By Iain Blair
Apple TV+’s new series WeCrashed is a wild ride and a cautionary tale of ambition, power, greed, success and failure. Created by Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello, it tells the story of Adam Neumann (Jared Leto) and his wife Rebekah (Anne Hathaway), whose trendy startup space-sharing company WeWork became a huge success before an even more spectacular crash, going from a $47 billion valuation to under $10 billion after a failed IPO.
Lee Eisenberg
I recently spoke with Eisenberg (The Office, Bad Teacher), Crevello (The Grudge 2) and post supervisor Melissa Owen (City on Fire, The Baker and the Beauty ) about making the show and the post workflow.
Talk about what it took to prep and plan, and how much did the COVID crisis affect it?
Lee Eisenberg: Any time you’re dealing with real-life people, you need to have it all vetted by legal. We had outside counsel, and we wanted to get the story right. We did a huge amount of research and spoke to dozens of people who’d worked at WeWork and knew the Neumanns at different stages, and that was all very time-consuming.
COVID made everything far more difficult, like just connecting with your crew and trying to have conversations. You take so much for granted when you can see people’s faces and their smiles — or frowns. And we set out to make a very ambitious eight-hour movie on a TV schedule, so every day was crammed. We never took our foot off the gas pedal, and we strained every department, ourselves and the budget to pull it off.
Drew Crevello
Tell us about post. Was it a traditional TV post schedule?
Melissa Owen: The editors were cutting dailies as they came in and getting cuts ready to be viewed by the directors and DPs, so we tried as best we could to stick to a TV schedule. The back end of post was pretty heavy with finishing all the VFX and sound and so on, so it was a bit of a hybrid.
We shot on the ARRI Alexa Mini LF at 4.5K — 4448×3096. Even though our final delivery resolution was UHD at a 2:1 aspect ratio, we did our VFX pulls at source resolution to maintain a true 4K workflow and for archival.
Melissa Owen
Where did you do the post?
Owen: I’d say that 90% was done remotely from people’s homes because of COVID. That was a big challenge for all the editors and producers. It all had to be done online, all the reviews and so on. We did do a little bit in person when we got to the final stages, like the mix and the color correction. The DPs were able to come in and work on the grade.
Drew Crevello: Even that was quite strange. Post is obviously a very intimate creative process, and you’re working with the editors and the sound team for months. Then we’d meet for the first time at the final sound mix. So there was a lot of dislocation because of the pandemic.
Eisenberg: I remember being at one of the sound mixes and someone was trying to say hi to me. I had no clue who it was until I realized he was the editor I’d worked with remotely for four months.
You had three editors on this: Tamara Meem, Justin Krohn and Debra Beth Weinfeld. How did that work?
Eisenberg: The workflow was very traditional. We had directors who did blocks, but the same editor didn’t necessarily cut all three episodes in a block. And we shot out of order, so E3 was the first one up. We shifted it back and forth, so they were all busy at all times, and we were jumping into different Evercast rooms to check in and give notes.
Owen: For the offline editing, we were fully WFH and did not have a post production office. The editors and AEs used Avid Media Composer 2018 with Jump Desktop. The Avids were located at our Avid vendor’s secure location, Hula Post, and connected to our 20TB Nexus. The editors had computer systems in their homes and would log in remotely via VPN to their own Avid. We shot in New York, so dailies were transferred every night from Light Iron NY and sent digitally to Hula Post in LA.
What were the main editing challenges?
Eisenberg: Tone was a big one. Our directors, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, worked very closely with the editors on the first few episodes, and that really helped establish the tone. The temp score and final score by Chris Bangs helped so much with the tone as well.
Crevello: Justin, who cut E1 and E2, laid down a great temp score that was so pitch-perfect that it really helped tonally with the show. It also laid down a blueprint for the score, so that was key.
What about the importance of music and sound to the show?
Owen: We had a great sound team, and Brent Findley was our supervising sound editor and sound designer. He did a fantastic job. We mixed on the lot at Universal Sound with re-recording mixers John W. Cook II and Ben Wilkins, who had worked with Lee before. We did a Dolby Atmos mix. They were all so dedicated in creating a great soundscape for the show.
There are quite a lot of VFX. Who did them and what was entailed?
Owen: We had a few vendors and traded off on different episodes. Onyx was key in doing a lot of the VFX, and we also used The Molecule, who have just been acquired by Crafty Apes. We also used Phosphene for a big scene in E3 and another one in E6.
One of the trickiest ones to do was the beach scene in E6 and getting all the lighting and the beach married to the house, as they were separate locations in reality. Then there was the Dead Sea scene at the end of E8. We shot all the actors on a beach in Long Island, then we had an Israeli crew shoot Dead Sea plates, and that got composited together. And that was tricky, getting all the lighting and so on to match.
Crevello: Before this show, I’d spent 16 years working on the film side and on movies with 1,800 or 2,000 VFX, like the X-Men films. I have to say that getting the color of the sky just right on this, and comping in some of the beach stuff, was far harder than most of the stuff on those big movies. It’s all to do with what you’re used to seeing. You have no frame of reference for a spaceship, right? But making a sky look utterly natural is very challenging.
What about the DI?
Owen: We did it at Light Iron LA with colorist Ian Vertovec on FilmLight Baselight in UHD and Dolby Vision. The online editor was Monique Eissing. The online/conform in Baselight was also done at true 4K. The timeline was set to 4448×2224. We maintained the full horizontal resolution of the original camera files but then viewed and rendered at UHD for mastering.
Our DPs set looks in person at Light Iron LA in Dolby Vision, but then a color review file was made available using Moxion. That system allowed our creatives to view and make notes in Dolby Vision on qualified devices, such as iPad Pros and newer Mac Books.
Crevello: Our directors, John and Glenn, along with one of our DPs, had worked with Ian a lot in the past, so that was great. And both the DPs — Xavier Grobot and Corey Walter — talked to Ian early about the look and scope of the show, so we were in very good hands.
Eisenberg: I’ve been quite involved in the DI in previous projects, but this was different because of COVID. It was also different because our directors had walked us through exactly what they wanted with the look, and our DPs were also so involved. Because of this, Drew and I entrusted it to all of them.
Did it turn out the way you first envisioned it?
Crevello: Yes, but even better, thanks to such a great cast and crew.
Eisenberg: They all took what we’d written and just elevated everything.
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.
