someone that they work with regularly. Giles was incredibly helpful, and it was easy to get him on the phone and talk about what we needed.

(SORT OF SPOILER ALERT!)
The final scene of Monk getting shot was the most VFX-laden thing that we had, and it was just kind of just trial and error. We saw five to six different versions, and every version was good. It was just kind of refining what was already there. For example, let’s move this bullet hole a little to the left. Let’s move this sort of blood spatter a little to the right, but nothing too major. I felt it was pretty easy overall.

Rasula: In the end, we had a lot of VFX, some of which were invisible visual effects that you would never know existed, but those were easy enough to deal with. Split screens and that sort of thing.

Cord, I assume you want to direct again?
Jefferson: Absolutely. I will keep making movies for as long as they’ll let me make movies. And I’ve told Hilda that I want her to work on everything with me now, so hopefully she’ll be there as well.

Hilda, would you work with him again?
Rasula: (Laughs) Of course. Cord has the most amazing voice and such clarity in his writing. And I think as a storyteller and now as a director, he has a reason to make movies. He has a reason to tell stories. He just doesn’t do it without a sense of purpose. That’s all I ever want from my director.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

 

Academy Announces Science and Technical Oscar Awards, Plaques

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will celebrate 16 scientific and technical achievements at its annual Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony on February 23 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

“Each year, a global group of technology practitioners and experts sets out to examine the extraordinary tools and techniques employed in the creation of motion pictures,” reports Barbara Ford Grant, chair of the Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards Committee, which oversees the vetting of the awards. “This year, we honor 16 technologies for their exceptional contributions to how we craft and enhance the movie experience, from the safe execution of on-set special effects to new levels of image presentation fidelity and immersive sound to open frameworks that enable artists to share their digital creations across different software and studios seamlessly. These remarkable achievements in the arts and sciences of filmmaking have propelled our medium to unprecedented levels of greatness.”

Unlike other Academy Awards to be presented this year, achievements receiving Scientific and Technical Awards need not have been developed and introduced during a specified period. Instead, the achievements must demonstrate a proven record of contributing significant value to the process of making motion pictures.

The Academy Awards for scientific and technical achievements are:

TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS (ACADEMY CERTIFICATES)

To Bill Beck for his pioneering use of semiconductor lasers for theatrical laser projection systems.

Bill Beck’s advocacy and education to the cinema industry while at Laser Light Engines contributed to the transition to laser projection in theatrical exhibition.

To Gregory T. Niven for his pioneering work in using laser diodes for theatrical laser projection systems.

At Novalux and Necsel, Gregory T. Niven demonstrated and refined specifications for laser light sources for theatrical exhibition, leading the industry’s transition to laser cinema projection technology.

To Yoshitaka Nakatsu, Yoji Nagao, Tsuyoshi Hirao, Tomonori Morizumi and Kazuma Kozuru for their development of laser diodes for theatrical laser projection systems.

Yoshitaka Nakatsu, Yoji Nagao, Tsuyoshi Hirao, Tomonori Morizumi and Kazuma Kozuru collaborated closely with cinema professionals and manufacturers while at Nichia Corporation Laser Diode Division, leading to the development and industry-wide adoption of blue and green laser modules producing wavelengths and power levels matching the specific needs of the cinema market.

To Arnold Peterson and Elia P. Popov for their ongoing design and engineering, and to John Frazier for the initial concept of the Blind Driver Roof Pod.

The roof pod improves the safety, speed and range of stunt driving, extending the options for camera placement while acquiring picture car footage with talent in the vehicle, leading to rapid adoption across the industry.

To Jon G. Belyeu for the design and engineering of Movie Works Cable Cutter devices.

The design of this suite of pyrotechnic cable cutters has made them the preferred method for safe, precise and reliable release of suspension cables for over three decades in motion picture production.

To James Eggleton and Delwyn Holroyd for the design, implementation and integration of the High-Density Encoding (HDE) lossless compression algorithm within the Codex recording toolset.

The HDE codec allows productions to leverage familiar and proven camera raw workflows more efficiently by reducing the storage and bandwidth needed for the increased amounts of data from high-photosite-count cameras.

To Jeff Lait, Dan Bailey and Nick Avramoussis for the continued evolution and expansion of the feature set of OpenVDB.

Core engineering developments contributed by OpenVDB’s open-source community have led to its ongoing success as an enabling platform for representing and manipulating volumetric data for natural phenomena. These additions have helped solidify OpenVDB as an industry standard that drives continued innovation in visual effects.

To Oliver Castle and Marcus Schoo for the design and engineering of Atlas, and to Keith Lackey for the prototype creation and early development of Atlas.

Atlas’s scene description and evaluation framework enables the integration of multiple digital content creation tools into a coherent production pipeline. Its plug-in architecture and efficient evaluation engine provide a consistent representation from virtual production through to lighting.

To Lucas Miller, Christopher Jon Horvath, Steve LaVietes and Joe Ardent for the creation of the Alembic Caching and Interchange system.

Alembic’s algorithms for storing and retrieving baked, time-sampled data enable high-efficiency caching across the digital production pipeline and sharing of scenes between facilities. As an open-source interchange library, Alembic has seen widespread adoption by major software vendors and production studios.

SCIENTIFIC AND ENGINEERING AWARDS (ACADEMY PLAQUES)

To Charles Q. Robinson, Nicolas Tsingos, Christophe Chabanne, Mark Vinton and the team of software, hardware and implementation engineers of the Cinema Audio Group at Dolby Laboratories for the creation of the Dolby Atmos Cinema Sound System.

Dolby Atmos has become an industry standard for object-based cinema audio content creation and presents a premier immersive audio experience for theatrical audiences.

To Steve Read and Barry Silverstein for their contributions to the design and development of the IMAX Prismless Laser Projector.

Utilizing a novel optical mirror system, the IMAX Prismless Laser Projector removes prisms from the laser light path to create the high brightness and contrast required for IMAX theatrical presentation.

To Peter Janssens, Goran Stojmenovik and Wouter D’Oosterlinck for the design and development of the Barco RGB Laser Projector.

The Barco RGB Laser Projector’s novel and modular design with an internally integrated laser light source produces flicker-free uniform image fields with improved contrast and brightness, enabling a widely adopted upgrade path from xenon to laser presentation without the need for alteration to screen or projection booth layout of existing theaters.

To Michael Perkins, Gerwin Damberg, Trevor Davies and Martin J. Richards for the design and development of the Christie E3LH Dolby Vision Cinema Projection System, implemented in collaboration between Dolby Cinema and Christie Digital engineering teams.

The Christie E3LH Dolby Vision Cinema Projection System uses a novel dual modulation technique that employs cascaded DLP chips along with an improved laser optical path, enabling high dynamic range theatrical presentation.

To Ken Museth, Peter Cucka and Mihai Aldén for the creation of OpenVDB and its ongoing impact within the motion picture industry.

For over a decade, OpenVDB’s core voxel data structures, programming interface, file format and rich tools for data manipulation continue to be the standard for efficiently representing complex volumetric effects, such as water, fire and smoke.

To Jaden Oh for the concept and development of the Marvelous Designer clothing creation system.

Marvelous Designer introduced a pattern-based approach to digital costume construction, unifying design and visualization and providing a virtual analogy to physical tailoring. Under Jaden Oh’s guidance, the team of engineers, UX designers and 3D designers at CLO Virtual Fashion has helped to raise the quality of appearance and motion in digital wardrobe creations.

To F. Sebastian Grassia, Alex Mohr, Sunya Boonyatera, Brett Levin and Jeremy Cowles for the design and engineering of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD).

USD is the first open-source scene description framework capable of accommodating the full scope of the production workflow across a variety of studio pipelines. Its robust engineering and mature design are exemplified by its versatile layering system and the highly performant crate file format. USD’s wide adoption has made it a de facto interchange format of 3D scenes, enabling alignment and collaboration across the motion picture industry.

Kirk Baxter on Editing David Fincher’s The Killer

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By Iain Blair

David Fincher’s The Killer is a violent thriller starring Michael Fassbender as an unnamed hitman whose carefully constructed life begins to fall apart after a botched hit. Despite his mantra to always remain detached and methodical in his work, he lets it become personal after assassins brutally attack his girlfriend, and soon he finds himself hunting those who now threaten him.

L-R: Kirk Baxter and David Fincher

The Netflix film reunites Fincher with Kirk Baxter, the Australian editor who has worked on all of Fincher’s films since The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and who won Oscars for his work on The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

I spoke with Baxter about the challenges and workflow.

How did you collaborate with Fincher on this one?
I try not to weigh David down with too many background questions. I keep myself very reactionary to what is being sent, and David, I think by design, isolates me a bit that way. I’ll read the script and have an idea of what’s coming, and then I simply react to what he’s shot and see if it deviates from the script due to the physicality of capturing things.

The general plan was that the film would be a study of process. When The Killer is in control, everything’s going to be deliberate, steady, exacting and quiet. We live in Ren Klyce’s sound design, and when things deviate from The Killer’s plan, the camera starts to shake. I start to jump-cut, the music from composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross comes into the picture, and then all of our senses start to get rocked. It was an almost Zenlike stretching of time in the setup of each story then a race through each kill. That was the overarching approach to editing the film. Then there were a thousand intricate decisions that we made along the way each day.

