Tag Archives: Oscars

Getting the Right Look for Oscar-Nominated Anatomy of a Fall

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Securing the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and clinching five Oscar nominations, Anatomy of a Fall is a gripping family saga unraveling the startling collapse of an ordinary household. Under the helm of Justine Triet, her fourth directorial venture paints a dizzying portrayal of a woman accused of her husband’s murder, set amidst a suffocating ambiance. Graded at M141, colorist Magali Léonard from Chroma Shapers shares her workflow on this film, discussing both the artistic and technical details.

“Justine and director of photography Simon Beaufils reached out to me early on, even before the filming commenced, during the camera trials. I had previously collaborated on the grade for Justine’s Sibyl, a project where Simon also served as the lensman. This marked my second project with Justine and sixth with Simon,” says Léonard.

The director and DP worked closely with Léonard, who worked on Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve Studio, throughout the entire post process, making sure the film’s feel translated to the screen.

“Justine envisioned a raw, contrasting narrative embracing imperfections and flaws, aiming to create something visceral and sensual,” explains Léonard. “This vision particularly manifested in the trial sequences, characterized by flushed skin tones, sweat and tangible fatigue.

“I translated that vision alongside Simon’s directives into the visuals, meticulously attending to facial expressions and skin tones,” she continues. “We closely collaborated in crafting a visual identity, starting with extensive camera trials during preproduction involving hair, makeup and costumes.”

During the initial phases, Beaufils conducted tests on 2-perf 35mm film, allowing Léonard to emulate the film’s appearance when calibrating the digital camera tests. “This served as the cornerstone to unearth the film’s ambiance and visual identity,” she says.

Triet and Beaufils opted for a large-format camera paired with Hawk V lite anamorphic lenses, despite the film’s aspect ratio of 1.85. “The anamorphic lenses infused a richness of colors, flares and distinct blurs, softening the digital sharpness of the sensor. Simon was a pleasure to collaborate with, crafting exquisite imagery encapsulating intricate emotions,” she adds.

“My approach to the visuals was iterative, manipulating contrast through DaVinci Resolve’s custom curves, followed by adjustments in colors, saturation, and highlights. Subsequently, I introduced grain to impart a more pronounced aesthetic, a process initiated from the rushes onwards, laying the groundwork for the film’s overarching mood,” Léonard shares.

Refinement and Collaborative Efforts
In the later stages of the digital intermediate process, Léonard revisited the nodes used to establish the visual identity for fine-tuning. “I ventured into more daring suggestions, striving to refine highlights and specular lights while infusing subtle diffusion. For instance, we enhanced the saturation in the blues while preserving the rawness inherent in the set design and costumes,” she elaborates.

For the courtroom sequences, the grade underwent an evolution mirroring the unfolding of the trial toward a denser, golden atmosphere. “It was crucial to accentuate the actors’ facial expressions while retaining the initial appearance of a slightly rugged and textured visual, a tangible and vibrant material,” says Léonard. “I embraced the notion of allowing the visuals to unfold their utmost potential as the narrative progresses.

“Throughout the grading process, we frequented the Max Linder Cinema to screen the film under theatrical conditions, gaining insights into the visuals and enabling me to make finer adjustments to the final look. For instance, through these screenings, we discerned that certain scenes would benefit from heightened saturation or contrast,” she concludes.

DP Linus Sandgren on Saltburn’s Shoot, Dailies and Color

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By Iain Blair

Swedish cinematographer Linus Sandgren, ASC, has multiple award noms and wins under his belt, including an Oscar for his work on the retro-glamorous musical La La Land. His new film, Saltburn, couldn’t be more different.

Written and directed by Emerald Fennell, Saltburn is a dark, psychosexual thriller about desire, obsession and murder. It follows Oxford University student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) who finds himself drawn into the world of the charming and aristocratic Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), who invites him to Saltburn, his family’s sprawling estate, for a summer never to be forgotten.

Linus Sandgren

I spoke with Sandgren, whose credits include First Man, Babylon and American Hustle, about making the film and his workflow.

What was the appeal of doing this film?
It was two things. The script was brilliant; it was very suspenseful and exciting. I was drawn in by the buildup, how Emerald had it constructed, and I couldn’t stop reading. It was also very exciting for me because I hadn’t really done this type of film before. It was a unique story with a unique approach to this sort of psychopathic character — how you feel an affection for him, a sort of sympathy. It’s also so dark and funny.

I was also excited to talk to Emerald because of her work on Promising Young Woman, which I loved. Her directing of that film was excellent, and she was making very bold decisions. Then we had a call, and I was very impressed by her. She’s just so brilliant when she explains her vision, and you’re really drawn into her storytelling.

Tell us a bit about how you collaborated on finding the right look.
I typically don’t find the look [based on] different films. It’s more abstract than that, and a good approach is to just talk about it and see what words come up. Emerald said things like, “Desire or unachievable desire. Beauty and ugliness. Love and hate.” Suddenly you get images in your head, and one was of vampires. The family are like vampires, and Oliver is obviously a vampire who loves them so much he just wants to creep inside their skin and become them.

So there was some sort of metaphorical layer I was attracted to, and Emerald had a lot of vision already in terms of visual references — from Hitchcock movies about voyeurism to silent horror movies and Caravaggio paintings. We grounded it in some sort of gothic vampire core, but the story couldn’t just start there. We had to fool the audience a little bit and not explain that right away but have imagery that could be in that vein. The language was basically that the days could be sunny and bright and romantic, while the nights would be dangerous and dark and sexy. It was these discussions we had early on that inspired the lighting style and the compositions.

Tell us more about the composition.
Emerald wanted it to feel like the house was a dollhouse that we could peek into, and she wanted it to have a square format. It all made sense to me with that in mind, as well as the voyeuristic approach, where you focus on one singular thing more than if you go scope. It feels like you can see much more that way, so that allowed us to do things in a more painterly style. As soon as we started shooting that way, we knew we were right using an aspect ratio of 1.33×1 because we felt that we could be more expressive.

So compositions were a little bit as if you’re watching an oil painting, a classic type of composition, and we’d block the scenes within a frame like that without really cutting, or we’d go in really tight on something. It was sort of that “play with it a little bit” thing. Also, the approach is slightly artful more than cinematic. I feel like we thought of the shot list in another way here. It would be more, “How can we tell this story in a single shot, and do we need another shot, and if so, what is that?” Probably that’s just a really tight close-up. So we had a slightly different way of blocking the scenes compared to what I’ve done before. It was about creating that language, and the more you nail it before you shoot, then it solves itself while you start working on each scene.

What camera setup did you use, and what lenses?
We shot Super 35mm film in a 1.33×1 aspect ratio, which is the silent aspect ratio. We used Panavision Panaflex Millenium XL2s. It’s the same as silent movies, basically, for perf, and we used Panavision Primo prime lenses.

Did you work with your usual colorist Matt Wallach in prep?
Yes, the team was Matt Wallach (Company 3 LA) and dailies colorist Doychin Margoevski (Company 3 London). The dailies software was Colorfront’s On-Set Dailies. I have worked with Matt on dailies for many movies and lately in the DI. We set this up together, but he wasn’t able to come over to London to do the dailies, so he was involved remotely and was watching stills from the dailies Doychin did.

Tell us about your workflow and how it impacts your work on the shoot.
My workflow is always that the film gets scanned, in this case at Cinelab in London, and then developed and scanned in 4K. So it’s a final scan from the beginning, and we don’t touch the negative again. Then it goes to Company 3 for dailies. But before the dailies are distributed, the colorist sends me stills from his grading suite in dailies so I can look at the color. It’s just a few stills from the different scenes, and takes a week or two for us to dial it in. Matt gets the footage; he uses his instinct, and we apply a Kodak print emulation LUT. Then he works with the printer lights to see where he has the footage, and he does what he feels is right, with perhaps contrast or lower blacks.

He then tells me what he did, and we look at it on the stills he sends me. That’s when I’ll say go a little colder or darker or brighter or whatever. But usually after a few days we dial it in and get the look down. But, as I said, we spend a little more time in the beginning to make sure we have it right, and it also has to do with me knowing that we’re doing the right thing with the lighting — perhaps I’ll need to add more light for the next scene.

This has been our way of working since Joy in 2015, which was the first thing Matt and I worked on together with dailies. That process is really good because nowadays the iPad is like P3 color space, and it looks really good when you have it at a certain exposure, and that becomes our look. That’s why it’s so important to set that in the dailies because once we’re in the DI, I don’t want to change it. I just want to adjust things, like match the shots to each other or fix a face or do something else without changing this sort of look. The look should be there already.

That’s what I like about film too; it adds something to it. I feel like I know exactly how it’s going to look, but it looks 5% better or different with film because it gives me things that pressure me when I see it. It’s like, oh, look at the halation there, or look at those blue shadows. There’s something always going on that’s hard to actually imagine, as you don’t see it with your eyes, even if you know it’s going to be there. So that’s a nice thing. Basically, if you looked at the dailies on any of my previous films, I didn’t touch it much. That’s why I usually like having the same colorist do the dailies as the DI, but it couldn’t be helped on this one.

Dailies colorist Doychin Margoevski was great. He’s also got a great eye for darkness, and he’s not afraid of letting it be dark. So as I noted, the three of us dialed it in together initially, and then he sent stills to me and Matt, and we looked at them. That way, Matt was very familiar with the footage when we came to the DI, and he’s used to being with a timer and keeping track on the whole project. Matt also did the trailers, so all that is solid control.

I heard that you shot all the stately home interiors on location at just one house?
Yes, it was a 47-day shoot, all done in the one country house and in a nearby country estate for some exteriors, like the bridge scene. Otherwise, all the exteriors and interiors are at the same house. Then we shot at Oxford and near Oxford for some interiors, and then London. We built only one set, which was the bathroom. That was built inside of a room, and the two rooms next to it were Oliver’s and Felix’s bedrooms. They were completely painted and dressed and made up as their rooms, as they didn’t look that way at all when we came in. It’s the red corridor that was important going into the bathroom, and then the bathroom and then the rooms.

 

I assume the huge maze was mostly all VFX?
Yes, the whole maze is visual effects combined with the practical. When we’re down there walking around, it’s all practical, and we had these hedge walls that were moved around so we could get through. The center of the maze with that big statue in the middle was built by production designer Suzie Davies and her team. It was all VFX for the big, wide exterior overhead maze shot and the wide shot from the windows. VFX supervisor Dillan Nicholls and Union did all the effects.

What was the most difficult scene to shoot and why?
That’s a good question. I think the scenes of Oliver’s party. We had to be careful with the property, so we couldn’t drive around too many condors or cherry pickers, and we had to shoot different scenes over a few nights all over the place — from one end of the house to another end of the garden. We would be inside of the maze and outside at the discotheque or inside at the red staircase. And all of that had to be prelit to work 360, basically.

It was daunting to light, but we could eventually position lights and condors and sneak them in from other angles. So it was a little complicated. We had to plan it out, but thanks to the really good special effects department, we could fog it all up. Suzie Davies helped with fire flames so we could send practical lights in there to make it all look like a big party.

