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67 F A L L Q 4 I S S U E F E A T U R E Schoonmaker and Scorsese. The pair have collaborated on some of the era's defining films. P H O T O : A P I M A G E S together. Sometimes an accidental thing will happen and we will be thrilled by it. We are very open to experimentation. He loves that. That is why we did a lot of strange edits in this movie. There are some odd jump cuts. In order to get the best performance, it was worth it to us. It added to the deceptive simplicity of the movie that sucks you in and then hits you in the end. Obviously there has been a lot of talk about the very complex effects work for Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci. How did that work impact the picture editing? We could not do the de-aging until we got very close to a fine cut. It was a process that [visual effects supervi- sor] Pablo Helman at ILM developed very slowly after working with us on "Silence" (2016). Pablo knew that Marty wanted to make this movie without casting younger actors to play the younger versions of De Niro, Pesci and Pacino. Marty didn't think that was going to work. Pablo developed this system and convinced us with many tests that he did long before shooting started. The big dif- ference was not having a person wear a helmet with two small cameras attached to them by their chin that is all over their faces. There is no way these actors—who are some of the great improvisers in the world—would work that way. What was great was that Pablo had two 3D infrared lenses on either side of Marty's lens and those are tracking the actors' movement. From that point on, Pablo would send us every week a bunch of shots, and we would look at them and ask him to make changes here and there. Sometimes we found we were losing the performance if too much had been taken out of an actor's face and we put some of it back in. All in all, it was an ex- cellent process and freed up the actors to just behave the way they normally would. Sometimes they were wearing a few dots on their face or metal clips on their clothes to track their movements. Actu- ally we screened the film quite a bit with them not de-aged and nobody minded, which was really astounding. I think they were so gripped by the performances. The actors were wearing no makeup at all in the shots they were being de-aged because that would make it too difficult. Were there some instances with the visual effects, where you had to make editing choices to lessen or downplay the importance of that technology, so it didn't overwhelm the emotional content of a scene? Very little. It was mainly [with] Bob. He is such a subtle actor. He is conveying so much with so little. Sometimes with his stuff, we wanted to put a little bit more back in because that is where the acting was. The acting is not only in the eyes. It's in other facial expressions. In order to retain his great acting and his subtlety, we adjusted there. Marty had three cameras in the scene where Tony Pro (Stephen Graham) fights with Jimmy Hoffa in Miami. That means you have nine lenses that all need focus pulling. Marty would have thought out very carefully how he was going to do the scenes where there was camera move- ment. With improvisation, you can't do camera movement, or else the editor can't cut it. All improvisation he did very simply, with the camera locked down. The movie has a very novelistic struc- ture, with two framing devices: Robert DeNiro's character Frank reflects back on his life, and the car trip set during the very pivotal moments of 1975. Was that in the script or something you and Scorsese developed? That was in the script. That was Mar- ty, [writer Steven] Zaillian, a little bit of Nick Pileggi, working out a way to make this trip a sort of spine of the movie. Frankly I was a little worried about it at first. I wondered if people were going to understand when we cut back to them on this journey, but nobody ever com- plained about it. Marty and the writers had such a strong conception for it. The interesting thing about it that people will