I assume you never go on-set?
Correct. I just get dailies. Then David and I go back and forth almost daily while he is shooting. [Fincher and DP Erik Messerschmidt, ASC, shot widescreen anamorphic aspect ratio, 2.39×1, with the Red V-Raptor and recorded footage in 8K.] David remains very involved, and he’ll typically text me. Very rarely does he need to call me to talk during an assembly. Our communications are very abbreviated and shorthand. I put assemblies of individual scenes up on Pix, which allows David to be frame-accurate about feedback.

Sometimes I’ll send David selects of scenes, but often on larger scenes, a select sequence can be 30 to 40 minutes long, and it’s difficult for David to consume that much during a day of shooting. So I’ve developed a pattern of sending things that are sort of part edited and part selected. I’ll work out my own path through action, and then I open up and include some multiple choice on performance or nuance — if there are multiple approaches that are worth considering. I like to include David. If I leap to an edit without showing the mathematics of how I got there, often the professor wants to know that you’ve done the research.

The opening Paris stake-out sequence sets up the whole story and tone. I heard that all of Fassbender’s scenes were shot onstage in New Orleans along with the Paris apartment he’s staking out. How tricky was it to put that together?
Yes, it came in pieces. The Paris square and all the exteriors were shot on location in Paris. Then there’s a set inside WeWork, and that came as a separate thing.

What made it more complex was that all the footage of the target across the street came much later than the footage of The Killer’s location. But I still had to create an edit that worked with only The Killer’s side of the story so that Fincher knew he had it. Then he could strike that set and move on. My first version of that scene just had words on the screen [to fill in the blanks] of what was happening across the street. I built it all out with the song “How Soon Is Now?” by The Smiths and The Killer’s inner monologue, which allowed me to work out Fassbender’s best pieces. Then, when I eventually got the other side of the footage, I had to recalibrate all of it so that it wasn’t so pedantic. I had to work out ways to hide the target by the size of the POV or stay on The Killer’s side to allow the scene to stretch to its perfect shooting opportunity, ladling suspense into it.

What were the main challenges of editing the film?
For me, it was a complex film to edit due to how quiet and isolated the lead character is. In the past, I’ve often edited scenes that have a lot of characters and conversation, and the dialogue can help lead you through scenes. There’s a musicality to voices and talking that sometimes makes it obvious how to deliver or exploit the information. Crafting a silent, exacting person moving through space and time called for a different muscle entirely. I often used Fassbender’s most subtle micromovements to push things along. We are always obsessing over detail with Dave’s films, but the observational study of a methodical character seemed to make the microscope more powerful on this one.

It’s very much a world of seeing what he sees, and his temperature controls the pace of the movie. He slows things down; he speeds things up. And that’s the way David covers things — there are always a lot of angles and sizes. There are a lot of choices in terms of how to present information to an audience. It was a very fiddly film to perfect.

As you note, there’s very little dialogue, but there’s a lot of voiceover. Talk about handling that.
Anytime you deal with voiceover, it’s always in flux. It’s quite easy to keep writing a voice-over — keep moving it, keep streamlining it, removing it, bringing it back. That all impacts the picture. We recorded Fassbender performing his monologue four different times, and he became more internal and quieter with the delivery each time. In editing the sniper scene and playing The Smiths in The Killer’s headphones at full volume over all of his POVs, I had to time his voiceover to land on the coverage. That then became a language that we applied to the entire film. POVs never had voice-over, even on scenes when The Killer wasn’t playing music. It created a unique feeling and pacing that we enjoyed.

What was the most difficult scene to cut and why?
The scene with the secretary, Dolores, begging for her life in the bathroom was very challenging because it’s somewhat torturous watching an almost innocent person about to be killed by our lead character. There was a lot of nuance in her performance, so we had to figure out how to manipulate it to make it only slightly unbearable to watch. And that’s always my role. I’m the viewer. I’m the fan. Because I’m not on-set, I’m often the one who’s least informed and trying to make sense of things, learning as I go.

I think the scene with Tilda Swinton (The Expert) was rather difficult as well, probably because she’s so good. The scene was originally a lot longer than it is now, but I had to work the scene out based on what Fassbender was doing, not what Tilda was doing. There are only so many times you can cut to The Killer and his lack of response without diluting that power. So I reduced the scene by about a third in order to give more weight to the lack of vocalization, pushing things forward with the smallest facial performances. That was the scene we played with the most.

There is some humor in the film, albeit dark humor. How tricky was it trying to maneuver that and get it exactly right?
I think there’s always dark humor in David’s movies. He’s a funny guy. I love the humor in it, especially in the fight scene. There’s such brutality in that physical  fight scene, and the humor makes it easier for the audience to watch. It gives you pauses to be able to relax and catch up and brace yourself for what’s coming.

There’s also humor in the voiceover throughout the film. I had to work out the best possible timing for the voice-over and decide what we did and didn’t need. There was a lot of experimentation with that.

Did you use a lot of temp sound?
There was some underwhelming temp stuff that we put in just to get by, but usually sound designer Ren Klyce comes in and does a temp mix before we lock the film. From that point on, we continue to edit with all of his mix splits, which is incredibly helpful.

The same goes for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. They scored about 40 minutes of music very early in the process, and that’s how I temped the music in the film — using their palette so we didn’t have to do needle-drops from other films. Working with their music and finding homes for the score is probably the most enjoyable part of film editing for me.

What about temping visual effects?
We do temp effects when they’re based on storytelling and timing, and there are always so many split screens. David often keeps shots locked off so that we can manipulate within a frame using multiple takes. There are a lot of quiet visual effects that are all about enhancing a frame. And we are constantly stabilizing camera work — and in this case destabilizing, adding camera shake during the fight or flight scenes.

There’s a lot of that sort of work with David, so I don’t need to get bogged down with it when I’m getting ready to lock a cut. That all comes afterward, and it’s [all about] enhancing. We mostly communicate storytelling and timing and know that we’re secure in our choices — that’s what I need to deal with while editing.

Did you do many test screenings?
There’s always a trusted crowd that David will show it to, but we didn’t do test screenings in the conventional sense of bringing in piles of strangers to see how they respond. David’s more likely to share with filmmakers and friends.

How long did the edit take to complete?
It was close to a year and then David reshot two scenes. When David’s in Los Angeles, I like to work out of his office in Hollywood so he can casually pop in and out of the cutting room. Then we picked up and went to the south of France to Brad Pitt’s property Miraval. They have cutting rooms there. We worked there in the summer for a couple of months, which was incredible and very focused.

I heard you’re not much of a tech head.
For me, editorial is more of a mindfuck. It’s a head game, much like writing. I’m focused on what I’m crafting, not on data management. I can be like that because I’ve got a great team around me that is interested and curious about the tech.

I have no curiosity in the technology at all. It just allows me to do my work efficiently. We cut on Adobe Premiere, and we have done for quite a few movies in a row. It is an excellent tool for us — being able to share and pass back and forth multiple projects quickly and effortlessly.

You’ve cut so many of Fincher’s films, but this was a very different type of project. What was the appeal?
I was very excited about this film. There’s a streamlined simplicity in the approach that I think is quite opposite to a lot of movies being done right now in this type of genre. And it felt somewhat punk rock to strip it back and present a revenge film that applied the rules of gravity to its action.

Finally, what’s next? Have you got another project with him on the horizon?
David’s always sitting on a bunch of eggs waiting for one to hatch. They all have their own incubation speed. I try not to badger him too much about what’s coming until we know it’s in the pipeline.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Top Gun

Top Gun: Maverick‘s Oscar-Nominated Sound

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By Luke Harper

Even the snobbiest of film snobs has had a hard time shooting down Top Gun: Maverick, one of the biggest success stories in recent movie history. Nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Sound and Best Visual Effects, Top Gun: Maverick has been credited with helping to bring audiences back to theaters after the pandemic.

Al Nelson

The original Top Gun (1986) established a mood and aesthetic, and it set a bar. Maverick director Joseph Kosinski understood exactly what Tony Scott’s vision was on the original, and the way forward was clear — lots of action, sound and heart.

Speaking of sound, we recently spoke with Skywalker Sound sound supervisor Al Nelson, part of the Oscar-nominated sound team that also includes Mark Weingarten, James H. Mather, Chris Burdon and Mark Taylor.

Nelson has been working on the highest end dubbing stages since 1995, contributing to blockbuster films, including the Jurassic Park and Star Wars franchises.

Were you on the carrier at the same time as the camera crew?
I was. We got to piggy-back with the camera crew while shooting the opening sequence. The whole opening sequence is basically a recreation of the original Kenny Loggins scenes.

The cool thing about this go-round was that the Navy had F-35s and F-18s launching. This was new for the Navy and a significant moment for them. The presence of the F-35s necessitated a great deal of extremely controlled access for DP Claudio Miranda (ASC).

Aircraft carriers tend to be sonically unsubtle. What were some of the location-specific challenges?
There are a couple of parts to this. For one, the planes are loud enough that if you point a microphone at an F-35, you are going to get the F-35. We got amazing proximity and access, so we were able to get exactly where and what we needed. Also, as a result of modernization, the constant buzz of propellers, which was a major noise factor in the early ‘80s, is gone.

What was your aesthetic plan going into this project?
It was an evolving process, but fundamentally, it was, “It’s got to be as good as Top Gun.” The first film has sharp edges; great, tight cuts; and great dynamics. It’s an ‘80s movie, so they didn’t have subs, they didn’t have the channel counts we have today and they didn’t have the location access that we did.