Are you happy with the way it turned out?
Yes, I’m really proud of it. It’s a special film for sure, and it was a really fun shoot… and different. It’s so refreshing to have a director that dares to do what you think is right, just the way you want to, so you don’t have to restrict yourself. I love working with Emerald. She’s very fun and, I think, brilliant.

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.

Kirk Baxter Talks Editing Workflow on David Fincher’s Mank

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By Oliver Peters

David Fincher’s Mank follows Herman Mankiewicz during the time he was writing the classic film Citizen Kane. Mank, as he was known, wrote or co-wrote about 40 films, often uncredited, including the first draft of The Wizard of Oz. Together with Orson Welles, he won an Oscar for the screenplay of Citizen Kane, but it’s long been disputed whether or not he, rather than Welles, actually did the bulk of the work on the screenplay.

Kirk Baxter

The script for Mank was penned decades ago by David Fincher’s father Jack, and was brought to the screen thanks to Netflix this past year. Fincher deftly blends two parallel storylines: Mankiewicz’s writing of Kane during his convalescence from an accident and his earlier Hollywood experiences with the studios, as told through flashbacks.

Fincher and director of photography Erik Messerschmidt, ASC, (Mindhunter) used many techniques to pay homage to the look of Citizen Kane and other classic films of the era, including shooting in true black-and-white with Red Helium 8K Monochrome cameras and Leica Summilux lenses. Fincher also tapped other frequent collaborators, including Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for the score and Oscar-winnitng editor Kirk Baxter, ACE, who won for the Fincher films The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Social Network.

I recently caught up with Baxter, who runs Exile Edit, to discuss Mank — starring Gary Oldman in the main role — the fourth film he’s edited for David Fincher.

Citizen Kane is the 800-pound gorilla. Had you seen that film before this or was it research for the project?
I get so nervous about this topic because with cinephiles, it’s almost like talking about religion. I had seen Citizen Kane when I was younger, but I was too young to appreciate it. I grew up on Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Conan the Barbarian, then I advanced my tastes to the Godfather films and French Connection. Citizen Kane is still just such a departure from all of that. I was kind of like, “What?” That was probably in my late teens.

I went back and watched it again before the shoot and after reading the screenplay. There were certain technical aspects to the film that I thought were incredible. I loved the way Orson Welles chose to leave his scenes by turning off lights like it was in the theater. There was this sort of slow decay and I enjoy how David picked up on that and took it into Mank. Each time one of those shots came up in the bungalow scenes, I thought it was fantastic.

In regard to how close David took the stylings [of that era], well, that was more his tightrope walk. So, I felt no shackling to slow down an edit pace or stay in masters or stay in 50-50s as might have been common in the genre. I used all the tools at my disposal to exploit every scene the best I could.

Since you are cutting while the shooting goes on, do you have the ability to ask for coverage that you might feel is missing?
I think a little bit of that goes on, but it’s not me telling Fincher what’s required. It’s me building assemblies and giving them to David as he’s going, and he will assess where he’s short and where he’s not. When you’re with someone with the ability that Fincher has, then I’m in a support position of helping him make his movie as best he can. Any other way of looking at it is delusional. But I take a lot of pride in where I do get to contribute.

Mank is a different style of film than Fincher’s previous projects. Did that change the workflow or add any extra pressure?
I don’t think it did for me. I think it was harder for David. The film was in his head for so many decades, and there were a couple of attempts to make it happen. Obviously, a lot changes in that time frame. So, I think he had a lot of internal pressure about what he was making. For me, I found the entire process to be really buoyant, bubbly and fun.

As with all films, there were moments when it was hard to keep up during the shoot, and definitely moments coming down to that final crunch. That’s when I really put a lot of pressure on myself to deliver cut scenes to David to help him. I felt the pressure of that, but my main memory of it really was one of joy. Not that the other movies aren’t, but I think sometimes the subject matter can control the mood of the day. For instance, in other movies, like Dragon Tattoo, the feeling was a bit like your head in a vise when I look back at it.

Dragoon Tattoo is dark subject matter. On the other hand, Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Mankiewicz really lights up the screen.
Right. I loved all the bungalow scenes. I thought there was so much warmth in those. I had so much compassion for the lead character, Mank. Those scenes really made me adore him. But also when the flashback scenes came, they’re just a hoot and great fun to put together. There was this warmth and playfulness of the two different opposing storylines. No matter which one turned up, I was happy to see it.

Was the inter-cutting of those parallel storylines the way it was scripted? Or was that a construction in post?
Yes, it was scripted that way. There was a little bit of pulling at the thread later. Can we improve on this? There was a bit of reshuffling later on, and then working out that “as written” was the best path. We certainly kicked the tires a few times. After we put the blueprint together, mostly the job became tightening and shortening.

This was a true black-and-white film shot with modified, monochrome Red cameras. So not color and then changed to black-and-white in the grade. Did that impact your thinking in how to tackle the edit?
For the first 10 minutes. At first you sit down and you go, “Oh, we work in black-and-white.” And then you get used to it very quickly. I forwarded the trailer when it was released to my mother in Australia. She texted back, “It’s black-and-white??” [Laughs.] You’ve got to love family!

Backgrounds and some sets used visual effects but also classic techniques, like rear projection. What about the effects in Mank?
As in most of David’s movies, they’re everywhere, and a lot of the time it looks invisible, but things are being replaced. I’d say almost half the movie. We’ve got a team that’s stabilizing shots as we’re going. We’ve got an in-house visual effects team that is building effects just to let us know that certain choices can be made.

The split screen thing is constant, but I’ll do a lot of that myself. I’ll do a fairly haphazard job of it and then pass it on for our assistant editors to follow up on. Even the montage kaleidoscope effect was all done in-house down the hall by Christopher Doulgeris, one of our VFX artists. A lot of it is farmed out, but a fair slice is done under the roof.

You used Adobe Premiere Pro to cut this film. Can you talk about that?
It’s best for me not even to attempt to answer technical questions. I don’t mind exposing myself as a luddite. My first assistant editor, Ben Insler, set it up so that I’m able to move the way I want to move. For me, it’s all muscle memory. I’m hitting the same keystrokes that I was hitting back when we were using Avid. Then I crossed those keys over to Final Cut and then over to Premiere Pro.

In previous versions, Premiere Pro required projects to contain copies of all the media used in that project. As you would hand the scene off to other people to work on in parallel, all the media would travel into that new project, and the same was true when combining projects back together to merge your work. You had monstrously huge projects with every piece of media, and frequently duplicate copies of that media, packed into them. They often took 15 minutes to open. Now Adobe has solved that and streamlined the process. They knew it was a massive overhaul, but I think that’s been completely solved. Because it’s functioning, I can now purely concentrate on the thought process of where I’m going in the edit. I’m spoiled with having very technical people around me so that I can exist as a child. [Laughs.]

How was the color grade handled?
We had Eric Weidt working downstairs at Fincher’s place on Baselight. David is really fortunate that he’s not working in this world of “Here’s three weeks for color. Go into this room each day, and where you come out is where you are at.” There’s an ongoing grade that’s occurring in increments and traveling with the job that we’re doing. It’s updated and brought into the cut. We experience editing with it, and then it’s updated again and brought back into the cut. So it’s this constant progression.

In the past you’ve said your method of organizing a selects reel was to string out shots in the order of wide shots, mediums and closeups. Then you bump up the ones you like and reduce the choices before those were presented to David as possible selects. Did you handle it the same way on Mank?
Over time, I’ve streamlined that further. I’ve found that if I send something that’s too long while he’s in the middle of shooting that he might watch the first two minutes of it, give me a couple of notes of what he likes and what he doesn’t like, and move on. So, I’ve started to really reduce what I send. It’s more cut scenes with some choices. That way I get the most relevant information and can move forward.

With scenes that are extremely dense, like Louis B. Mayer’s birthday party at Hearst’s, it really is an endless multiple choice of how to tackle it. I’ll often present a few paths. Here’s what it is if I really hold out these wides at the front and I hang back for a bit longer. Here’s what it is if I stay more with Gary [Oldman] listening. It’s not that this take is better than the other take, but more options featuring different avenues and ways to tell the story.

I like working that way, even if it wasn’t for the sake of presenting it to David. I can’t watch a scene that’s that dense and go, “Oh, I know what to do.” I wouldn’t have a clue. I like to explore it. I’ve got to turn the soil and snuff the truffles and try it all out. And then the answers present themselves. It all just becomes clear. Unfortunately, the world of the editor, regardless of past experiences, is always destined to be filled with labor. There is no shortcut to doing it properly.

Were you able to finish Mank before the virus-related lockdowns started? Did you have to move to a remote workflow?
The shooting had finished, and we already had the film assembled. I work at a furious rate while David’s shooting so we can interface during the shoot. That way he knows what he’s captured, what he needs, and he can move on and strike sets, release actors, etc. There’s this constant back and forth.

At the point when he stops shooting, we’re pretty far along in terms of replicating the original plan, the blueprint. Then it’s what I call the sweeps, where you go back to the top and just start sweeping through the movie, improving it. I think we’d already done one of those when we went remote. So it was very fortunate timing.

We’re quite used to it. During shooting, we work in a remote way anyway. It’s a language and situation that we’re completely used to. I think from David’s perspective, it didn’t change anything.

If the timing had been different and you would have had to handle all of the edit under remote conditions, would anything change? Or would you approach it the same way?
Exactly the same. It wouldn’t have changed the amount of time that I get directly with David. I don’t want to give the impression that I cut this movie and David was on the sidelines. He’s absolutely involved but pops in and out and looks at things that are made. He’s not a director that sits there the whole time. A lot of it is, “I’ve made this cut; let’s watch it together. I’ve done these selects; let’s watch them together.” It’s really possible to do that remotely.

I prefer to be with David when he’s shooting and especially in this one that he shot in Los Angeles. I really tried to have one day a week when we got to be together on the weekends and his world quieted down. David loves that. I would sort of construct my week’s thinking toward that goal. If on a Wednesday I had six scenes that were backed up, I’d sort of think to myself, “What can I achieve in the time frame before David’s with me on Saturday? Should I just select all these scenes, and then we’ll go through the selects together? Or should I tackle this hardest one and get a good cut of that going?”

A lot of the time I would choose — if he was coming in and had the time to watch things — to do selects. Sometimes we could bounce through them just from having a conversation of what his intent was and the things that he was excited about when he was capturing them. With that, I’m good to go. Then I don’t need David for another week or so. We were down to the shorthand of one sentence, one email, one text. That can inform me with all the fuel I need to drive cross-country.

The film’s back story clearly has political overtones that have an eerie similarity to 2020. I realize the script was written a while back at a different time, but was some of that context added in light of recent events?
That was already there. But it really felt like we are reliving this now. In the beginning of the shutdown, you didn’t quite know where it was going to go. The parallels to the Great Depression were extreme. There were a lot of lessons for me.

The character of Louis B. Mayer slashes all of his studio employees’ salaries to 50%. He promises to give every penny back and then doesn’t do it. I was crafting that villain’s performance, but at the same time, I run a company [Exile Edit] that has a lot of employees in Los Angeles and New York. We had no clue if we would be able to get through the pandemic at the time when it hit. We also asked staff to take a pay cut so that we could keep everyone employed and keep everybody on health insurance. But the moment we realized we could get through it six months later, there was no way I could ever be that villain. We returned every cent.

