Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1081428
www.postmagazine.com 17 POST JAN/FEB 2019 DIRECTOR'S CHAIR the end. It actually plays like a tragedy, both for him and the country, I think." Casting the right actor as Cheney is obviously crucial, but Christian Bale doesn't immediately spring to mind, yet he perfectly channels him. What did he bring to the role? "He was so good as Michael Burry in The Big Short, and relished the whole idea of not showing his emotions in that role, and I felt that if anyone could do the deep spelunking necessary to understanding Cheney, it'd be Christian. And I didn't real- ly care that he looked nothing like Cheney, but then, after all the prosthetics and make up and weight gain and the walk and the voice and so forth, lo and behold, he did. It was an amazing transformation." Lynne Chaney turns out to be the power behind the throne. What did Amy Adams bring to the role? "She was crucial. You quickly see that Lynne was the one with ambition, who picked Cheney, and he was this pretty affable, low-key guy, sort of mediocre, while she was both sweet and tough as nails. And Amy's like Lynne in that regard, this great mixture. So it was really the Dick and Lynne story to me, and Christian and Amy were both like detectives them- selves, and they did so much research as well, reading all the books, watching all the interviews and footage out there, and talking to people, and luckily there are a lot of amazing journalists who'd done a lot of research and could provide a lot of background and information about them. But even by the end of all this, Cheney still seemed like a pretty enigmatic guy." Where did you post, and what were the main challenges? "We did all the post on the Sony lot and cut it all there. We shot on 35mm, but we had to deal with a lot of formats — 16mm, Super 8 — and we even used real TV cam- eras for the period. And then it's not just a one period film — it covers five decades, different countries, hundreds of locations, so there was a lot of stuff to deal with in post. And then our composer, Nick Britell, came on almost immediately and start- ed doing some demo tracks right away which is unusual, and he also wrote some of the music right away." Do you like the post process? "I love post. It's really the most enjoyable part of the whole process for me, as I love writing, and post is writing. There's nothing better than all the discoveries — and accidents — you find in post. They transform the film. My only rule for post is, you've got to have windows, otherwise I just go out of my mind." The film was edited by Hank Corwin. Tell us about that relationship and how it worked, especially considering the sheer volume of visual information he had to process. "It was a huge amount of material to deal with, and so dense, so you just grind it out every day, and I love working with Hank because he's got a very unusual take on things and how to really tell the story in the most interesting possible way. The big challenge was getting all the rhythms right, the pacing, and we found that even just adding or cutting three or four frames in a scene could really throw it all off. It was really deli- cate work, and we had a lot of montages and the timing had to be perfect, so we spent a lot of time refining and refining scenes. I really like to do test screenings and get feedback during post, so we'd do some screenings in the little theaters in the Thalberg building, for just seven or eight people, including some friends and filmmakers. Paul Thomas Anderson and David O. Russell came by, and they really helped give us a sense of where we were, and what was working and what wasn't. We pretty much followed the screenplay, although you always change stuff and shift things around, and there was far more about their teen years originally in the cut. But it just didn't work. And we also did some test audiences in malls, and that's where you really take it on the chin. It turned out that they didn't like all the teen-year stuff and watching another actor playing the young Cheney, even though it looked so great. And we didn't want to cut it, but finally we did, and then the whole movie suddenly worked. A lot of times, the movie tells you what it wants to be, and you can't force it to go in a different direction." Like all period pieces, this uses some VFX. Talk about them. "We needed a lot, and we had a great VFX super, Raymond Gieringer, who really cared so much about the film and every detail. We used several VFX teams — from Cinesite, MRX Montreal, Lola, Gloss, Fuse and some others — and they all went above and beyond. We had a ton of clean up, and about 60 or 70 make-up fixes, and then bigger stuff like shots of D.C. and really weird stuff, like the sequence with the prehistoric fish swimming around. That was one of my favorite shots, and it was really hard to do it. It took about eight attempts to get it right." Where did you do the final sound mix? "Up at Skywalker Ranch, with mixer Chris Scarabosio and a really great team, and it was a hard movie to mix, what with all the music transitions and tons of dialogue. It took a long time to get that seamless flow I wanted." Where did you do the DI? "At FotoKem, with colorist David Cole, and again, it was quite tricky as we had so many different formats and archival and news footage to blend together, and David was crucial in making all that work." Editing was completed on the Sony lot.