My goal was Top Gun… but with more punch, more low end and more material that imparted a signature tonality. We had more proximal recordings for specificity and a decent amount of time to achieve this. I wanted to explore and feature the visceral quality that is a jet. You feel it in your gut.

There are also these hits on the cuts that they did on the first film, and we wanted to expand on those with power and punch — transitional cuts emphasized with a variety of quick, tight and huge sounds.

Anticipating a final mix in IMAX and Atmos formats, contrasting with the no LFE/four-channel mix of the 1986 version, what were your goals for the new channel freedom?
We needed to have the resources to fill those speakers should the story demand, so that translated to making sure we had enough material to fill those channels.

Do you ever show up on-location during production?
Not usually, unless there’s something specific. In those cases, we try to arrange a kind of side opportunity. Since we had a week booked on the carrier, we were independent from the production team. From time to time, I’d go more to meet with the filmmakers or for planning/research purposes.

Top Gun

On the huge productions, like the Jurassic Park movies, I tried to get one visit to set to either get all the big vehicles or unique equipment that were only going to be on-location. Or if they’re in an odd or exotic location, there’s also a need for me to get some research done — for example, if they are in Hawaii or something. Access is the name of the game, so this was extra-special. Luckily, the producers and directors were fully supportive of audio in general, so I was there for F-35s and F-18s, which is extremely rare.

What kind of other machinery did you capture for this film?
We were in touch with Skunk Works [an official pseudonym for Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs] and got some great material from them. We also went to GE and Pratt & Whitney and recorded a lot of jets of all sizes and specs. We also got a lot of APUs (auxiliary power units) because of the great screaming and whining that their operation entails. We recorded the GE9X (which is the size of a building), helicopter components, all kinds of things to help round out the sonic sphere.

Ben Burt, my right-hand man, recorded many, many things, including rockets.

How literal was the sound design for Maverick?
We were much more literal in the sound sources, but there’s the occasional action that necessitates a little creativity to really sell it. Credit to Gary Rydstrom and Ben Burt for additional use of distortion and for their availability for consultation. There were sounds that were ripping and tearing the air, as jets do — harsh, aggressive and dangerous. Sounds that wouldn’t work on some projects had a home on this film.

Can you speak to the dynamics choices on the final mix?
You can’t get to 11 without starting at 0. Tom Cruise was very invested in the projects and sound, and something he articulated was that in those moments when we could go to 0, we absolutely should go to 0. Silence exists in life, and we should be cognizant in leveraging that.

The story and sound are very much in parallel. Dynamics is drama. For instance, when we are focused on Rooster in the cockpit, when he thinks Maverick has died, it’s just breathing. There are a few moments like that. A lot of filmmakers are anxious about silence, but our producers and Joe were bold enough to advocate for the silence so that the ensuing jet thrust would just wallop the audience.

Can we talk about expectation management?
We put our best foot forward and really invested ourselves. But that was the expectation, to be clear. It was never about “serviceable” or “fine.” It was going to be pushing and working and digging until the results were exactly right. We had the luxury of so many invested people, but there was a tangible tenacity for perfection from the top.

Could you discuss your priority/balance philosophies regarding mix dynamics in general?
The thing that needs to drive a film like this is: “Where is the story?” When we are trying to create tension or trying to focus on a character, the tools at hand should deliver that. We had huge faith in the film, and that story was key. When we would participate and bring the sonic goods, we did. When we needed to get out of the way, we did. You know, for Hans Zimmer or whatever.

With all of the modern tools and techniques, what is your workflow philosophy?
My post production phrase du jour is, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” From gear to level to track counts, doing things for the sake of doing them is wrong.

I’ve been mentored with some of the best in the business, and know I’m extremely lucky.]

Surround yourself with people who are successful, who have done this and who understand the art of sound for film. It’s not necessarily how to use Altiverb; it’s how to tell a story with sound. The right recording for the right moment is all you need. What is the right sound for this scene, and how do I get there?

An old chestnut for you – “A picture tells you what to think. Sound tells you how to feel.”
It’s a cliche, but it’s nice because it says that sound has emotion. Sound can give you emotion in cinema just as much as music or picture can. The right sound at the right time can be an emotional contribution.

Can you talk about your favorite gear?
Native instruments. I like to use Kontakt to go hunting through the selects for the “meat” and best perspectives. It’s great for on-the-fly manipulations. I use GRM Tools and iZotope tools to get to the personality.

What drives your work?
I love to record. I use Zoom’s H4n, F6 and F8 recorders; Sound Devices; and a nice Schoeps MS mic. Anywhere I go, I will have something.

What is your philosophy of sound selection, bearing in mind the audiences who may be extremely passionate about the subject matter?
The right sound for the right moment in the scene. If the audience and filmmakers believe it, then it’s right. That said, I’m not going to claim 100% literal representations for every scene. Oh, except for the Ninja. That is absolutely the correct motorcycle, and it is precisely what is heard.

Parting thoughts on Top Gun: Maverick?
It was a lot of work from a lot of people. The expectations were high, both from myself and from the filmmakers. I needed to nail it. We had two Foley teams, a combination of mixers, multiple sound supes and designers, so we were set up for success. I leaned on a lot of people and am grateful for their support. Something like this definitely takes a village.

Luke Harper is an audio engineer and instructor of 25 years. He lives Minneapolis, where he owns an Atmos mix facility, called DeCoded Audio.

Banshees

Editing Banshees of Inisherin: Oscar-Nominated Mikkel E.G. Nielsen

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By Iain Blair

The Banshees of Inisherin has scored nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director for Martin McDonagh and Best Film Editing for Mikkel E.G. Nielsen, ACE. The film, another dark comedic drama written by McDonagh, is set in 1923 on a mythical and remote island off the west coast of Ireland. It follows lifelong friends Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson), who find themselves at an impasse when Colm unexpectedly puts an end to their friendship, leading to disastrous, anarchic consequences.

Banshees

Mikkel E.G. Nielsen

I spoke with Nielsen, who previously won the Oscar for his work on Sound of Metal, about the editing challenges and the post workflow on the film.

Tell us about collaborating with Martin for the first time. How did that work?
Although we’d never worked together before, it was a very easy collaboration. I did the first assembly on my own in Copenhagen then showed it to Martin, and from there on we would sit together and work on the edit and find the film. He loves post and the whole editing process and discovering how even a tiny change in the edit can make a huge difference to the tone and feel of a scene… and then to the whole story. It was great working with him, and we had a lot of fun.

This was shot on location on two islands off the west coast of Ireland. Were you on-set?
No, I never went. I started on the job very late, and they’d already been shooting for a few days. Sadly, his usual film editor, Jon Gregory, had passed away suddenly, so I met with Martin and took over the role of editor.

BansheesWhere was all the editing done?
After I did the first assembly, we moved to London for all the post work. We cut it at Gravity House in Soho with my assistant editor, Nicola Matiwone. Carter Burwell’s score was recorded and mixed at Abbey Road, and the DI was done at Goldcrest Post with colorist Adam Glasman.

Tell us about the workflow. What editing gear did you use?  
We cut on Avid Media Composer Version 2018.12.8, which I really like, and we used two of them. Editorial storage was on an Avid Nexis system. I traveled around quite a bit, so I was always able to access material and work wherever I was.

What were the main challenges of the edit? How did you approach the material?
BansheesThe big one was keeping the simplicity of the story but also finding the right balance between the comedy and the drama, and then turning it into this tragedy. It was also about making it about the characters and tracking all of them along with the animals and so on. Little by little you find that balance.

We also tried to edit in a way that told the story almost like a fable. You’re on this remote island, and you introduce the main characters. And then you treat the island and nature and the animals almost like characters as well. So all of that was a huge challenge for me, as I’ve never done anything like this before. It was a big learning process and really interesting from an editorial point of view to see just how much the material changes with the pacing and pauses.

Finding the rhythm was so important, especially with the dialogue, as Martin writes dialogue almost like a piece of music, and then the actors bring so much rhythm to their lines as well. The smallest elements can make big changes in an edit like this.

Fair to say you and Martin treated all the animal characters, especially Jenny the donkey, with a lot more attention than is usual in films?
For sure. Martin is a huge animal lover, and we really treated them with the utmost respect. We set out with the idea to almost give Jenny a voice with that little bell. It becomes almost like dialogue with Pádraic, and that had to do with creating a soundscape where you hold back so that the dialogue is all-important. And along with the bell, you have all the ambient sound in the distance, so it becomes almost claustrophobic at times. All the animals and nature around the characters function like commentaries on the story.

BansheesAny surprises in the edit?
I wouldn’t say there were any in terms of the story and the structure, but there were some happy accidents as we worked with the material. For instance, there’s the bit with the small birds jumping up at each other, and that suddenly worked as another commentary on the whole conflict between the main characters. They’re like small hidden gems that suddenly reveal themselves in the edit. You’re trying to find the essence of the simplicity in a scene, and often it reveals itself and the rhythm it needs. It’s a very simple story we’re telling, but it’s also very complex, and it allows you to reflect on all the themes and topics it deals with.

Did you use a lot of temp sound?
We did. We also did a full pass on the whole film for screenings for us to see and feel how much we should hold back in the audio. It’s actually a very quiet film from a sound perspective, but it also has these small elements that almost have their own language.