I think most companies are set up to be able to exist for four months. If everything stops dead — no one’s anticipating that — the 12-month brake pull. It was really, really frightening. I would hope that I would think this way anyway, but with crafting that villain’s performance, there was no way I was going to replicate it.

Oliver Peters is an award-winning film and commercial editor/colorist. His tech reviews, analysis, and interviews have appeared in numerous industry magazines and websites.

Catching up with Jojo Rabbit director Taika Waititi

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By Iain Blair

Now available on-demand and on DVD, Jojo Rabbit has had an impressive path to the big screen and beyond. Since it premiered at Toronto last year, Jojo Rabbit went from festival favorite to Oscar darling. Helmed by New Zealander Taika Waititi, and infused with his trademark blend of comedy and pathos, it’s a World War II satire that follows Jojo, a lonely German boy, whose world view is turned upside down when he discovers his single mother is hiding a young Jewish girl in their attic. Aided only by his idiotic imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler (Waititi), Jojo must confront his blind nationalism.

The Oscar-winning adapted screenplay by Waititi, who brought a fresh perspective and impish humor to the usually dead-serious subject matter, is based upon the book “Caging Skies” by Christine Leunens.

The behind-the-scenes team includes director of photography Mihai Malaimare, production designer Ra Vincent, editor Tom Eagles, composer Michael Giacchino and visual effects supervisor Jason Chen.

Here, Waititi, whose diverse credits include the $854 million global blockbuster Thor: Ragnarok, Flight of the Conchords and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, talks about making the film.

Given the current rise of anti-Semitism and as someone who’s Jewish yourself, fair to say this was a very personal endeavor?
It was, but not so much because I’m Jewish. I just think anyone who sees the rise of intolerance and the horrible things people do to each other could tackle this. But I definitely felt a sort of quiet power behind me on this, and it’s also the first time I’ve ever sat down and written a script from page one all the way through. I usually start at the end and then bounce around a lot as I figure out how to cobble it all together. But this time it all flowed so easily, so maybe it was my ancestry coming through and helping me.

What sort of film did you set out to make, as this could so easily have been a very bleak drama?
Right, so I set out to make a film with some hope and humor that was also a very different look at such a dark period and a fairly simple story, one about two kids learning to bridge the gaps between themselves and their cultures and understand each other. I also wanted to tell a story about a kid — who’s been indoctrinated to hate — learning to think for himself.

Tonally, I always wanted it to feel like this. I never wanted to make a straight drama, as I don’t know how to do that, or some ridiculous comedy, as that wouldn’t have any substance to it. So I wanted that flow in and out of drama and comedy, which is more in keeping with human experience anyway to me.

Hitler isn’t even in the novel. Did writing him into the film and playing him yourself help exorcise some ghosts?
I think so. The novel’s very dark, without the humor I wanted in this, and the idea of creating Hitler as the imaginary friend just seemed the perfect way to bring in all the comedy and satire. It’s an old theme — young boy befriends a monster — and there’s something quite poetic about looking at the world through the eyes of children.

Clint Eastwood told me it’s not easy directing yourself. How tough was it?
I don’t find it tough. He’s probably felt that way because they’re dramas and he’s not having any fun. For me, it’s improvising and being ridiculous, and I’m pretty aware of my acting abilities, so I always give myself the easier roles. This was so much fun to do, and there was no pressure, as I had no intention of doing an authentic portrayal.

Maybe this was a bit harder than other roles I’ve played because you just feel a bit more embarrassed when you’re dressed like Hitler, and everyone’s looking at you like you’re the biggest piece of shit in the world… because you’re dressed like the biggest piece of shit in the world. (Laughs) So I’d always take the mustache off if I didn’t have to be on camera to feel normal again.

DP Mihai Malaimare shot it, and visually it couldn’t be more different than the usual somber, black-and-white WWII film with its saturated colors. Talk about the shoot and the look you went for.
I’m glad you noticed that, as usually films about the Nazis make everything look very grim and bleak and gray. But we wanted to capture just how much color and brightness there was in Germany then, and we needed to see it that way through the boy’s eyes — all the excitement and hysteria, like a wonderland of celebration and a giant party.

Mihai shot with the ARRI Alexa SXT, and instead of the standard anamorphic 2X lenses he used the Hawk V-Lite squeeze anamorphic 1.3X lenses that gave us the vivid color saturation we wanted. We shot in these small towns in the Czech Republic that still had all these pre-war buildings perfectly preserved, and the interior sets were built on stages at Prague’s Barrandov Studios, the same place the Nazis used to shoot all their propaganda.

Talk about post and editing with frequent collaborator Tom Eagles, who won the ACE Eddie for cutting this film. How did that work?
While we shot, Tom set up in Prague to deal with dailies and work on scenes and move towards an assembly. When we got back here in LA, we started cutting in offices in Burbank, and then we did all the mixing on the Fox lot.

I imagine finding the right tone and the right balance between comedy and tragedy were the big editing challenges?
They were. Tom and I’ve worked together for a long time, and he’s brilliant and also has a great knack for finding music that fits perfectly. He’s got a good eye for comedy and in the end it took us about nine months to get it all right. We also did a lot of testing – about 14 times – and the reason I do it so much is because I really value the audience’s opinion and feedback, and I want to really understand what they want and don’t want from my films. So then we’d make some changes, maybe test some new jokes, delete a couple of scenes, but the final film was pretty close to the original script. (Read postPerspective’s interview with Eagles.)

Do you like the post process?
I do, but I find editing quite hard, as I don’t like sitting still, and watching the editor pull little pieces together drives me nuts. So I tend to leave and come back, watch what they’ve done and give notes, and then maybe we’ll work together on it for a bit. I also don’t want to see the film too many times, as I get bored and start making changes just to keep interested.

VFX play a role. Talk about working on them with VFX supervisor Jason Chen.
We always knew we’d have to do a lot of clean up, as it’s a period piece —  taking out modern road signs and we had some set extensions and wire removal. Luma did them and there was nothing major… not like Thor, where we had well over 2,000 shots, I think.

I loved the scene with The Beatles singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in German over the worshipful Hitler footage. Can you talk about the importance of sound and music?
It’s huge, and a big part of it came from all the research I did of the Hitler rallies and Hitler Youth. It really hit me watching old footage how all these people — men, women, children — would be screaming and fainting and crying, and how Hitler was like this rock star of the ‘30s; their reaction was the same as with The Beatles. It was the same crowd hysteria. I’d also included Bowie’s “Heroes” in the first draft, as I always wanted contemporary music in it, along with contemporary dialogue, because it is a modern story. It can happen again.

Where did you do the DI, and how important is it to you?
At Company 3 with Tim Stipan, and it’s key for the vivid look we wanted, but I really trust Mihai and Tim. I don’t want to micro-manage the whole DI. I go in and out and give notes.

How important was the Oscars and awards for a film like this?
(Laughs) You’re talking to a New Zealander, and we have this humility that we think is really charming but is probably really annoying. It’s so great to get a Best Picture nomination, and it’s been 10 years since I read the book and began working on it, so it’s been a lot of work. The goal was always to make something positive that promotes love and change, so I feel validated.

What’s next?
I like to keep doing very different things, so I’ve shot this sports film about football, Next Goal Wins, which we’ve started post on in LA.

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.

ASC’s feature film nominees include 1917, Joker

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The American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) has nominated eight feature films in the Theatrical and Spotlight categories of the 34th ASC Outstanding Achievement Awards. Winners will be named at the ASC’s annual awards on January 25 at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland.

This year’s nominees are:

Theatrical Release

Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC, for 1917
Phedon Papamichael, ASC, GSC, for Ford v Ferrari
Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC, for The Irishman
Robert Richardson, ASC, for Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
Lawrence Sher, ASC, for Joker

Spotlight Award
Jarin Blaschke for The Lighthouse
Natasha Braier, ASC, ADF, for Honey Boy
Jasper Wolf, NSC, for Mono

This is Deakins’ 16th nomination by the society, which has sent him home a winner four times (The Shawshank Redemption, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Skyfall, Blade Runner 2049). Richardson earns his 11th nomination, while Papamichael and Prieto have each been recognized three times in the past by the organization. Sher, Blaschke, Braier and Wolf are first-time nominees.

Last year’s Theatrical winner was Łukasz Żal, PSC, for Cold War, which was also Oscar-nominated for Best Cinematography.

The Spotlight Award, introduced in 2014, recognizes cinematography in features that may not receive wide theatrical release. The accolade went to Giorgi Shvelidze for Namme in 2019.

Cold War’s Oscar-nominated director Pawel Pawlikowski

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By Iain Blair

Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski is a BAFTA-winning writer and director whose film Ida won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Pawlikowski, who left Poland at age 14 and currently resides in the UK, is Oscar nominated again — as Best Director for his latest film, Cold War. Also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, Cold War earned cinematographer Lukasz Zal an Oscar nomination, as well as an ASC Award win.

Pawel Pawlikowski                            Credit: Magda Wunsche and Aga Samsel

Cold War traces the passionate love story between Wiktor and Zula, a couple who meet in the ruins of post-war Poland. With vastly different backgrounds and temperaments, they are fatefully mismatched and yet condemned to each other. Set against the background of the Cold War in 1950s Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia and Paris, it’s the tale of a couple separated by politics, character flaws and unfortunate twists of fate — an impossible love story in impossible times.

I spoke with Pawlikowski, whose credits include The Woman in the Fifth, which starred Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas, about making the film, the Oscars and his workflow.

How surprised are you by the Oscar nominations, including the one for Best Director?
I’m pleasantly surprised as it’s very unusual for a small film like this — and it’s in B&W — to cut through all the noise of the big films, especially as it’s an American competition and there’s so much money and PR involved.

Your Ida cinematographer Lukasz Zal also got an Oscar nomination for his beautiful B&W work. It’s interesting that Roma is also semi-autobiographical and in B&W.
I’m so happy for him, and yes, it is a bit of a coincidence. Someone told me that having two foreign-language film directors both nominated in the same year has only happened once before, and I feel we were both trying to reconnect with the past through something personal and timeless. But they’re very different films and very different in their use of B&W. In Roma you can see everything, it’s all in focus and lit very evenly, while ours is far more contrast-y, shot with a lot of very different lenses — some very wide, some very long.

You won the Oscar for Ida. How important are the Oscars to a film like this?
Very, I think. This was made totally as we wanted. There wasn’t an ounce of compromise, and it’s not formulaic, yet it’s getting all this attention. This, of course, means a wider audience — and that’s so important when there’s so much stuff out there vying for attention. It’s very encouraging.

What sort of film did you set out to make, as the story is so elliptical and leaves a lot unsaid?
That’s true, and I think it’s a great pleasure for audiences to work things out for themselves, and to not spell every single thing out. When you work by suggestion, I think it stays in your imagination much longer, and leaving certain types of gaps in the narrative makes the audience fill them in with their own imagination and own experience of life. As a film lover and audience member myself, I feel that approach lets you enter the space of a film much more, and it stays with you long after you’ve left the cinema. When a film ties up every loose end and crosses every “T” and dots every “I” you tend to forget it quite quickly, and I think not showing everything is the essence of art.

