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www.postmagazine.com 18 POST SEPTEMBER 2018 DIRECTOR'S CHAIR with my editor, Fred Raskin." Talk about editing with him. What were the big editing challenges? "I'd never cut such a big, VFX-heavy movie, and a lot of the scenes you're looking at blue screen and waiting for the effects shots, and I didn't really know how to deal with that. It's a leap of faith, but Fred's very experienced with that, and then tweaking stuff right till the end. We went to NYU together but we'd never worked together before, although I'd always wanted to, but he's always been busy doing Tarantino's movies like The Hateful Eight and Django, and he's cut Guardians of the Galaxy, Fast and Furious and so on. This time, the timing worked out, and he wasn't on the set but he'd cut every day in LA and send me stuff and keep a list of inserts and extra stuff he felt I'd need, so he became the de facto 2 nd unit di- rector. And he cuts very fast. He had the whole clock sequence done days after we'd shot it, so then I could show the crew, and everyone gets pumped up." All the VFX play a big role. How many were there? "In the end we had well over a thousand, but it was more like a few hundred of full-on CG shots. Most of the others had little fixes and enhancements and clean up. And we kept adding stuff, like having the chair move." Talk about the importance of sound on this. "It's so important in all films, but I think it's especially crucial in horror and suspense, where the right sound can add so much to a scene, and you learn so much from that. For this, we did all the sound at 424 Post and had an amazing team, with guys like Gary Rizzo, who won Oscars for Dunkirk and Inception, and Oscar winner Bob Beemer and sound designer Karen Baker Landers — the best in the busi- ness. Just getting the right sound for a clock in a wall took us a long time, and I'm just as obsessed with sound as I am with every other aspect, and I'd meet with Karen every day to go over every single sound effect. It was a lot of trial and error, but I'm very happy with the result. We did a Dolby Atmos mix and it sounds phenomenal." Where did you do the DI and how important is it to you? "At Efilm with colorist Mitch Paulson, who did Death Wish for me. He did Sicario and Bladerunner 2049, and is just a master of his craft, and he, Rogier and I all worked on getting the right look. It's very important, especially on this as we also blew it up to IMAX, so the whole look and sound was a first for me." Did the film turn out the way you hoped? "Even better than I hoped. And it's largely thanks to the great cast and crew I had." What's next? Maybe a light comedy? (Laughs) "Maybe. No one expected this from me. I'm not sure what's next. I have a lot of projects lined up but I haven't decided which one's next." The film was edited by Fred Raskin. 424 Post handled audio duties. The film has more than 1,000 VFX.