BansheesWe see these amazing images with huge waves in the background, but we really hold back so you almost can’t hear them. And we really wanted to focus on the dialogue and characters all the way through, and ‘plot sounds,’ like Jenny’s bell and a horse-drawn wagon. It’s very interesting just how much we were able to hold back on the soundscape and how it makes it all feel more – not less – claustrophobic. And that also gave more room to Carter’s music, especially in the montage sequences.

There are quite a lot of VFX by Union and Goldcrest.
Yes, there are quite a lot of VFX, which you might not expect in a film like this, but they are mainly for body parts and for period accuracy. Union did previz for all our screenings, and they worked closely with my assistant editor, Nicola. And it was very easy working with VFX super Simon Hughes and his team, as they were right down the road from Gravity House. They would send us files, and we could check stuff as it came in.

How would you sum up the whole experience? Where does it rank in terms of challenges and satisfaction?
It was a huge challenge to bring this slow-burn tragedy and all its characters to life, and my dream was to be invisible in the editing process. It’s an extremely simple premise – two old friends fall out — but it just adds and adds to that, and it was so difficult trying to balance all the elements. It was probably far more difficult than editing Sound of Metal, and that wasn’t easy.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Sound Designer Scott Gershin on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

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Veteran sound designer Scott Gershin has been working in the industry for over three decades, with a resume that includes Star Trek, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, Green Lantern and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, among many others.

In December he took home his first Children’s & Family Emmy Award for Netflix’s Maya and the Three, and his latest work on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio has earned him a spot on the Oscar shortlist for “Best Sound.” Gershin has a history with del Toro, previously collaborating with the director on Pacific Rim and Blade II.

Pinocchio

Scott Gershin

This stop-motion version of Pinocchio (which recently won a Golden Globe) reimagines the classic Carlo Collodi tale of the fabled wooden boy and sends Pinocchio on an adventure that transcends worlds and reveals the life-giving power of love. The characters are voiced by Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Gregory Mann, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Finn Wolfhard and Christoph Waltz.

We recently spoke with Gershin about working with del Toro on and off for 30 years, their work on Pinocchio and his love of sound design.

Did Pinocchio differ from some of your other collaborations with del Toro?
I always wanted to work on some of Guillermo’s quieter movies. When we started discussing Pinocchio, we both realized this movie had to be very different than the other ones we had done together. It had to be much more subtle and tasty and really support the nuances of the story and the art…to create lots of detail using a fine brush. It was much more of a detailed audio sculpture rather than just putting sound anywhere.

Were there any sounds you created in the beginning stages of the film that changed a lot as you dove further into the project?
For Pinocchio, I started very early on during the storyboard portion. As I was coming up with different concepts, the sound evolved as the picture evolved. We kept iterating, and as the picture matured, so did the audio.

What are some of the sounds you created, especially for the characters?
The sonic artistry of the show involves when and how a certain sound was used and how the sounds help propel emotion. A lot of the organic sounds, such as wood, initially don’t contain a lot of emotion or ways of supporting the character. What little piece of sound we choose to use in any given moment, how we manipulated those the sounds and how we combined them really helped support all the different kinds of characters within the show. Each character had a number of signature sounds, and each character was made up of a lot of sounds rather than just one.

Pinocchio is made up of different types of woods that we moved and hit together. Wood creaks, metal squeaks and even sounds that weren’t actually wood all combined to create a single sound.  Then we used different elements throughout the show to amplify and support certain emotions.

Volpe has pockets full of coins, and occasionally you’ll hear tap shoes as he becomes very dramatic. Podesta and the priest have opposite sound from each other — one aggressive and the other passive.

All the townspeople and kids are speaking Italian. And the weapons that the kids fire don’t sound like guns, but something else. We tried to make them spring-loaded to confuse what happens in the following scene. Like the art in the show, the sounds are stylized and have their own take on what reality is.

But all those sounds evolved throughout the whole show. The goal is for listeners never to concentrate on the sound design because if they do, that means we are distracting them from connecting with the character. Our job is to create the perfect illusion, which means you fall in love with the different characters, especially Pinocchio.

Creating sound is hard to describe. It’s like carving into wood or stone — it’s all about the nuances and how you do it. It’s difficult to pinpoint a specific sound. It’s much more an expression of detail than it is of big sounds. Big sounds would just take away from the meaning and goal of the show.

Did the fact that the characters were created with stop-motion and not necessarily based on reality give you more leeway in the sounds you were able to create? 
A small fact is that creating a film using stop motion is actually similar to filming live action, except it’s being shot frame by frame. They shot with real cameras, lighting, costume and a makeup department. Sets were built, and they used CG to enhance things like water.

That being said, the show definitely had a stylistic feel. It was strongly based on architectural and clothing styles of the era. Obviously, the characters themselves had a unique creative style. I tried to stay organic to the look and feel of the visuals. While enhancing the sound to have a stylistic flair, I wanted to remain anchored in what you saw. The goal was that the sound had to transcend what you saw and heard… become a new reality.

It was important for the audience to see and feel that Pinocchio was a real character and not a wooden prop. So the goal of all the sounds was to support the emotional arcs that exist throughout each scene and the movie. A major plus was that our dialogue tracks were clean and without production noise. This allowed for more articulation and precision between the dialogue, music and sound effects.

All the frequencies were available, but the only challenge was that there was no place for sounds to hide. Every single sound is heard — every squeak, creak, cloth movement and weight shift by the characters — from Pinocchio to the godly sounds of the spirits and the inside of the dogfish to each bubble pop, dog scratch and distant line of Italian dialogue. It’s all heard.

It was all about making the correct choices for each shot and scene and the overall story arc. Because the show starts with simplicity — mono, like the birth of innocence — and evolves through the spatial complexities of life going full circle, ending life with simplicity and back to mono. All of this was thought out beforehand.

What is the best advice Guillermo has given you?
Not to f**k up. Because Guillermo and I have worked together for such a long time, we have a certain amount of shorthand. Our communication is always with sound and using creativity to help enhance the story. He likes to say we talk the vocabulary of sound and not words.

You have said that even the most minute of noises sometimes took up to three weeks of trial and error to find. Which noises were you referring to?
What makes this show unique is the detail. I love to put detail in my shows, but because this one was built so that there was no way to hide behind other sounds or music, you heard every sound you chose. As the picture, animation and movements evolved, so did the audio to best capture the essence of the scene and of the character. Many times we kept working, like with a sculpture, where you build the face and it looks like a face, but then you start going for every little detail. We added every little bit of sound that we could put in, which had to be balanced with what was happening on-screen, what was happening with music and what was happening with the story. We had to make specific decisions on what exact details we wanted at any given moment.

What scene in Pinocchio was your favorite, soundwise? Why?
I don’t have a favorite scene, but as you look at the film as a whole, it has a very specific sonic arc. One of the things I’m proud of is that there is not one scene that makes the show. The whole show evolves with the characters. It’s about the full story. It’s like asking, “What’s your favorite part of a score?” It’s the beginning, middle and end. It’s a sonic journey that has to be appreciated as a whole rather than living or dying on one scene. It really needs to be played as a full sonic piece because so much changes, and the evolution of sound is an integral part of the design.

Can you talk about the tools you use?
I used so much technology in this show; it’s hard to pick just one. Before I do anything, it has to start with great recording and the right sound. Then I can enhance it and manipulate it and make it into something different.

I can put the sound into Pro Tools, Reaper or Soundminer and use my favorite plugins or plugin chains to enhance, mutilate, mangle and combine it with other sounds, and that turns it into a new sound that better fits into the scene. Like music, it’s about volume, pitch, rhythm, presence, spatiality and/or mangling the harmonic and envelope structure to turn it into something else. Or simply grabbing a mic and using your voice, which I did a lot for Dogfish.

What advice do you have for sound designers just getting started?
Relearn to listen. As we grow, we stop listening. Become an audio photographer and start listening to all the sounds that you are exposed to, whether they be movies, games or just the environments around you. Start getting a mental vocabulary so that if you need to draw upon an experience, you will know what it sounds like.

For example, what does a realistic punch sound like? What does the “Hollywood” version of a punch sound like? Same goes with weapons such as guns. It’s too loud to record and then play back at the same volume, so how do you capture the essence of the weapon that can be played back at a reasonable volume?

Same thing with animals. How do you give animals an emotional sonic vocabulary similar to humans when, in fact, they don’t communicate or make sound in the same way. You have to invent it, and the audience has to be able to believe it.  The same concepts apply to vehicles, aircraft and pretty much everything. Learning to listen is essential because you have to hear it in your head first. If you can’t hear it in your head, you are never going to be able to create it, no matter what tools you have available.

Second, learn your tools and instruments so that when you have a creative idea, your brain will automatically know how to use the tools. And then it’s all about what you hear and how you bring it to life.

DP Mandy Walker on Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis: Shooting, LUTs, More

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By Iain Blair

Aussie cinematographer Mandy Walker, ACS, ASC, who collaborated with Baz Luhrmann on his sprawling epic Australia, teamed up with the director once more on Elvis. An epic in its own right, Elvis conjures up the life and times — and rise and fall — of this rock ‘n’ roll icon. Starring Austin Butler as the poor white kid from Tupelo, the film is told from the point of view of Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). And as Oscar season starts up, it’s been getting a lot of buzz. And for her part on the film, Walker has become the first woman to take home the AACTA’s Best Cinematography award for Feature Film in Australia, and she has been nominated for an Oscar in the same category.