Is it true that the two main characters of Wiktor and Zula are based on your own parents?
Yes, but very loosely. They have the same names and share a lot of the same traits. They had a very tempestuous, complicated relationship — they couldn’t live with each other and couldn’t live without each other. That was the starting point, but then it took on its own life, like all films do.

The film looks very beautiful in B&W, but I heard you originally planned to shoot it in color?
No. Not at all. It’s been like this Chinese whisper, where people got it all wrong. When the DP and I first started discussing it, we immediately knew it’d be a B&W film for this world, this time period, this story, especially as Poland wasn’t very colorful back then. So whatever colors we could have come up with would have been so arbitrary anyway. And we knew it’d be very high contrast and very dramatic. Lukasz did say, “Maybe we shouldn’t do two films in a row in B&W,” but we never seriously considered color. If it had been set in the ‘70s or ‘80s I would have shot it in color, but B&W was just visually perfect for this.

Where did you post?
All in Poland, at various places in Warsaw, and it took over six months. It was very tricky and very hard to get it right because we had a lot of greenscreen work, and it wasn’t straightforward. People would say, “That’s good enough,” but it wasn’t for me, and I kept pushing and pushing to get it all as nearly perfect as we could. That was quite nerve-wracking.

Do you like the post process?
Very much, and I especially love the editing and the grading. I’m basically an editor in my approach to filmmaking, and I usually do all the editing while I shoot, so by the time we get to post it’s practically all edited.

Talk about editing with Jaroslaw Kaminski, who cut Ida for you. What were the big editing challenges?
We sit down after the shoot and go through it all, but there’s not that much to tweak because of the coverage. I like to do one shot from one angle, with a simple, square composition, but I do quite a lot of takes, so it’s more about finding the best one, and he’s very used to the way I work.

This spans some 15 years, and all period films use some VFX. What was involved?
Quite a lot, like the whole transition in Berlin when he crosses the border. We don’t have all the ruins, so we had to use enormous greenscreens and VFX. West Berlin is far brighter and more colorful, which is both symbolic and also realistic. We shot all the Paris interiors in Poland, so everything that happens outside the windows is greenscreen, and that was very hard to get right. I didn’t want it to feel like it was done in post. We scoured Poland for locations, so we could use real elements to build on with the VFX, and the story also takes place in Split, Yugoslavia, so the level of realism had to be very high.

Talk about the importance of sound and music.
It was so important, and it took a long time to do as it’s really a silent movie when there’s no music, and as it’s not an action film, it was really critical that we didn’t overdo it or under-do it. I took a very long time working with my sound mixer — over four months. Before we shot, I went around Poland with my casting director to lots of folk music festivals and selected various faces, voices and tunes for the first part of the film. That took over half a year. Then I chose three tunes performed by Mazowsze, a real ensemble founded after the war and still performing today. A tune could be used in different ways — as a simple folk song at the start of the film, but then also later as a haunting jazz number in the Paris scenes. For me, all this was like the glue holding it all together. Then I chose a lot of other music, like the Russian piece, Gershwin and also a song like “Rock Around The Clock,” which really drives a wedge between Wiktor and Zula. The film ends with Bach, which gives it a whole different feel and perspective.

The grading must have also been very important for the look?
Yes. Michal Herman was the colorist and we spent a long time getting the contrast and grain just right. I love that process.

Did the film turn out the way you hoped?
It did. It’s more or less everything I felt and imagined about my parents and their story, even though it’s a work of fiction.

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.

Tatiana Riegel on editing the dark comedy I, Tonya

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By Randi Altman

I, Tonya is sad and funny and almost unbelievable in the sense that this — or a version of this — actually did happen. It’s also a fantastic movie.

Some of us are old enough to remember when the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan “Why?!” incident took place. I think we all knew at the time that what was playing out was more like a soap opera and less like figure skating. Thanks to the Craig Gillespie-directed I, Tonya, everyone gets a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what led up to that assault, and it’s not pretty. What the public didn’t know back in 1993 was the abuse that Tonya Harding was enduring via her mother, her husband Jeff Gillooly and even the figure skating community, who viewed her as too working class to represent them.

Tatiana S. Riegel, ACE

I, Tonya’s editor, Tatiana S. Riegel, ACE, is a long-time collaborator of Gillespie’s, having worked with him now on five features (Lars and the Real Girl, The Finest Hours, Fright Night and Million Dollar Arm) and the pilot for the TV series United States of Tara for Showtime. She says the shorthand they’ve developed over 10 years “is thrilling and makes life very, very easy.”

We spoke to newly minted Oscar-nominee Riegel about working with Gillespie and her workflow on the film, which was nominated for a number of Golden Globes and has earned Riegel her own ACE Eddie and Independent Spirit award nods as well.

When were you brought on I, Tonya?
Craig told me about it the fall of 2016, and I officially began when they started shooting in January 2017.

Were you on set, near set? How did that work?
I was far from set. I was in Los Angeles, and they were shooting in Atlanta. It was very nice for me to be able to stay home. That is one of those advantages that I can have with Craig because we do have such a shorthand. And while I have traveled with him on location many times, this time, from a budget standpoint, it was prohibitive. Plus, we were going to be in New York for the six months of post, and I didn’t want to go away for nine months. This was our compromise.

You worked out of Harbor Picture Company in New York, where the post was being done?
Yes. It was lovely. They’re so nice. I really — I have to say — I miss it and I hope I get to go back to New York and work there again. I felt like I was at home, even though I wasn’t.

Can you talk about how you and Craig work together? Does he shoot a lot of coverage?
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is he is very prepared and very disciplined. The schedule on this was quite short. It was 31 days, and I think there were 260 or 265 scenes. So it was compact, but he was so wonderfully prepared. For certain scenes, he didn’t shoot as much coverage, but for other scenes, much more. But always with lots of options, which makes editors very happy.

What did he shoot on?
Craig shot most of it on film, which was lovely. It gave it a great look. He shot 2- and 3-perf, 35mm film, but then he did do some stuff digitally. The interviews were shot digitally, just because of the amount of coverage. It was three hours, per person, for the interviews. And then, obviously, some of the extreme slow-motion stuff was shot with a Phantom camera.

Did Harbor do the dailies?
They did not. We did the DI at Company 3. That’s where we finished, and the dailies were processed at Crawford in Georgia.

Who is your assistant, and how do you work together? Are they covering the technical stuff? Are they another eye?
They’re both. This was probably our sixth or seventh film together. Dan Boccoli is fantastic. For this film he was on with me during dailies, because when we went to New York I had to hire a local. His name was Steve Jacks, who was also superb.

Dan and all of my assistants are a wonderful combination of creative and technical. They are preparing everything, communicating with all of the different departments, making sure I have everything I need, and they keep me out of those loops that I don’t want to get involved in.

I show them scenes and get their feedback, which is wonderful for me — this allows me to show somebody before I show the director or anybody else. Just to make sure everything’s being comprehended properly, and I’m getting the reaction that I want. It’s also a teaching process for them; they get to understand the whole process, and learn for their own future.

Was Craig looking at scenes you were editing?
With all directors, I like to stay up to camera as much as possible. I want to start that conversation sooner rather than later to make sure we’re all on the same page tonally, performance-wise and story-wise. Then there are the practical things like, is all the coverage there? I try to put the scenes together quickly, the best that I can, and send them off on a daily basis, sometimes a couple times a week, sometimes once a week. It depends on what’s being shot.

Another advantage is that when shooting is finished and they come in for the first time to watch the assembly, they’re not surprised by anything. It’s not anywhere close to being done, but they are clear about what they have and how we’re doing tonally and performance-wise.

How were you physically getting scenes to Craig?
A variety of ways, but usually it was a system like Pix or DAX because of piracy issues. It’s very secure, and he was able to watch it online.

Were there any instances where you thought coverage was missing?
Yes, there was one situation. Shawn, the bodyguard, doesn’t really show up in the movie until the second half — there are only some interviews early on. I actually asked for a couple more instances to be added so we would have an introduction to him. This way it wasn’t a new character popping up and the audience thinking, “Oh, I think I saw him once.” I called Craig and he agreed, and the writer Steven Rogers agreed.

Can you talk about editing the skating scenes? I know that VFX was used for some of that and there was a double, but how did that work?
There are four or five larger skating sequences, and Craig and the DP talked very early on about each having their own personality. For example, the first one, the ZZ Top one, is earlier in Tonya’s career, and she’s got an attitude and gruffness and a strength that wants to be portrayed in that sequence. Especially after coming off of the Vivaldi Four Seasons, and emphasizing how Tonya Harding was not the typical ice skater. She didn’t fit the mold, and she really did skate to ZZ Top.

Craig and the DP Nicolas Karakatsanis watched the original skating sequences for the choreography and tried to get as close as possible. They had to do some pretty serious planning for these seamless transitions between Margot and the double. Margot had trained for about five months, so she did a fair amount of spectacular stuff where you have to be an Olympian type moves. She did do some of the dancing and getting on and off the ice, and the beginning and ends of routines.

Then it was a question of following this choreography map they had set up, but also spicing it up and giving each of the scenes their own personality and energy. The ZZ Top scene is very energetic and a bit show-off-y. The one at the end of the film, at Lillehammer, is all done in one shot, or it plays as one shot. We go in and out of Margot and the double, and that’s purposely done to build the tension, the anxiety and the stress she’s going through at that moment with her shoelace having broken.

The soundtrack is fun. Can you talk about that?
There was nothing about music in the script. This is all something that Craig brought to it. He had gotten a lot of music from the music supervisor, prior to shooting, and we began listening to stuff. But after I had the whole thing together, we sat down, about a week into it, and started throwing music against it and figuring out what worked for energy, for pacing, for fun and for emotion. We just kept trying things, moving them around. Sometimes we cut in or out of songs very quickly, for momentum, and that became a lot of what we did in the post process. Experimenting.

There was a scene where Gillooly is on the floor of his house, and then the camera sort of backs away and takes you down a street. Was that one shot?
It plays as one, but it was actually shot as four different parts. He starts on the bed, which I just love. He’s distraught and hunched over, but looking right at the camera. Then the camera pulls away from him and goes into the hallway, and then we find him again in the kitchen, where he’s obviously trying to talk to her but get mad, so he throws the phone. Then it pulls out of the kitchen and into the living room, and he’s sitting alone on the floor. Then it pulls out of the living room onto the front yard and down the whole block. It was all these different shots that were stitched together quite beautifully.

While there was obvious violence and abuse, there was also humor, so it was a fine line you needed to walk. How did you tackle that as an editor?
Craig spoke with Margot and everybody about it very early on, because it was really important to not sugarcoat that stuff. This is what made her who she is and made her react how she did. This is the reality of her life. There’s a documentary about her when she’s 15 years old, and she’s very matter-of-factly talking about her mother hitting her. She says it in a very detached, unemotional way that really struck a chord in Craig. That’s when he came up with this idea of breaking the fourth wall and having the characters talk directly to the camera. It allowed the characters to separate emotionally from that moment in a way that felt very lifelike to us. Although it’s not a lifelike moment, talking to the camera, it gives it detachment. It also shows survival. It’s the 45-year-old Tonya talking back about that moment having survived.

You cut this film on Avid Media composer. What about it do you like, and did you use ScriptSync?
I find it to be just a fantastic tool for sharing media. I know how to use it very well, so I don’t have to think, which is terrific. I did use ScriptSync for the very first time on this film. I just haven’t felt the need for it before, but this time it was helpful because of the way the interviews were shot, which were, for the most part, very long takes. The interviews are spaced throughout the script, so the actors would read all the way through them, doing some retakes within a take, but then continue on. So, just from an organizational standpoint, ScriptSync was a lifesaver. It was just brilliant. I don’t know how I would have done it without it, to be perfectly honest. It would have been excruciatingly time consuming.

Is there any scene that you are most proud of, or that was most challenging?
The film as a whole was very challenging in terms of balancing the very serious with the very funny. There are moments that portray that, like the knife scene where she’s having dinner with her mother. The conversation grows into this terrible fight, and they are screaming at each other. Then the mother’s throwing stuff, and then she throws the knife, and it’s this amazingly shocking moment.

There is that fantastic pause. You don’t know how Tonya’s going to react or how LaVona is going to react. Then Tonya takes the knife out, but you still don’t know what she’s going to do. She walks over, slams it into the table, and we see LaVona’s reaction as Tonya walks off. I just loved that. It’s about holding that moment as long as possible, almost until it breaks, and then breaking it with this fantastic joke — where LaVona, in her interview says, all families have problems. When we screened it you could hear a pin could drop, and then it just breaks into this great relief of laughter. It’s just a really fun thing to put together.

What’s next for you?
I am going to Berlin to work on The Girl in the Spider’s Web for director Fede Alvarez. It’s part of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series. This is something that’s very different, which I find very appealing. I like doing different types of films. I think editors often get pigeonholed very quickly — “They’re a comedy person, they’re a drama person, they’re an action person.” I like to shake it up a bit whenever possible, because I like working on different kinds of films just as I like going to see different kinds of films.

The A-List: Manchester by the Sea director Kenneth Lonergan

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By Iain Blair

It’s been 16 years since filmmaker and playwright Kenneth Lonergan made his prize-winning debut at Sundance with You Can Count on Me, which he wrote and directed. The film won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and was an Academy Award and Golden Globe nominee for Best Screenplay.

Lonergan’s most recent film is also garnering award attention. Directed by one of the most distinctive writing talents on the American indie scene today, Manchester by the Sea, fulfills that earlier promise and extends Lonergan’s artistic vision.

Kenneth Lonergan

Both an ensemble piece and an intense character study, Manchester by the Sea tells the story of how the life of Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a grieving and solitary Boston janitor, is transformed when he reluctantly returns to his hometown to take care of his teenage nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges) after the sudden death of his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler). It’s also the story of the Chandlers, a working-class family living in a Massachusetts fishing village for generations, and a deeply poignant, unexpectedly funny exploration of the power of familial love, community, sacrifice and hope.

Co-produced by Matt Damon, the film from Roadside Attractions and Amazon Studios — which received four SAG nominations, a crucial Oscars barometer — has a stellar behind-the-scenes list of collaborators, including DP Jody Lee Lipes (Trainwreck, Martha Marcy May Marlene), editor Jennifer Lame (Mistress America, Paper Towns), composer Lesley Barber (You Can Count on Me) and production designer Ruth De Jong (The Master, The Tree of Life).

I recently spoke with Lonergan about making the film and his workflow.

I heard Matt Damon was very involved in the genesis of this. How did this project come about?
Matt, his producer Chris Moore and John Krasinski were talking on the set of this film they were shooting about ideas for Matt’s directing debut. Matt and John brought me the basic idea and asked me to write it. So, I took some of their suggestions and went off and spent a couple of years working on it and expanding it. I don’t really start off with themes when I write. I always start with characters and stories that seem compelling, and then let the themes emerge as I go, and with this it became about people dealing with terrible loss, with the story of this man who’s carrying a weight that’s just too much to bear. It’s about loss, family and how people cope.

Is it true that Damon was going to star in it originally?
Yes, but what actually happened was that John was going to star and Matt was going to direct it, but then John’s schedule got too busy and then Matt was going to star and direct it, and then he also got too busy, so then I came onboard to also direct.

You ended up with a terrific cast. What did Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams and Lucas Hedges bring to their roles?
Casey’s a truly wonderful actor who brings tremendous emotional depth even without saying much in a scene. He’s very hard working, never has a false moment and really has the ability to navigate through the complicated relationships and in the way he deals with people.

Michelle has a tremendous sense of character and is just brilliant, I think. She brings a beautiful characterization to the film and has to go through some pretty intense emotions. They’re both very generous actors, as there are a lot of people they have to interact with. They’re not show-boaters who just want to get up there and emote. And Lucas is this real find, a very talented young actor just starting out who really captured this character.

You shot this on location all over Cape Ann. How tough was it?
It was a bit grueling, as we shot from March until April and it was pretty cold a lot of the time, especially during prep and scouting in February. We had some schedule and budget pressures, but nothing out of the ordinary. I loved shooting around Cape Ann — the locals were great, and the place really seeped into the film in a way that I’m very happy about.

Do you like the post process?
I love post because of the quiet and the chance to really concentrate on making the film. I also like the lack of administrative duties and the sudden drop in the large number of people I’m responsible for on a set. It’s just you, the editor and editorial staff. Some of the technical finishing procedures can be a bit tiring after you’ve seen the film so many times, but overall post is very enjoyable for me.

I loved my editor, and doing all the sound mixing; it was so much fun putting it all together and seeing the story work, all without the stress of the shoot. You still have pressures, but not on the same scale. We did all the post in New York at Technicolor Postworks, and we worked from May through September so it was a pretty relaxed schedule. We had our basic template done by October, and then we did a bunch of little fixes from that point on so it would be ready for Sundance. Then we did a bit more work on it, but didn’t change much — we added four minutes.

Talk about working with editor Jennifer Lame. Was she on the set?
No, we sent her dailies in New York and we never actually met face-to-face until after the shoot. I had to interview her on the phone when she was in LA working on another job, and we got along right away. She’s a wonderful editor. We began cutting on Avid Media Composer at Technicolor Postworks and then did some over the summer at my rental house in Long Island, where she’d come over and set up. Then we finished up back in New York.

How challenging were all the flashbacks to cut, as they’re quite abrupt?
All the flashbacks were very interesting to put together, but they didn’t really present more of a challenge than anything else because they’re such an intrinsic part of the whole story. We didn’t want to telegraph them and warn the audience by doing them differently. We discussed them a lot. Should they be color-timed differently? Should they be shot differently? Look and sound different?

In the end, we decided they should be indistinguishable from the rest, and it’s mainly only because of the content and behavior that you know they’re flashbacks. They were fun to weave into the story, and the more seamless they were the better we liked it. Jennifer actually pointed out that it was almost like telling two stories, not just one, because that’s how Lee experiences the world. He’s always dealing with memories which pop up when they’re least wanted, and when he returns home to Manchester he’s flooded by memories — for him the past and present are almost the same.

You shot in early spring, but there’s a lot of winter scenes, so you must have needed some visual effects?
Some, but not that much. Hectic Electric in Amsterdam did them all. We had some snow enhancement, we added some smoke, clean-up and did some adjustments for light and weather, but scenes like the house fire were all real.

How important is sound and music to you?
It’s hard to overstate. For me, music has the biggest influence on the feeling of a scene after the acting — even more than the cinematography in how it can instantly change the tone and feeling. You can make it cheerful or sad or ominous or peaceful just with the right music, and it adds all these new layers to the story and goes right to your emotions. So I love working with my composer and finding the right music.

Then I asked [supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer] Jacob Ribicoff to record sounds up in Cape Ann at all our locations — the particular sound of the marina, the woods, the bars — so it was all grounded in reality. The whole idea of post sound, which we did at Technicolor Postworks with Jacob, was to support that verisimilitude. He used Avid Pro Tools. There’s no stylization, and it was also about the ocean and that feeling of never being far from water. So the sound design was all about placing you in this specific environment.

Where did you do the DI?
We did the color correction with Jack Lewars, also at Technicolor Postworks. He did the final grade on Autodesk Flame. We shot digitally but I think the film looks very filmic. They did a great job.

Did it turn out the way you first envisioned it?
Pretty much, but it always changes from the script to the screen, and once you bring in your team and all their contributions and the locations and so on, it just expands in every direction. That’s the magic of movies.

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.

DP Vittorio Storaro on color and Woody Allen’s ‘Café Society’

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Legendary Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro has had a storied career that includes three Oscar wins for his work on Apocalypse Now (1979), Reds (1981) and The Last Emperor (1987). To call his career prodigious would be an understatement.

One of his most recent projects was for writer/director Woody Allen’s Café Society, which follows a young man from Brooklyn to Hollywood and back to New York City in the 1930s. Two filmmaking legends teaming up on one film? How could we not check in with Storaro to talk about his work on Café Society, which represented Allen’s first taste of digital shooting?

You’ve done 58 movies on film. What was your first experience with DI?
A long time ago, someone at Kodak asked me what I thought about digital intermediate versus film. Because I had already started doing transfer from film to telecine, I had some experience with the process. But the quality was not there yet — digital cameras and color correctors were still in their infancy back then.

My first experience in digital finishing was on a movie called Muhammad: The Messenger of God. In 2011 and 2012, we were doing the pre-production and production of the film, which we shot in Iran. I shot on film because, in my opinion, no digital camera could handle such drastic changing weather conditions. One segment, though, was transferred digitally, mostly for VFX purposes.

For the post of the film in 2013, we sent all the negative material to Arri as both Kodak and Technicolor Italy had closed. Arri scanned the negatives in 4K 16-bit. After that we decided to do the entire DI at ScreenCraft where I could review the film in a 4K 16-bit color screening, which is very important. It was an almost 100 percent switch from film to digital. They also had a FilmLight Baselight system in their screening room that we moved into their beautiful 4K theatre so we could work in the optimal environment.

The colorist at ScreenCraft was not used to doing films, as he had mainly worked on video and TV, so I had to influence him step-by-step, feeling the story. My advice to him was to work on color in realtime, listen to the dialogue, understand the dynamic and not just concentrate on the technical aspect of the fixed images.

In cinematography, the first image doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be the starting point, and it is moving in time until you reach the end. So when you see an image through Baselight, you have to think about what you really want to achieve. This is somehow a visual journey, which follows the path of the world where the characters interact, or the music plays.

It is fantastic to have color correction in realtime. Baselight through the 4K 16-bit video projector gave me my first taste of this great opportunity.

How did you come to shoot and finish Café Society digitally?
When Woody Allen asked me to do Café Society, he had never done a digital capture before. At that time, I knew it was a chance to step up to this new digital world. I chose the Sony F65 camera so that the image we had on set was as close to the final image as possible. I had experienced the first CineAlta digital video cameras from Sony in the past and valued the quality of the Sony equipment. I know that what I see on set is 90 percent of exactly what I will see in finishing. Plus, I wanted to work with a camera that gave me a ratio close to the 2:1 aspect ratio that was suggested to me by Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting, along with 4K resolutions.

We also had a 4K 16-bit video projector because that was my previous experience and my preference. And for the post production of the movie at Technicolor PostWorks NY, I asked specifically for the color grading to be done on Baselight. It was good news, as they already had the system!