Mandy Walker

I spoke to Walker, whose credits also include Mulan and Hidden Figures, about the challenges of shooting Elvis, the cinematography and working with the DIT, DI and VFX.

This is an epic story. How did you approach the look of the movie with all the different eras stretching from the ‘50s to the ‘70s?
We basically divided the story into two parts and used different lenses to tell the story. For the first part, when Elvis is growing up in Tupelo, I shot spherical in what we called “black-and-white” color that’s a desaturated look with pushed blacks. Then, once he got to Las Vegas, we used anamorphic lenses — old glass from that period, with more aberrations. We also had different LUTs for each period.

When Elvis is 10 and running to the Pentecostal tent, we shot it with the black-and-white color look. It was a very considered color palette that we’d researched from the period. Then, by the time Elvis got to Hollywood, it was more Kodachrome-looking, and I had more depth of field, more color in the lighting and more contrast. Then in Vegas, there were bright, garish colors, very ‘70s, with lots of flares.

This is your fourth collaboration with Baz. How did it work on this?
Baz is very good at explaining the story he’s making and the whole emotional journey. Then it’s a matter of me interpreting all that visually. And as he’d been working on this for 10 years, he’d done so much research, and the visuals are so important in this.

Fair to say that initially the camera seems to be constantly moving – right from the carnival Ferris wheel scene at the start?
Yes, we wanted it to fly. But later, when it all settles down and the drama gets heavy, the camera moves far more slowly so you focus on the situation. When Elvis is with his mother, it’s slower. Then later, in his Vegas hotel room when he can’t sleep, the mood is darker, and the camera reflects that.

How long was the prep?
We had a lot of prep on this movie — 16 weeks — and we went through everything meticulously. We were just about to start shooting when we had to shut down for four months when Tom Hanks got COVID, so we had even more time to do tons of testing on cameras, lenses and so on. Baz loves to test and experiment, and we also worked closely with all the other departments – not just costume and art direction, but all the VFX. Really, post is part of prep now on a film like this.

Did you do lots of shot lists and storyboards?
Yes, but not for everything. It was more about making the connections between scenes and sequences. For instance, for the bit when young Elvis runs from the gas station to the juke joint to the tent — that was all storyboarded, as it was all a build.

We also built the Beale Street set and Graceland exterior and interior, all on stages and backlots. That way, we could design all the camera moves and transitions and rehearse stuff physically on the sets before we even shot. Pretty much everything was shot on the biggest stages they had at Village Roadshow in Australia, and we also shot on three backlots for the carnival and Beale Street stuff.

Was there any talk about shooting in some of the real locations in the US?
Yes, early on, but we all soon realized we couldn’t, as it’s all changed so much now. Memphis doesn’t look anything like it used to when Elvis was there, and the same with Vegas. That’s why we had to recreate it all from scratch. There is a bit of archival footage of ‘70s Vegas in there, but that was it.

Mandy Walker on-set

How did you make all your camera and lens choices?
We decided to shoot on the ARRI Alexa 65, and Baz and I decided to go that way very early on. It’s an epic story, so why not shoot on an epic format? Then, when Baz was in LA around August 2019, we met up with [optical engineer] Dan Sasaki at Panavision and went through all these different lens iterations — some on 35mm and some on a 65mm camera — until we got to the right ones that were specially built for us.

I heard you also used a special Petzval lens?
Yes, mainly for all the flashback sequences and drug episodes. It’s based on an old projector lens from the 1800s and has a focal length of up to 160mm. Dan made anamorphic and spherical versions of it for us. It was perfect for helping to create that feeling of disorientation we wanted in those scenes because the focus is on the center of the frame and the edges are softer and fuzzier. It gives you this great vortex effect.

Did you work with a colorist in prep on any LUTs?
I did all of that with my DIT, Sam Winzar, and we began very early on in prep and testing. Baz and I would look at colors and lighting, and then we’d refine them when we got to our location or set. We put together a lot of references for the LUTs so all the transitions would be very smooth from one period to another, and we always knew where we were in time. Those LUTs translated into dailies. Sam and I would go into dailies every night, and if we had four or five cameras running, we’d tweak them a bit to make sure they were all balanced. Then Kim Bjørge, our dailies colorist, also ended up becoming our DI colorist.

Isn’t that very unusual?
Very. It was a big step up for him, but he’d been working on the film the whole time and knew it inside out. It worked out really well.

I assume there was a lot of bluescreen and set extension work, especially for the big concert scenes?
There was a lot, as we built all the stages and auditoriums for the concerts and shows. We didn’t use any real theaters, and the film’s full of big sequences, like the famous ’68 Comeback Special set piece. That was huge, as it was the high stage and backstage area and about a third of the audience. All of that was built, along with the whole studio and control room. So we used bluescreen for the rest of the audience and extending the auditorium.

It was the same for the hayride, the early concert sequence. We had about a third of the audience and built the whole stage and backstage again. We used a lot of set extensions for stuff like Beale Street. We built four blocks, but just one level. So the second story and the rest of the street were all added in post. Everything was very carefully planned out, and we did a lot of tests in prep so we all knew exactly what was in frame and what would be added later in post.

The Russwood Park concert is another good example. We shot all of that on a black stage. I put up stadium lights, and that sequence was all extended as well. All the split-screen stuff was planned too. The VFX team worked closely with us and did a great job of integrating with our in-camera work. I was quite involved in integrating all the VFX and post work with them, and we had a lot of VFX companies, like MPC and Luma, working on it. (Other VFX companies included Method, Slate, Mr. X, Rising Sun Pictures and Cumulus VFX).

We did it at The Post Lounge in Brisbane, and they also handled all our dailies and processing. I did all the sessions remotely since I was in LA on the Warner lot in the DI suite — I could see all the images from The Post Lounge in real time, and that’s how we did it.

We did quite a lot of work, especially adding some LiveGrain to match the older film stocks and for when we intercut with archival footage and for stuff like all the 8mm home footage sequences. VFX also added a lot of artifacts to those scenes. But I do have to say, the finished film you see is very close to how our dailies looked. It really did turn out the way we first pictured it, and I’m very proud of the way it looks.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

West Side Story

Audio Post: The Oscar-Nominated Sound of West Side Story

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By Iain Blair

When veteran director and producer Steven Spielberg took on the challenge of reimagining West Side Story, it paved the way for several new firsts in his long and storied career. This was his first musical, and it earned him his eighth Best Directing Oscar nomination — making him the first person to get a nom in the directing category in six consecutive decades.

West Side Story

Andy Nelson (Credit: Holger Max Hoetzel)

A Best Picture nominee, the film also racked up seven nods in total, including one for Best Sound. That team included supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Gary Rydstrom, re-recording mixer Andy Nelson, production sound mixer Tod A. Maitland, scoring mixer Shawn Murphy and supervising sound editor Brian Chumney.

I recently spoke with Nelson, who has been Oscar-nominated 22 times, about working on the film and the challenges involved.

You won the Oscar for your work on Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, and you’ve worked with him a lot. When I last interviewed him, he told me he’s a very instinctual filmmaker, that if something feels right, he doesn’t waste time over-analyzing it. Would you agree?
Completely. He operates very much from the heart, and I’ve worked on many films where he’ll make an instant decision based on how he feels at that moment. That’s very rare because many directors second-guess themselves and will want to go back and keep searching for something. He’s not like that at all, and I love working with him for that reason.

Give us a sense of preparing this film with Spielberg, since this was his first musical. What were the early discussions like?
He and I sat down for quite a while in New York and talked about how we’d approach all the sound. I was coming at it from quite a large background of very different musicals — Les Miserables, Evita, La La Land, The Phantom of the Opera, Moulin Rouge — and we discussed all the various techniques you could use.

West Side Story

I’m a big fan of trying to capture live vocals whenever possible, as I feel the connection to the audience is very visceral and powerful that way. It’s more like being in the front row at a show, and you sense the actors are right there performing for you. But in a film like this, where there’s so much dancing as well, it’s very hard to sing all the songs live. So we discussed the options of picking up live recordings wherever we could, and that’s what we did. Production mixer Tod Maitland did a fantastic job of capturing all that, and I was able to actually use the live vocals on several songs.

How hands-on is he with all the audio work once you’re in post?
He’s very hands-on in terms of all the final choices. I think this is my 19th film with him, so there’s a degree of trust there. We like to present him with our version of a reel — or in this case, a song — and have him come in to critique it and work with us rather than start from scratch. He loves having a choice and then working on it to get it the way he wants it. There were many times in this film when we’d play him sequences and he’d be really happy with the results.

How closely did you work with the rest of the nominated team?
Very closely, and even with Tod. Typically, the production mixer is off on another job by the time we get to post, so there’s little interaction. But in this case, we did have a lot of conversations with Tod about the material he was sending us.

A good example is the whole gym sequence. He was able to send us tracks of the actors doing their dance without the music blasting, so we could use that as a basis of the recorded track to go against the music, which was great. Then I worked side by side with our sound designer Gary Rydstrom, who created all the New York period sounds. I handled all the dialogue, vocals and music. That’s how we work together. Then Brian Chumney, the other supervising sound editor, handled all dialogue recordings and any additional ADR looping and stuff like that.

Scoring mixer Shawn Murphy captured all the orchestra recording. That was a huge job since he had to capture the New York Philharmonic with Gustavo Dudamel conducting, but because of COVID, part of the score had to be recorded in LA with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. So he was dealing with different orchestras and different rooms, and some of the LA recordings had to be integrated into the New York ones. But Shawn did an amazing job of blending the two so that when I did the final mix it was no problem.