This is when colorist Anthony Raffaele joined your color journey?
Anthony Raffaele was originally only supposed to be the colorist for the DI, but with Technicolor we decided to have him on board from start to finish. In Italy, we are used to having a technician next to us from the beginning to the end of a project. To me, if the color process moves from one person to another from dailies to post to DI, you risk wasting all the history, the knowledge and the experience that has been built, and in my opinion it’s the best experience that I’ve had.

What is the look of the Café Society and its journey?
In my mind, the movie is in four different parts: it starts in the Bronx in 1935, then moves to Hollywood, then the main character comes back to New York and then to LA. In essence, it is four different looks, while keeping an overall style. I wanted to see the subtle differences in the dailies. I’d get the dailies on Blu-ray copies for me to watch on a calibrated Sony monitor, so it was very, very close to what I had on set. That was the process with Woody Allen too.

Anthony often came to Los Angeles during shooting, and when I was in New York we’d watch the dailies together. Looks were saved to SD cards as LUTs with notes. Every day Anthony was going through all the shots and applying the LUT that he already had, then he would make adjustments according to my notes. We practically grew up together through the entire film. And when we arrived to do the DI we had the right experience to continue.

For finishing, we graded using ACES with Baselight converting to XYZ. We got the EDL from editorial, pulled all the RAW media files from the LTO and conformed in Baselight. I told Anthony to always compare source material with the edited version. Check meticulously for any difference and get the feeling of our original intent. It is very easy to get lost in DI.

It is also very important to me to watch the film with sound, even if it’s temporary sound. The dialogue between two characters can give you some kind of feeling, which impacts the light, for instance. Or the time they have spent talking, everything is always moving. Or the music. If you don’t take notice of the words and sound you cannot adjust the color accordingly. Having said that, Woody also asked to watch the corrected copy without sound.

How much time did you spend on the DI overall?
It depends on the movie, of course, but I usually personally get involved in the DI of the movie over a week. Some movies require more time. It also depends on the relationship you have with the colorist. I don’t know how much time Anthony spent in the dark room polishing the movie without me. He is a perfectionist and because I was always pushing our creative intent, he probably spent time seeing what features within Baselight could do more. I’ve always encouraged him to perfect his art and technical knowledge. I’d say, “Can we try this? Can I look at that? What if we try it? Tell me, show me.”

You talked about the evolution from film to digital to DI. How would you say the role of a cinematographer has changed in this time?
The main change is that before digital, nobody was able to tell how the film would ultimately look. Only the cinematographer — through perception, knowledge, culture, intelligence, technology and experience — would eventually predict how the image would end up looking. Today, with digital capture and high-end technology, the standards are higher and reachable, and pretty much everyone can tell if it’s good or ugly, too contrasted, too bright and so on. Digital video cameras have mostly made everything automatic, you don’t even have to think anymore. But knowing the technology is not enough.

You need to know the meaning of the visual elements as well. Know ALL the arts that are part of cinematography. Cinema is a common art, not a single one. A good cinematographer will bring feeling and composition from the storyline, adding the emotion, the feeling and his own perception to the film — to know how one color connects to another color and the kind of emotional reaction you can have in relation to them.

What about the colorist’s role nowadays?
Firstly, I would say that a colorist has to know everything about production on set so that he or she can cover the journey of the project. Anthony told me, “I learned so much working with you, Vittorio, because I’m not used to being asked the things you ask me, and no one explained the why to me.” I was always referencing paintings, always showing him pictures and explaining why the artist had chosen this particular content or softness for instance.

Secondly, to reach that level where you can transfer a completely abstract idea into images and materialize concepts, the colorist has to know and control the grading system he is using as well as the tools sitting in his color suite.

Finally, the more you go to museums, read books and look at photography, the more you know about art and its evolution. I had such an experience when I was at Technicolor in Rome. A color supervisor I was working with, Ernesto Novelli, had an incredible sensitivity to images. If I asked him to do something, he might suggest adding four red, which I thought was crazy, but he would do so and the image was there, it was superb. He was able to use the technology to achieve the look of the image I wanted. Without such talent the technology doesn’t mean much.

On Café Society we worked effectively because Anthony knew Baselight very well. If I could give any advice to colorists, I would say they have to really know their console to reach the true potential capabilities of the machine. Learn, keep learning and never stop.

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Vittorio Storaro is currently in pre-production on the following films: 33 días, Story of Jesus, The Hunchback and Bach.

Colorist John Dowdell Talks About the Look of Carol

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By Randi Altman

Todd Haynes’ Carol, about two women who fall in love in New York City in the 1950s, received six Oscar noms this year, including one for Best Cinematography. Despite its setting, this beautifully captured film was actually shot in Cincinnati because of its architectural resemblance to 1950’s Manhattan.

But the post was done in New York. One of the movie’s producers, Goldcrest Films, has a post house there, so Carol’s edit team called that location home for about seven months. It was there that editor Affonso Gonçalves and his assistant Perri Pivovar enjoyed a close relationship with Goldcrest’s in-house, veteran colorist John Dowdell, who was also working on the film.

The editors would often call Dowdell into the edit suite to find out what he could accomplish in his color suite. For example, one challenge the edit team had was the film — which takes place during Christmas — went over a little. So some of it was shot at the end of the winter and into the spring. There were some pesky green leaves and grass that needed browning and Dowdell obliged.

John Dowdell

John Dowdell

“With the Quantel Revolver tool I selected a range of green pixels and changed the hue and the saturation towards a winter brownish color,” he explains. “The Revolver output is a LUT offset, which adds no noise and creates a very natural appearance, which is far superior then an HSL key.”

The film features over 100 visual effects shots — VFX supervisor Chris Haney brought on his own company and other New York-based effects houses — including totally convincing CG snow and CG buildings.

Dowdell was able to achieve other simple effects, such as removing signage and things that were distracting. “Quantel Rio 4K has a Paintbox in it, and I removed a lot of that stuff by painting it out,” he says.

Let’s dig in a bit further with Dowdell.

Carol was shot on film. Can you talk about that?
Carol was shot by cinematographer Edward Lachman. It was shot on Kodak Super 16 with an Arriflex 416 camera that is pin-registered, which was needed for all this effects work. I’m so glad they shot it on 16mm film because they were trying to duplicate the way 35mm film looked 60 years ago — and even as good as digital cameras are, it would’ve been very hard to reproduce that classic film look. The randomness of the grain is very beautiful.

That was their choice, and I think it was a brilliant one. Also, film gave us beautiful radiant flesh tones, deep textured blacks, and plenty of detail in even the brightest highlights.

What was the workflow like?
Every day the film would be shipped from Cincinnati to Technicolor in New York for processing — at that time, Technicolor and Deluxe shared the lab at the Deluxe building. The film would get processed to a negative and then picked up by Goldcrest.

The film was scanned at Goldcrest by Boon Shin Ng and Michelle Ambruz on an Arri Scanner. The Arri has a dailies mode where it will scan pin-registered quite fast at 15fps with a single flash. The Arri flashes red, green and blue LEDs onto the monochrome 3K CMOS chip, which is the same chip that’s in the Alexa camera, but without a Bayer filter, so it’s a B&W chip.

CAROL

When the edit is complete, the Arri scans the selects with handles also at 3K. This time the RGB is flashed twice. The second flash is 10 times brighter and merges the two together in an HDR algorithm capturing everything in the negative with great signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, the film gets an infrared flash. The infrared spectrum is not absorbed by the cyan, magenta and yellow dyes of the film. Dirt particulates, however, will block the Infrared creating a dirt map for the Kodak Digital Ice to do its magic. Scanning is about 3fps in this mode.

Who did the dailies?
Boon Shin prepped with Colorfront Express Dailies. MXF files were synced and metadata of scene take numbers were entered during the day, then the Colorfront was handed over to colorist Scott Olive for scene-to-scene color grading in the evening. DP Ed Lachman would call Scott each night and discuss the footage he would be working on and would go over Scott’s work from the day before.

Scott would then send the color corrected H.264 files over the Goldcrest FTP server to Ed. The Avid MXF Files were ready for Affonso and Perri in the morning in their edit room here at Goldcrest. When the film edit was locked, Boon Shin conformed the film in the Quantel Rio 4K with the 2K DPX scans.

What direction were you given from Todd and Ed? Were you given any sort of examples of what they wanted the look to be?
Todd had a thing called a Look Book. It’s a thick scrapbook filled with images he liked. He worked with production designer Judy Becker and with Ed Lachman on it, so this book set the looks. He found images he liked from the ’50s, mostly from print. There were ads and work from photographers like Ruth Hawkin.

I had a color reference light for Todd so he could view the tear sheets. We would look at the shots and Todd would explain the look, the saturation and the muted values — images that referenced the 1950’s era.

Both Todd and Ed liked when colors were muted, a little more green with maybe some warmth — the combination of cold and warm in the same frame — so mixed color temperatures.

It was a great start, but even during the DI color timing Todd would look through his book, turn the reference light on, look at his picture then look at the screen. He would say, “Give that a little tweak, add two points of red, or let’s go a little dark by four points.” Film lab timers have always worked in RGB Film Printer Lights. There are six points to an F-Stop change.

Both Todd and Ed had timed films in the past. In the DI world the points work identically to photochemical printing. It really is a great way of communicating color. Ed could ask me to add two points of green, then Todd might ask to see three points. Technically, it’s the proper way to time in DI.

You worked with Todd and Ed at the same time?
They were always together. We did a lot of experimenting with color, and Todd and Ed sometimes had different opinions of where they wanted to go with it. You have to show the one look, save the metadata of that, do another look and go back and forth. That’s how color correction works. It’s very interactive.

Can you talk about a particular scene from the film?
In the opening scenes of the department store the palette is a muted green. It’s an uncomfortable time for Rooney’s character. Ed works with filters and mixed light sources to produce the desired looks in-camera, but leaves plenty of range for DI visualization.

When things are getting better in their relationship, the colors become gentler and more beautiful with more warmth. Ed would reference the Kodak Film Ektachrome for its bluish greenish values compared to the rich warm saturated colors of Kodachome.

My RIT education in Photographic Arts and Sciences has served me well my entire career. My favorite Ansel Adams quote is, “The negative is the score and the print is the performance.” Ed made a beautiful score and we collectively produced a great performance in my DI suite.

ROONEY MARA stars in CAROL. Did anything surprise you about the color?
A lot of shots are much darker than most directors and DPs ask for. Often they say, “I want to see more, open it up. I want to see brighter, what else can I see in this shot?” It was kind of the reverse on this. They both liked it rather dark. I used the S-curve function for almost every shot in Carol. With it, I can place my black and white points and then pivot all the mid-tone transitions. I can make very dark images without crushing any of the blacks. A great number of the shots have a subtle vignette applied — light fell off at the edges with camera lenses of that era.

Can you give an example?
The scene where Cate Blanchet’s character is in the child custody hearing and makes her heart wrenching speech — I added more S-curve , brought the lift down and increased gamma. Todd said no, no, even darker. Once we got down there, it was like, “Wow, this works.” It’s very effective. It’s more realistic, and adds more drama into a powerful scene.

They used a lot of natural Window light. Kate’s flesh tone and brightness changed a bit. My job was to make sure it was all totally even.

Were there any scenes in particular that stood out as more challenging or something that you’re most proud of?
I love the DI process because it’s so interactive, and I like problem solving. There’s one shot where Cate is touching the telephone hang-up button with her Index finger. She’s listening to Rooney but not responding.

Todd was concerned because the hand was too sharp from one finger to the other, and he wanted less depth of field — Super 16 has a large depth of field. So I put a diagonal window through her Index finger, the one that’s touching the hang-up button. Then I feathered off a Gaussian transfer curve into the background, used a  Gaussian de-focus on the Quantel and put a little defocus on, blending it as the fingers rolled off further back and forward, so that the emphasis was on the index finger. He loved it. That solved the problem.

Anything else stick out in your mind?
The last scene, the beautiful encounter at the Oak Room, I’m really proud of that. That has a great look. It started with gorgeous photography, but I had an idea that Todd and Ed really liked. In the scene, Cate is having dinner with friends surrounded by diners and waiters.

What I did was track a little bit of a window on Kate and feathered it off, and then outside that window desaturated everyone a little bit. I also brought a little bit more highlight detail onto Kate, so the image popped. Just think about how eye contact works — you’re not interested at all in your surroundings or who’s sitting at the back table. It’s just them.

CAROLNow Kate pops out a bit and everything just kind of feathers off a little, and she’s just radiant. I did the same thing to Rooney. It’s very subtle, but it helps tell that story. No dialogue was needed; it was all said in their eyes.

Why is the Pablo Rio the right tool for you?
Ten years ago, we built the DI suite at Goldcrest around the Pablo, which at the time was a brand-new product from Quantel. Quantel’s iQ was a conforming machine, an editing machine, an effects machine, titler and Paintbox — all in one. The only thing it really didn’t do was color… until they came out with the Pablo iQ. They invented an interface box to deal with color!

It was also the only machine at that time that could do different canvas sizes, different speeds and different resolutions, all on the same timeline. With every other system you would have to commit to one resolution. It was important to have everything in its native resolution.

Most recently we replaced those Pablos with the Quantel Rio 4K, which has a much faster processor. I can now play 4K with multi-levels of color correction in realtime without rendering.

What’s next for you?
I recently completed something I’m really proud of. It’s called The New Yorker Presents, and it’s 10 half-hour films from Amazon Studios and Jigsaw Productions. It’s basically a film version of The New Yorker magazine. Each episode is a collection of short docs, interstitials and their celebrated cartoons being created by the artist at hyper speed.

There are two features coming into Goldcrest now, but I can’t talk about those yet.

The A-List: Mike Hill on editing ‘In the Heart of the Sea’

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By Randi Altman

Herman Melville’s novel, Moby-Dick, is a classic tale of man versus whale. The famously long book — commonly used as a metaphor for fighting one’s demons — is known for its obsessed protagonist Captain Ahab and its famous first line, “Call me Ishmael.” What people might not know is the book was based on the true story of a whaling ship called, the Essex, which in 1820 was attacked by a giant whale, leaving the crew fighting the elements, starvation and this monster of the sea.

In the recent film by director Ron Howard, In the Heart of the Sea, viewers get to know the story that Moby-Dick was based on. To help tell the tale, Howard called on veteran editor and long-time collaborator Mike Hill, who has edited 23 films for the director and collaborated on about 30.

L-R: Ron Howard, Dan Hanley, basketball's Steve Nash and Mike Hill, who worked together on Iconoclasts.

L-R: Ron Howard, Dan Hanley, basketball’s Steve Nash and Mike Hill, who worked together on the “Iconoclasts” documentary series.

For Arri Alexa-shot In the Heart of the Sea, Hill once again worked with long-time editing partner Dan Hanley, with whom he shares multiple “Best Editing” Oscar noms and a win for Apollo 13. Hill was kind enough to talk to us about the process of editing and the challenges and joys of cutting Warner Bros.’ In the Heart of the Sea, as well as working with director Howard.

How early in the process did you get involved in this one?
Basically, from the first day of shooting, which was back in the fall of 2013 over in England.

So you were near set?
Yes, we were at Warner Bros. Studio, which is north of London in Leavesden. It’s an old Rolls Royce factory, and they built a big water tank and a replica of the ship, the Essex. Our editing rooms where close by in one of their production buildings.

You and editor Dan Handley have partnered on many of Ron Howard’s films. Was he in London as well?
Yes. He got there earlier and set everything up so we were ready to go.

What about your assistant editors?
Our first assistant was Simon Davis. He is a Brit who we have worked with on several projects. He’s excellent and a very important part of the process. We had some other British second assistants as well, including Jeremy Richardson and our apprentice was Rob Sealey. Back in the States, Simon continued as first assistant but Carolyn Calvert came on as second assistant and Alec Johnson was our apprentice.

Heart of the Sea

Simon pretty much runs the cutting room and the technical aspects of the edit. He’s in charge of all the assistants and oversees everything. He is a wizard at all of that… very knowledgeable, technically oriented and computer savvy. This is a big help, since I’m not much of a computer guy. It’s great to have people like that behind you who let you focus on the job at hand.

This was Ron Howard’s second digitally-shot film?
Yes. Rush, which was about Formula One racing, was the first one he shot with digital cameras. But in terms of editing, we’ve been working digitally since 1996. Ransom was our first film on the Avid Media Composer. Prior to that, we had cut on film, the old-fashioned way.

How does the film being shot digitally affect your edit?
There are a lot of big differences regarding workload and the approach. On film, I developed a discipline — you really had to think about every cut you made and plan things ahead. We tended to let things play a little longer because it’s easier to trim than to put back. That was always our philosophy.

When we started using the Avid, it allowed us to instantly make changes without worrying about cutting into the work print, so you really didn’t have to worry about that so much. We learned that you could be a lot more experimental and try a lot of things without any problems. So that was a big difference.

Mike HIll

You started your career cutting on film. Now that you are editing digitally, are you still instinctually working on that first cut, or does having the ability to try different things change the way you edit?
That’s a good question. The way I approach editing a scene, hasn’t really changed because the way I learned is so engrained in me. But you can try out new ideas and if it doesn’t work you can just get rid of it. I do try those things, but my initial instincts, for the most part, are what end up in the film. Sometimes what you try is crazy and silly and you’re hoping to find something almost by accident, but that doesn’t happen often.

Did it happen at all while editing In the Heart of the Sea?
I don’t recall anything like that. Rush was a little more conducive to that because we had so many different images and angles to work with. We were trying to make it flashy. This film is a more old-fashioned; an old sea epic adventure which is more traditional. It didn’t lend itself to a lot of crazy, flashy editing.

How do you, Dan and Ron work together?
We are a well-oiled machine and have developed a real short hand that doesn’t require much dialogue in most cases. What’s great about working with Ron is he is the kind of director that doesn’t really need or want to be hovering over your shoulder when you’re working. He gives us a lot of freedom.

During the shoot, when he’s on the set, we don’t see him very often, but he might drop in on a break or at night or on the weekend. When he does, he’ll want to see some scenes that have been cut, but for the most part he leaves us alone. Ron gives us some very simple notes from the set sometimes about takes he might like or moments he likes; this is helpful because I use this to guide me along when I start a scene. That’s really all I need.

What about after the shoot?
When he’s done shooting, we try to keep up with the demand in terms of getting the scenes cut together. So by the time the shooting is done, we can show him the entire film within about a week or so. After that we will spend two to three weeks — or whatever it takes — with him and go through the entire film from beginning to end, scene by scene. We get all of his notes and reactions and then he’ll leave us alone again. We’ll dive into those notes and do those, then show it to him again. The process just continues like that — we’re whittling away, improving it, changing some takes, and this goes on for several months. After we start to screen it for audience for reactions, we get a whole other set of notes and adjustment requests.

IN THE HEART OF THE SEA      IN THE HEART OF THE SEA

Considering how often you Howard’s films are there less notes over time?
(Laughs) No, I think it’s more now because he knows that we have the Avid. If there is a certain scene that might have some problems, Ron will give us an idea of what he wants and we’ll try different versions. This all increases the workload. I would say it’s a curse and a blessing all at the same time (laughs again).

When working with Dan, how do you guys decide who gets what scene or sequence?
It’s pretty random. The first scene that comes in, either he’ll take it or I’ll take it. Then the other one of us gets the second scene, and so on. The one thing we try to do throughout is identify the big scenes — the difficult ones and divided those equally between us, making sure that one guy isn’t doing all of the most difficult scenes.

Are you guys cutting in the same space logistically?
We’re in separate rooms, usually on opposite ends of the hallway with our assistants in the middle. What’s nice is every once in awhile if I’m stuck I call Dan in and have him look at something with a fresh eye and perspective. It’s a big help to have a guy you trust help you out like that.

For In the Heart of the Sea, was there a scene that was particularly difficult to cut?
For me there were two big ones. One was the scene where the whale attacks the ship and sinks it. That was shot sporadically throughout the entire schedule because some of it was shot in the tank in London and some was done in the Canary Islands, where they were for the final month and a half of the shoot.

They shot a lot of scenes pertaining to the attack, and I never got a complete set of dailies. I had to keep going back to the scene, adding in more material. It’s one of those scenes that had many different elementmains to it, plus the fact that the whale is all CG, and we really didn’t have temp shots, instead we would print out a storyboard still and use that as a representative cut. It’s one of those situations where you use your imagination to figure out the length of shots because there was really nothing to work with visually. Even though I enjoyed working on this bit, I’m not overly fond of these kinds of scenes because of the guesswork required. To me, the most interesting stuff to edit is the acting.

The other difficult scene was the second whale hunt, which leads up to that moment before Moby Dick attacks. The whales come in a huge pod and are frenzied and agitated. I didn’t have a lot to work with at first; the material would dribble in sporadically. Those are the two big ones that come to mind.

Anything else about the film that stands out?
It might surprise the viewer, but the most difficult sections was probably when they set sail and ran through a storm. Dan dealt with most of that, which I was thankful for. It was difficult because it was hard to set the tone. We needed to get the movie off to a good start, but for some reason it wasn’t quite working the way we wanted. We did solve it eventually; it’s just one of those things. You never know where your problems are going to come from sometimes.

Why was it so difficult?
There’s a lot of activity in those scenes. It was hard to get it all to work, and technically it all had to be correct. We had to have advisors come in and look at it because we didn’t know anything about sailing and there were the certain kind of sails that needed to be set.

IHOTS-TRL-439r     IN THE HEART OF THE SEA

Why do you like using the Avid?
The instant access to any of the takes is great and gives us the ability to experiment. It’s so much more civilized than running your film through sprockets and a Moviola, which is the way I learned. Even the KEM flatbeds seem primitive now compared to the Media Composer. It’s a nice, clean way to work.

Finally, what’s next for you project wise?
I won’t be in the edit suite anytime soon I’m afraid. I’m actually retired, and living in Omaha, my hometown.

Retired?! So that’s it?
Well, I won’t say absolutely not ever, I suppose after some time an irresistible script could suck me back in, but I’m not working on Ron’s current film Inferno, which is now in post. My spot was filled by Tom Elkins, a good friend who lives in Omaha as well. Tom has worked with us over the years as an assistant and then became an editor on some Wes Craven films.