What were the big challenges on West Side Story? The transitions and marrying the dialogue and musical numbers?
Yes it was, and it always is in a musical. Because of Tony Kushner’s fantastic script, we had longer dialogue sections that then became a song. He wrote the screenplay, so all the songs would emerge from the dialogue. That was really helpful because we could create the scene with the dialogue, as in a traditional dramatic scene, and then when the music came in, we were able to keep a sense of the place through the song.

A lot of that was to do with all the microphone choices that Tod made on-set. He was able to capture and work on each actor’s vocal range with the best mics, and then when they did their vocal pre-records he used the same mics. So on the final mix, that gave me a choice of what mic I could use when an actor went from the spoken to the sung word, and that’s why the transitions are so great. They’re the best of any musical I’ve ever done, and they’re crucial and the toughest part of any musical. It’s all about believability. If you can’t use live tracks, then the pre-records have to be a perfect match to the spoken word recorded on set.

Where did you do all the sound? What tools did you use?
Gary created all the sound effects and Foley and atmosphere up at Skywalker Sound in the Bay Area, which is his home, really. Brian prepared all the dialogue and then came down to LA to work with me on the lot at Fox, and we put all the dialogue together. Then Gary came down and we put all the sound effects together.

We did all the work and mixing on the Howard Hawks stage where I’ve worked on Steven’s films for the past 20 years. I mix exclusively on the Neve DFC console, and Gary wanted to use that too, so we had the room set up as a full mixing console. We didn’t use any Pro Tools on the mix and just mixed it traditionally on the console.

Did you mix in Atmos?
I did, even though it’s not the sort of film you’d traditionally think of that way, but the use of all the speakers around the room really added so much.

For instance, the whistles at the beginning that start the film off. Steven wanted to focus that down to just one speaker, so when the room goes dark you really get a sense of that call way over on the far left. Then you got the response maybe way over on the far right at the back. That’s how we ping-ponged it around, to give the sense of being in a live show.

So Atmos was very important, as you can only go to a single speaker in Atmos. Atmos also let me spread the orchestra out wider across the screen and go into the corner speakers which are only usable in Atmos, to give a sense of the sound being bigger than the screen.

There are so many iconic and well-known songs in this. What was the most challenging one for you to work on and why?
They all had their own challenges. Probably the most challenging was the “Tonight” quintet, when everyone’s singing together as they lead up to the rumble. You’ve got all the leads singing, plus the Jets and the Sharks, and everyone was miked separately. I had about 16 different channels, and you have to make it all work and balance it all as an ensemble piece. That was tricky. Then with “Somewhere,” there was this beautiful version that Rita Moreno sang all live, and it was a matter of delicacy and sorting out the orchestration and what would best balance her voice and keep that beautiful simplicity.

How do you look back on your experience on West Side Story?
It’s ironic, as West Side Story was the very first film I saw as a kid, so it’s like coming full-circle. And I’m very proud of all the sound work we did. It’s a big highlight of my career.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Don’t Look Up

Director Adam McKay and His Go-To Editor Hank Corwin on Don’t Look Up

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By Iain Blair

Writer/director Adam McKay has become one of the most successful filmmakers in Hollywood thanks to such hits as Anchorman, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, The Big Short, Vice and Marvel’s Ant-Man. His new film is another comedy/drama/action mashup, the apocalyptic satire Don’t Look Up. The Netflix film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as two astronomers who discover a comet headed straight for Earth. There are A-listers galore — including Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Jonah Hill — tons of locations, ambitious set pieces and lots of visual effects. It was nominated for four Oscar Awards.

Don't Look Up

Director Adam McKay

McKay also assembled an equally stellar team behind the scenes, including his go-to editor Hank Corwin, ACE; DP Linus Sandgren, ASC, FSF; composer Nicholas Britell; and VFX supervisor Raymond Gieringer.

Editor Hank Corwin

I spoke with McKay about making the film, his love of post and awards season. Corwin, who was just nominated for an Oscar Award for his work on Don’t Look Up, joined the conversation.

What sort of film did you set out to make?
Adam McKay: When I was writing the script and talking to Hank about it before we even shot, the whole idea was to make a big comedy that dealt with how crazy and ridiculous our world is, and how we can’t even process the most basic information. Then at the end, when you’d normally have a traditional happy comedy ending, we’d shift tones to a big emotional one.

That was always our approach and how we went into it. And as I often joke with Hank, we always pick the most difficult blend of tones and subjects, and we ended up working 10, 12 hours every day for months in post trying to find the right balance. Any time you work with Hank you leave the door slightly ajar in terms of the tone, so it can shift when you make all these discoveries in post. And this was a very hard one, especially with its blend of ridiculous comedy and realistic space sequences. The goal was always to have it play to a big global audience.

Don't Look Up

Hank, how early did you come on board?
Hank Corwin: Adam was already talking to me about it when we were doing Vice. The way we work at this point is to play around with a lot of ideas as we go. Adam was shooting in Boston, and I’d just try different things. I’d take different slivers of music and work very closely with Nick Britell, our composer, and sometimes I’d use things not necessarily the way Adam had intended. It was a form of collage initially, putting stuff together and trying to figure it all out.

How early on did you start on post and visual effects?
McKay: We had a great VFX team headed by supervisor Raymond Gieringer and producer Dione Wood, who did Vice with me. They did a great job of giving us VFX temps early on that Hank could cut with. The crazy thing with this movie was — since we had to shut down for five months because of COVID — we got so much of it done early, as the VFX team just kept going during that time.

Corwin: They were really diligent, and I got VFX material far earlier than usual. When I was cutting the launch sequence, initially the only live-action footage we had was of some extras out on the Cape. Raymond and the team had already created a lot of mission control and the shuttles just so I could figure out how to cut it.

Don't Look Up

How much previz did you do?
McKay: Day For Nite did it and we used quite a lot, especially for sequences like the first and second launches, and then some for the comet at the end. Hank was playing with a lot of the previz, but as you know, the difference between the previz and the final shot is often night and day. It comes to life when it gets close to being finished, so we definitely had to use our imagination.

It was also tough with this one as a lot of it’s a comedy and we were test-screening it a fair amount. So it was really a big thrill for us when we got the finished VFX shots; they really lit up the ending of the movie and the whole middle launch sequence.

Tell us about post. Was it remote because of COVID? Where did you do it?
McKay: Hank began cutting at home in Malibu, and then we moved to the Sony lot, which was a ghost town because of COVID. It was very strange. Then we did all the sound and mixing up at Skywalker.

Hank, what were the main editing challenges? Finding the right tone?
Corwin: Absolutely. Initially, I think we all understood the tone and knew exactly where the film was going, but it was devilishly hard trying to balance all the elements. I hate to sound pretentious, but it was like quantum physics. You could never really find a place. It was like a cloud. You’d get a tone to a certain place, then 40 minutes later down the film, you’d realize the tone you’d established up front was no longer working or resonating. So we’d have to circle back. We spent untold hours trying to figure it all out.

What was the most difficult sequence to cut and why?
Corwin: It’ll surprise you, but it was the first Oval Office scene. On paper it doesn’t seem that complex, but you have some of the greatest actors covering the script, and then Adam gave them all two days to romp all over it and improvise. We were shooting with up to six cameras to cover all that, and then the tone was so difficult to pin down. It wasn’t a matter of trying to find good takes. It was like chess, figuring out the laughs and how they’d play later, and we were cutting that scene almost for the duration of the whole edit.

Don't Look Up

McKay: It was a case of triangulating how crazy the world actually is, how crazy the audience thinks it is and how crazy we think it is. That’s what we were trying to balance — everyone is living through this insane moment but dealing with it in very different ways. Some are in denial, others know it’s crazy but kind of normal, and some know it’s completely bonkers. When we first screened the sequence for a test audience, they felt it was just too crazy and absurd, so we went back and recut and recut to try to find some middle ground.

There are a lot of VFX. Who did them, and what was entailed?
McKay: I really enjoy working with VFX, and I’ve done a few movies with a decent amount of them, like Talladega Nights, The Other Guys, Vice, so I’ve learned through the years to draw all the shots and hire really good VFX supervisors, and then dial in your style and get it as close to photoreal as you can get. And don’t play it like the big superhero movie kind of thing, just keep it as real as you can. You’ll never get 100% there, but you can get very close.

Don't Look Up

We had a lot of vendors [Scanline, Framestore, Lola, Otomo, Picturemill, Instinctual] all working on different sequences, and some of the biggest VFX were crowd creation. Any time you see a crowd, it’s all VFX since we couldn’t have a real crowd because of COVID. I really laughed watching Hank — who’s cut such serious movies as JFK, Natural Born Killers, The Tree of Life — having to deal with rocket ships blasting into space and all the other VFX we had.

Corwin: (Laughs) I’d never dealt with VFX before. I knew nothing about them. Or comedy. I had to learn on the job.

What about the DI? Who was the colorist, and how closely did you work with them and the DP?
McKay: It was Matt Wallach at Company 3, who also did the dailies grading. He, Linus and I all worked very closely. We shot on film, as I still love that real film look, even though you’re obviously transferring it. Linus has such a great eye, and we went for an “artful” look, with shadows and depth, but also with a bit of a colorful pop to it.