Are you missing it at all?
I’m not missing it yet. Editing can be really rewarding, but at the same time incredibly tedious. I’m 66 now, and on Heart of the Sea I just started to feel like the time had come to ride off into the sunset and live life on my own schedule for a while.  So far it really feels good to slow down a bit and enjoy this new stage of life.

Academy names winners of Scientific and Technical awards

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We in the industry know that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences don’t just give out gold statues, they also celebrate technology that has changed the way films are made. With that in mind, the Academy has announced that 10 scientific and technical achievements represented by 33 individual award recipients will be honored at its annual Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation on February 13, at the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills. In addition, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) will receive a special award recognizing “a century of fundamental contributions to the advancement of motion picture standards and technology.”

“This year’s honorees represent a wide range of new tech, including a modular inflatable airwall system for composited visual effects, a ubiquitous 3D digital paint system and a 3D printing technique for animation,” said Richard Edlund, Academy Award-winning visual effects artist and chair of the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee. “With their outstanding, innovative work, these technologists, engineers and inventors have further expanded filmmakers’ creative opportunities on the big screen.”

Unlike other Academy Awards to be presented this year, achievements receiving Scientific and Technical Awards need not have been developed and introduced during 2015. Rather, 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)
– Michael John Keesling for the design and development of Image Shaker, an optical system that convincingly creates the illusion of the camera shaking in a variable and repeatable manner. The Image Shaker was unique and superior to alternatives in use when it was invented two decades ago, and it continues to be used today.

– David McIntosh, Steve Marshall Smith, Mike Branham and Mike Kirilenko for the engineering and development of the Aircover Inflatables Airwall. This system of modular inflatable panels can be erected on location, at lengths reaching hundreds of feet, with exceptional speed and safety. When used to support blue or green screens, the Airwall permits composite shots of unprecedented scale.

– Trevor Davies, Thomas Wan, Jon Scott Miller, Jared Smith and Matthew Robinson for the development of the Dolby Laboratories PRM Series Reference Color Monitors. The PRM’s design allows the stable, accurate representation of images with the entire luminance range and color gamut used in contemporary theatrical feature presentation.

– Ronald Mallet and Christoph Bregler for the design and engineering of the Industrial Light & Magic Geometry Tracker, a novel, general-purpose tracker and solver. Geometry Tracker facilitates convincing interaction of digital and live-action elements within a scene. Its precise results and tight integration with other ILM animation technologies solve a wider range of match-animation challenges than was previously possible.

– Jim Hourihan, Alan Trombla and Seth Rosenthal for the design and development of the Tweak Software RV system, a highly extensible media player system. RV’s multi-platform toolset for review and playback, with comprehensive APIs, has allowed studios of all sizes to take advantage of a state-of-the-art workflow and has achieved widespread adoption in the motion picture industry.

– Richard Chuang and Rahul Thakkar for the groundbreaking design, and Andrew Pilgrim, Stewart Birnam and Mark Kirk for the review workflows and advanced playback features, of the DreamWorks Animation Media Review System. Over its nearly two decades of development, this pioneering system enabled desktop and digital theater review. It continues to provide artist-driven, integrated, consistent and highly scalable studio-wide playback and interactive reviews.

– Keith Goldfarb, Steve Linn, Brian Green and Raymond Chih for the development of the Rhythm & Hues Global DDR System. This consistent, integrated, production database-backed review system enables a recordable workflow and an efficient, collaborative content review process across multiple sites and time zones.

– J Robert Ray, Cottalango Leon and Sam Richards for the design, engineering and continuous development of Sony Pictures Imageworks Itview. With an extensive plug-in API and comprehensive facility integration including editorial functions, Itview provides an intuitive and flexible creative review environment that can be deployed globally for highly efficient collaboration.

Scientific and Engineering Awards (Academy Plaques)
– Brian McLean and Martin Meunier for pioneering the use of rapid prototyping for character animation in stop-motion film production. Laika’s inventive use of rapid prototyping has enabled artistic leaps in character expressiveness, facial animation, motion blur and effects animation. Through highly specialized pipelines and techniques, 3D printing capabilities have been harnessed with color uniformity, mechanical repeatability, and the scale required to significantly enhance stop-motion animated feature films.

– Jack Greasley, Kiyoyuki Nakagaki, Duncan Hopkins and Carl Rand for the design and engineering of the Mari 3D texture painting system. Combining multilayer painting tools and a unique texture-management system, Mari simplifies working with large, high-resolution texture sets. It has achieved broad adoption in the visual effects industry, often supplanting long-term in-house systems.

The A-List: Director George Miller talks ‘Fury Road,’ Oscar season

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By Iain Blair

The Oscar-winning writer/director/producer George Miller was instrumental in introducing the new wave of revved-up Aussie cinema to the world stage thanks to his seminal and highly influential apocalyptic road trilogy, Mad Max. But when the first in the series roared onto screens in the late seventies, it wasn’t just a fresh blast of non-stop action reeking of hot engines and even hotter desert winds from down under. Miller’s assured debut, a bleak vision of the future, essentially rewrote the book on how to make a successful low-budget indie action film (for 20 years it held the record as the highest profit-to-cost ratio of any film).

He then went on to create two more much-beloved franchises — Babe and Happy Feet — which did for talking animals what Mad Max did for young up-and-comer Mel Gibson.

Miller, whose diverse credits include directing The Witches of Eastwick, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Lorenzo’s Oil and producing Dead Calm, the thriller that jump-started Nicole Kidman’s career, was in LA recently to talk about Warner Bros. Mad Max: Fury Road. The $375 million-grossing smash is the fourth in the blockbuster series, which left off with Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, released exactly 30 years ago.

George Miller and writer Iain Blair

George Miller and writer Iain Blair

Starring Tom Hardy in the iconic Gibson role and Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, the film was shot by John Seale, the acclaimed Aussie cinematographer who won the Oscar for The English Patient and whose credits include Cold Mountain, The Perfect Storm, Rain Man, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Lorenzo’s Oil with Miller. It was the DP’s first digital film and first time shooting with Arri Alexas (See our coverage on Seale shooting Fury Road here).

Over a nice meal, I spoke with Miller about making the film, posting Fury Road and the Oscars.

We’re heading into awards season. You’ve been nominated for three Oscars and you’ve won once, for Happy Feet. How important are they to you?
It’s a mistake to give it too much thought. It’s enough to just make a film that resonates with audiences, and I used to feel awards just aren’t important, but I’ve come to realize that culturally successful people — whether they’re directors or artists or musicians and so on — have the ability to analyze and reinforce what works. It’s always easy to see why something doesn’t work, but it’s far harder to pin down exactly why it works.

Is it true that you spent three years building 3D rigs from scratch to shoot Fury Road, and then at the last moment decided that the film would be shot in 2D instead?
We started off shooting native 3D with them, but suddenly we began to doubt that they’d hold up in all the heat and dust where we were shooting —the Namibian desert — as we only had six. And by then, stereo conversion was getting really good, so we decided to go digital with the Alexas, which were also supplemented with a Canon EOS 5D Mark 11 and an Olympus P5 used as “crash” cameras in some action sequences.

ONE TWO

Seale told me that — amazingly, given the non-stop action — the film was predominantly a one-camera shoot.
Yeah. Roman Polanski said, “At any given moment, there’s only one perfect camera position,” and I agree. So when I went into animation with the Happy Feet movies, it became really obvious, as you can take exactly the same performance, same set and so on, and by shifting the camera, the perspective and cutting pattern, you can change a scene completely. So yes, I’m a one-camera filmmaker in that sense.

Do you like the post process?
Very much. It’s where you confront your mistakes and where you can work around them, provided you have a good editor. We posted in Sydney in my offices, in this deco theatre, The Metro, and it took over a year. Then we did some extra shooting and the bookends to the movie, back in Australia.

The film was edited by your wife, Margaret Sixel, who also cut Happy Feet. Tell us about that relationship and how it worked.
We shot for nine months and she was back in Sydney, getting massive amounts of footage. Initially she didn’t want to do it because she’d never cut an action film before. I told her that was a great reason to do it since she wouldn’t be following all the clichés and tropes and style of those movies.

Charlize Theron and George Miller on set

Charlize Theron and George Miller on set

I’d seen her work on documentaries, where she’d taken some very bland footage and shaped it into a very strong narrative. She has this great sense of structure and causality of one shot to the next, either spatially or thematically — there’s some connection.

It struck me that this is essentially a silent movie, but with great sound.
That’s exactly what I set out to make, and we did the sound mix, the DI and post-viz as part of editorial, and did a lot of early sound work in Sydney, but then we ended up on the lot at Warners here in LA, and did the final Atmos mix here, too, with a great team: re-recording mixers Chris Jenkins and Gregg Rudloff.

Obviously, a lot of the action effects were shot in-camera, but there’s also huge number of visual effects shots in the film. How many are there?
There are over 2,800 shots in the movie — which is a lot — and I’d say over 2,000 have some VFX elements. Andrew Jackson, who did 300, was the VFX supervisor. A lot of that was done as post-viz — so the team did simple comps or simple animation, erasures and so on, and if they were good enough, we didn’t pass them on to the VFX houses… Method or Iloura in Sydney.

You also brought Eric Whipp, a DI colorist from Toronto who did the Happy Feet films, down to work on it full-time?
Yeah, and in the DI he was really pushing the Baselights to do stuff like sky replacements. The problem was, we shot for nearly 140 days but the story happens over three days, so you needed consistency in the skies, and he was able to do all that very quickly and cheaply in the DI. We did a preliminary DI on the set and were grading our dailies, and we also had our own Baselights in the editing suites in Sydney.

All that was so important — having postviz, editorial and Baselight all working together. And often Margaret or her assistants would comp performances in editorial, so there’s a lot of plasticity between the cuts now that we didn’t have in the past when it was all celluloid. (See our interview with colorist Eric Whipp here)

Digital, especially in post, must really suit your style of filmmaking.
Completely. I learned so much from doing animation in the Babe and Happy Feet movies, and now nearly every film involves animation and CGI to some extent. The biggest advantage of digital on this film was safety — you just erase harnesses, wires and so on. And also being able to erase tire marks from previous takes. That was huge for us!

FURY ROAD THREE

The film has a very gritty and over-saturated look. Was that all done in post or was it a combination?
It was a combination of design and post. We designed it to be pretty monochrome. In a way it’s all variations of reds, browns, yellows and very little color.

There are all these rumors you’re going to shoot Mad Max: Wasteland next. True?
(Laughs) All I can say is it’s not even the real title, but we are definitely talking about it.

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

George Miller photos credit: Jasin Boland

Catching up with some Oscar nominees

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By Randi Altman

On the heels of the recent Oscar nominations, postPerspective decided to reach out to a few of those chosen and gather their reactions.

Ben Grossmann was nominated for his work (alongside Roger Guyett, Patrick Tubach, and Burt Dalton) on Star Trek Into Darkness.  He is already the owner of a VFX Oscar statue for his contribution to Hugo (2011). Now a partner in Magnopus, a visual solutions companybased in downtown LA, Grossmann was at Pixomondo while working Star Trek Into Continue reading →