So the goal was this sort of metropolitan, energetic look, but artfully done – and Linus just nailed it. It’s exactly what I wanted, and then we did some work enhancing and fixing stuff and balancing it all in the DI, which I love. A lot of it was dealing with the crowd VFX and making sure it all looked real, and the film turned out great.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Editor Affonso Gonçalves on Netflix’s The Lost Daughter

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By Randi Altman

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s feature film directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, takes viewers on a journey that bridges the present and the past. Set in a European beach town, Olivia Colman plays a middle-aged professor on vacation who becomes obsessed with a group of Americans — in particular, a young mother (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter. This sets off a series of flashbacks to when her daughters were young, including some very difficult choices she made.

The Lost Daughter

Affonso Gonçalves

Shot by DP Hélène Louvart on ARRI Alexa Minis with Cooke S4 lenses, the film was edited by Affonso Gonçalves, ACE, who cut on Avid Media Composer.

Gyllenhaal sent Gonçalves the script in April of 2020. “I loved it,” he says. COVID necessitated pushing the film’s start date, but in the interim, Gonçalves cut a short film that Gyllenhaal directed (Penelope, part of a series of Netflix shorts called Homemade). “So when the time came to shoot The Lost Daughter, I knew I wanted to work with her.”

We reached out to Gonçalves, whose eclectic resume includes the feature films Carol, Winter’s Bone and Beasts of the Southern Wild, the documentary The Velvet Underground and the TV series True Detective. Let’s find out more…

What direction were you given in terms of the pacing for the edit?
There was no specific direction in terms of pace; I was responding to the footage that I was getting from the set. When Maggie joined me, we worked on that together.

Were you on set? Near set? Keeping up with camera?
They were shooting in Greece with very strict COVID protocols, so I don’t think I could’ve gone even if I’d wanted to. I was in LA, keeping up with camera as much as time allowed.

The Lost DaughterHow did you work with the Maggie Gyllenhaal? How often was she seeing footage?
Once she was back home in NYC, she was in the cutting room every day. I’m not sure how often she was watching the footage prior to coming to the cutting room, but once she was there, we would review performances and coverage.

Can you give an example of a note she gave?
The scene between Leda (Colman) and Nina (Johnson), after Leda finds Elena, is the first time they have a dialogue, and so much of that scene is told through looks. Maggie remembered a really specific performance from both Olivia and Dakota that she wanted to use.

The Lost Daughter

Maggie Gyllenhaal on set (masked) in Greece

This was Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut. As an experienced editor, did she lean on you a bit, or did she have a specific vision of what she wanted? Combination of both?
It was a combination of both. She did have a vision of what the movie should be, but we discovered and experimented quite a bit.

Do you think her experience on-camera played a role in how she wanted edits?
She’s an experienced actress, and she brought so much of the knowledge to the cutting room. I learned so much from her.

So much of the film rides on Olivia Colman’s facial expressions and eyes.  Can you talk about coverage? Did she shoot a lot of takes?
Maggie got really great coverage, and I loved the way cinematographer Hélène Louvart captured those moments. She has such a beautiful and intimate way to shoot her subjects. They didn’t shoot that many takes.

A lot of the film’s point of view is that of a voyeur, with Leda spying on this family.
When Leda first notices Nina and her daughter, it reminds her of her younger days with her two daughters. The affectionate moments between the two trigger memories of different times. From that moment on, Leda is taken by the family, but more specifically, Nina. And as events happen, she gets closer to her. The deeper their involvement and mutual fascination, the deeper Leda gets into her memories.

How did you bridge the past and the present?
That was pretty much the way it was scripted. We did play with which images would start and finish the “flashbacks.” There’s a very specific way to come in and get out of those memories.

One example is the very first time Leda has a flashback. The sound from the memory starts with her drinking water. The image of young Leda, Bianca and Martha is very loving and intimate, and yet at the very end, there’s a look of uncertainty on young Leda’s face. That look matches the look and feel of older Leda on the other side of that memory. Also, they’re both looking in the same direction, which I felt was important.

Were any scenes particularly challenging to edit?
The octopus scene between Leda and Lyle (Ed Harris, who plays the caretaker of the property Leda is staying in) was an interesting one. As it was shot, and in the script, it worked beautifully. First, they prepare and cook the octopus in the kitchen, then they eat it in the living room. But back to back, those scenes didn’t work the way we liked. We decided to experiment with combining those two scenes and moving back and forth. We found a nice balance on the dialogue, and we played with looks and small gestures. It felt like a dance. In the end, I think it worked pretty well.

Who was your assistant editor? Was your AE mostly technical, or did you show your edits, ask for opinions, let them edit?
I was very lucky that I could work with my old assistant, Ron Dulin. He’s an editor now, but I convinced him to come and “hang out” with me in the cutting room for those five months we were working. What’s fun about working with Ron is that we are constantly talking about movies and music. He’s a great source of ideas and has an amazing knowledge of film history.The Lost Daughter

I did give Ron some scenes to cut, and every time I finished a scene, I would show him the cut to get his opinions. It was really fun working together this one more time.

Finally, how do you avoid being pigeonholed as an editor? What advice do you have for others?
I think probably working on different genres, different projects and mediums. Keep working and keep experimenting with ways to tell a story.

Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years. 

Red Rocket

Director Sean Baker on Editing Red Rocket, VFX and Post

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By Iain Blair

Since making his first film, Four Letter Words, back in 2000, indie writer/director/editor Sean Baker has created a body of work that is provocative, edgy and heartfelt. His last film, The Florida Project, premiered at Cannes in 2017 and went on to earn an Oscar nomination for co-star Willem Dafoe.

Red Rocket

Sean Baker on set, right

His new film, Red Rocket, stars Simon Rex as a hustler and fading porn star who returns home to Texas and tries to reinvent himself. Here, Baker talks about making the awards-buzzy film and his love of post.

Is it true this film came about at the last moment because of COVID?
Yes, I was developing another film that got put on hold, and we had to do something smaller with a tiny crew, so I quickly changed course and set out to make a character study that was achievable given COVID.

You’re such a hands-on filmmaker, including editing your own films. How does that work?
I’m my own editor on all my films, so there’s always a waiting game, and I don’t do assemble cuts. I go right to fine cuts. I know that’s a really ridiculous thing, but that’s my method. I’ve written the film and directed it, so when I get to the edit and post, it’s just about going into a chronological edit. The only difference is that I encourage improvisation on my set, so sometimes there are alternate takes and alternate ways of cutting things that I have to figure out.

Red Rocket

For the most part, it’s all in my head, so my fine cut is my assembly, and it’s pretty much polished at that point. On this, we had our AD and FotoKem, our post house, working away behind the scenes and syncing up my dailies and getting them to a place where I could jump into my edit right after the shoot.

You’ve said that you’ll never shoot on a stage and only use real locations. Where was this shot?
Texas City, on the Gulf Coast, and we did a big location scout. It was the perfect place — with all the refineries and pipes and chimneys — to set a story about a washed-up porn star. Even the Donut Hole was a real place just down the road, and you had all the sexual innuendo with that name too. It was all so perfect. We shot with just a four-man crew, and I wanted to shoot film. I’ve shot on my iPhone, but I love the look of film.

DP Drew Daniels and I went for 16mm. It just made sense for the look I wanted and because we were working with such a small crew and a limited budget — we could never have shot 35mm. Drew and I got our hands on these great, vintage 16mm anamorphic Panavision lenses — very rare — that had never been used on a feature film before, just commercials and music videos. So this was a first as far as I know, and we did an actual 2.35:1 capture. Drew is so fast on 16mm. We shot for just 23 days, and it was a real guerilla-style shoot, as we were literally dodging the refinery security the whole time.

Where did you post?
I came back to LA and began editing on my MacBook Pro in my bedroom; I don’t have an office. We had proxies made, obviously, so I was not dealing with 4K files. I was essentially editing on 1K files. We did shoot some digital on a Blackmagic camera for the night-time scenes because we couldn’t light, and that’s the great thing about digital for me — the luminance and dark exposures you can get at night.

Red Rocket

We did basic LUTs on there that were supplied to us by FotoKem, where we did all the post, dailies, scanning and DI. Our DI colorist, Al Arnold, came up with a good look for the digital footage that we then applied universally to all the film, and it was looking good enough for my offline. Of course, we tweaked all of that in the final mastering, but I had a pretty good-looking film on my hands just from the LUT itself, and then I went right into a fine cut.

What were the big challenges of editing this one?
I had great coverage in this film — I guess as I get more confident in directing, I’m getting more coverage. And I always keep my editing hat on while I’m directing. This means I’m very aware of the coverage I need to make a scene work in the edit. A big concern for me is pacing and rhythm. I feel a lot of films are cut a mile a minute these days — the Michael Bay approach. That works for his films, but for mine, which are supposed to get deep into the human heart, you have to sell the audience on reality, and I feel that fewer cuts allow audiences to feel they’re watching reality play out in real time.

Red Rocket

So even though I get the coverage, I always go into the edit intending to have as few edits as possible. But sometimes with first-time performers, I need to manipulate performance a bit more in the edit, and that’s harder and takes more time. For instance, the “sabotage” scene at the end of the film only has two professional actors in it — Simon and Bree Elrod — and that took nine days to edit. That was by far the hardest one to edit in the whole film, as there’s so much chaos in it, and I wasn’t scoring the film, so I couldn’t rely on score to help me out in any way. Simon’s doing his thing in the scene, so I asked Bree to just give me a constant wall of sound — to talk nonstop and just improvise — and she was amazing. She gave me the whole background track of screaming and swearing and so on.

You were also the sound designer?
Yes, and I share the credit with John Warrin. He and Andy Hay were our supervising sound editors and mixers. So in that fine cut, I pretty much created the soundscape of that world, and then John and Andy swapped out my effects for far better ones and did better Foley work. Then we did the final mix at John’s company, Esho Sound in Burbank.

You create these ultra-realistic documentary-style films, but you also embrace VFX and all the technology, right?
I do, and it’s really interesting you ask me about this, as this film has a lot of VFX — a lot — but it doesn’t look that way. Stiban VFX and The Artery did them, and they’re all invisible.

There’s a lot of sky replacement, and in one scene we had to a build a 3D model. There was also a lot of clean up. When I began in this industry, I wasn’t that interested or involved in any way with VFX, but now I’ve come to absolutely love this part of post, and it’s changed for me so much in the last few years. It’s such a godsend.

On The Florida Project, I realized that working digitally gave us so much control over the image in post and let us do so much. Ten years ago, we’d laugh when people said, “We can fix it in post.” But now you actually can, and it’s amazing. Working on The Florida Project, I learned that I could remove a van or an electric cord or anything I didn’t like that was eating up part of the frame and didn’t look good to me.

Now, I’ve totally embraced VFX to where I’m doing some manipulation in almost every frame of the film. I’m erasing something, changing a sign, touching up a sky — not because they’re mistakes, but because I can improve the shot. And it’s driving my producers crazy! They say, “You make these neorealist films shot in real locations where it’s supposed to be all reality, but now almost every shot in the film is an effects shot. Why?” And my answer is, “They’re still neorealist films — I’m just making them better.” All stabilization and seamless mattes and so on — you can even manipulate performance on one side of the frame to the other side. I can take the timing of one actor’s performance on the right side of the frame and slightly change the timing of the other actor’s performance on the left side of the frame, and no one will ever know – even me.

Sean Baker (Credit: Priscilla Rodriguez)

After watching a film for a year, even I forget what was actually manipulated in post. I wish I’d had this ability and resource 15, 20 years ago. So yes, I really embrace VFX and all the latest digital technology in post. They’re incredible tools that allow you to improve every aspect of your film.

Can you tell us about the DI?
It was mainly me and colorist Al Arnold because our DP, Drew Daniels, is always super-busy and was shooting a series. He could only see links because he was never able to make the sessions, but he trusted me and my vision, and if we were doing anything drastically different, we let him know in advance. Al colored some tests with the DP, so they already had a shorthand and knew each other’s taste as well as mine. So Al leaned into the colors and fluorescents and hues I often work with, and he took the time to really match the digital to the 16mm film, and it’s seamless. We went to town on the DI, and he used every tool he could — halation, grain and even gate-weave and some fake dust. No one will see that dust, but it’s there.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

Colorist Chat: FotoKem’s Dave Cole on Working With Dune DP

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There is no denying the beauty of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, especially if you’ve seen it in IMAX or on any big screen.

To help achieve this look, FotoKem’s Dave Cole worked closely with the film’s cinematographer, Greig Fraser, ASC, ACS, who had created a color bible to follow (see our interview with him here). The two had previously worked together on Vice.

Most of Dune was shot digitally on ARRI Alexa LF (with some Super 16 film shots and some high-speed Phantom shots) and graded on Blackmagic’s Resolve. It was then output to film and scanned back in for the final color grade — an interesting process we will learn more about in a bit.

Let’s find out more from Cole about his relationship with Fraser and their work on Dune.

How did your previous collaboration inform your work on Dune?
Between Vice and Dune, we’ve done quite a lot of testing together — and not just in the DI. We began early on both projects and discussed lenses and LUTs as well as the movie’s aesthetic. So, we’ve gotten to truly understand each other when we describe colors and looks.

For example, we know the subtleties of what we are referring to when we talk about something needing to be “less black” or wanting to “add texture.” We’re also not afraid of doing nontraditional DI processes — both digital and analog. What’s unique about working with Greig is that he’s very willing to think outside the box about how to achieve an effect and not rely solely on the tools or features of the grading system.

An example of this was shooting out a Phantom-acquired shot as a reduced size on 35mm negative to simulate the size and grain structure of Super 16 and then scanning that back in to be used as a source shot.

How was the “look” of the film described to you by Greig and Denis? Did you look at any references?
Greig brought me one still photograph that he had found and said, “This is the vibe.” That was our jumping-off point when we dug into working on the LUTs. We talked about how he and Denis (see our interview with  him here) wanted to keep it beautifully gritty and real, but we didn’t want anything to look pristine.

FotoKem’s Dave ColeGreig also chose detuned lenses, and we weren’t afraid of their natural vignetting. We embraced those artifacts and the optical nature of the images he acquired with the gear he chose.

Was Greig or Denis with you for the grade? If not, how were you communicating?

Greig and I spent a lot of time setting the “color bible” for the film and had done iterations of almost every scene, which we presented to Denis. When Greig went off to film his next project, I referenced this bible and graded the entire movie based on this vision, our discussions and Greig’s references. Then I presented that pass to Denis, and we sat together for a final polish of things. Occasionally we’d send stills to Greig, and I’d talk to him on the phone about what we were doing.

Greig trusted Denis, and he also trusted me, so it was through that confidence, conversations and our history that this worked.

FotoKem’s Dave ColeWe had thoroughly covered our bases before he left; I had to join the dots and fill in the holes with continuity and nuance as well as bring that something extra to truly elevate the scenes as the movie finally came together. Likewise, a real collaboration and trust happened between color and the VFX team, led by Paul Lambert. [Watch this space for our upcoming interview with Lambert.]

Shot digitally, the footage was then output to film and scanned back in for the final color grade. Can you talk about why that was done? What challenges came along with that process?
Years ago, while testing on Vice, Greig and I talked about the possibility of a film-out/scan-back process, which was later successfully tested on some music videos here at FotoKem. Once Greig and Denis saw the scan-back tests we did for them on footage Greig shot, they found that the Alexa footage was enhanced by all the optical photochemical responses of film. This process offers a more organic way to transport the audience into the sci-fi world of Dune. It elevates the believability factor by grounding us in a subconscious reality.

Dune is a character-driven movie, and by using the film process, it brings an uncontrollable randomness to the character of the worlds and the people that inhabit them. This was the first time that FotoKem applied this process to a major motion picture. This, of course, adds time to the post pipeline. It’s quite a technical and artistic process in terms of further enhancing the creative.

The scan-back method was used for all 2D versions (not the 3D versions, for reasons inherent to that format). There was literally only one shot that we decided to keep purely digital — and that was because Denis just loved the pureness of what that shot meant on an emotional level.

Dune is VFX-heavy, like many of your past projects, from The Tomorrow War to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. What are some challenges, and how has that work evolved over the years?
When working on a VFX-heavy film, it’s great when one company is doing all or the majority of the work because there is uniformity, but that’s rare. It’s paramount to have a trusting relationship with the VFX supervisor, so they know you’ll do the best you can for their shots — and the movie as a whole — without breaking the visual effects. If I can’t make a shot work without breaking it, then I tell them rather than shoe-horning something in. Likewise, they can rely on me at the 11th hour to add nuance to a shot, which avoids iterative back-and-forth with the artists at the various VFX houses.

What has changed is that VFX teams are more aware of the need for mattes as a deliverable. Getting mattes from one source saves time, and when supplied from a source that trusts me, things are streamlined. When matte deliverables for the DI are built into VFX pipeline and it’s done well, then I can save time by not having to hand rotoscope, I have a more accurate isolation, and I can simply apply nuance. Everyone wins!

Any scene or scenes that stand out as most challenging or one that you are most proud of?
The final reel of the film was the most challenging. It’s the journey at night across the desert. It wasn’t traditionally lit; it’s natural photography with no stylized lighting effects. When you’re in the desert and the moon is out, you can see for miles. We really wanted to get that feeling of being out at night in the dark but still able to see.

FotoKem’s Dave ColeThe sequence progresses to pre-dawn and then the sun breaks. Throughout this reel – moon going down, sun coming up – the creative grade emphasized this transition, and it was an enormous undertaking. There was a lot of rotoscoping and shaping to keep the mood and tone and make the audience look where they need to look. There was a very slow but large tonal shift throughout the course of the 18-minute scene, and it had to be imperceivable and realistic. I hope no one will be aware of it. A lot of thought and effort went into it, but it should be natural and intuitive to the viewer.

Any tips for those wanting to become colorists?
You need to be dedicated and passionate about the art form — not just the technical aspects. Anyone can learn software, push buttons, move knobs. But a great colorist thinks outside the box and about how they can apply their technical proficiencies and aesthetic to realize the endgame for an image.

FotoKem’s Dave ColeHave a vision and know how you can get there. To do that, try to observe everything – art, architecture, photographs, etc. Look at the real world at various times of the day and make note of what you’re seeing in terms of color and nuance. Then develop the craft – learn tips and tricks from others, practice and take the time to understand why things work or why they sometimes don’t.

Be super-collaborative and communicative. Everyone on a project has to be working toward a common goal. You need to be adept at expressing yourself and your ideas throughout the entire process while being tuned in to all other creative ideas, then you must be able to funnel the best creative vision into that final image.