Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1316365
www.postmagazine.com 16 POST NOV/DEC 2020 OUTLOOK DIRECTORS so when the lockdown happened we had this great communication and were able to still work and get it done. Of course you have all of these amazing tools avail- able to you in post, but ultimately it's all down to the people." WEAKNESSES: "Again, I think it's all about the people, and if they don't care about the work, that could really hurt the whole post process. But I've never been in that situation. I've always been very fortunate to work with some of the best people in the industry, and I'm not just saying that. My post teams have always gone above and beyond, so I have no complaints there. I suppose you can lose focus and objectivity in post if you're not careful, especially after you see your film again and again and again, but you can always take a break." OPPORTUNITIES: "That's simple for me — we should have more people of color in post. More diversity! Oh my goodness! I have to say that it's just embarrassing. I honestly don't know whether it's that people of color don't get the opportunity, or they don't fight for the opportunity or use the opportunity, but you go to a post house and it's so rare that you see a person of color working there, and that's a real downside to the industry. I know that for my first three movies, I don't think I ever saw a black person at any of the post houses I went to. And more needs to hap- pen, more changes need to be made." THREATS: "It's always the usual sus- pects — the lack of time and the budget. The thing about post is that for me, and probably most directors, you could just go on and on, tweaking and fiddling about with things until they pull it away from you. But to be honest, I've never had a problem with the schedule or bud- get as I've always had great producers that facilitate all that stuff." OUTLOOK: "The pandemic has shut it all down for most of the year, and all I know for sure is that there's going to be an ava- lanche, a stampede of people heading to the cinema once things get back to some sort of normal. People love the experi- ence. It's like sitting around the camp- fire when people first told stories. It's a communal experience that you just don't get any other way. You hear the audience reaction, you hear the laughter. And you don't get that from watching stuff on your phone or streaming it on the TV. People want to go out, so I'm very confident that cinema and movies will come back bigger than ever." JON AVNET Fried Green Tomatoes, Up Close and Personal, Risky Business Avnet, who's direct- ed, written, and produced dozens of award-winning motion pictures, television movies and Broadway plays, is best known for co-writing, directing and producing Fried Green Tomatoes, which garnered multiple Academy Award nominations. He also produced Risky Business, which launched the career of Tom Cruise, and was the executive producer of Black Swan, starring Natalie Portman (winner of the Oscar for Best Actress) and directed by Darren Aronofsky. STRENGTHS: "Post often involves re- shooting and restructuring and rewriting within existing scenes, so it gives you the opportunity to fix your mistakes. And while you're editing, it gives you the abil- ity to fine tune the actors' work, and see if the timing reflects the right amount of 'narrative bites and bytes' — meaning the amount of story material necessary to keep the story moving forward. And that process of refinement also occasionally gives you the chance to create magic, and I think creating that magic is one of the big draws of being a filmmaker to me — the possibility of it and the way it can take you to this whole other world — what I like to call 'a present tense moment', where you're totally there. The only thing that matters at that moment is what you're seeing and hearing on- screen — the interaction of characters, the dialogue or just silence, the music. You're just transported, and it's only in post where that magic happens." WEAKNESSES: "I love the amount of choice you now have in the digital world in post, but that infinite ability to keep making changes, and very rapidly, is also a double-edged sword. When it was a me- chanical process, I think making a choice was much more deliberative. Yes, you could undo what you'd done, but it took a lot of work. Now, you don't need to think about it that much." OPPORTUNITIES: "What seem like small things can have such an impact. When we were cutting Fried Green Tomatoes, we had this scene with Mary Stuart Masterson inside a hive and tons of real bees, and the vibrations inside from over 100,000 bees were so powerful, and it felt so special while we shot. Then in post I spent a whole day with our sound team just working on the sound of the bees and placing them, so that the visceral effect of the bees' vibrations really made you feel you were in the hive with them." THREATS: "There are a lot of threats. First, if you're lucky enough to have final cut — and I've managed to main- tain that, probably because I'm now making smaller movies — you make the final choices, but even so there are nuances within that. If there's a dis- agreement, you have to screen two different versions, and then decide, and a lot of that depends on how personal filmmaking is to you. Some people live and breathe film, and I'm like that, so if it's not what you want, it's very difficult to live with. And for filmmakers who don't have final cut, then post allows producers and studio executives to get involved in the editing, and that then distances the director from their original intent. And intent is both conscious and unconscious, and when there are a lot of voices making noise, you can lose your instincts. And ultimately your instincts are your strongest weapon. They're not foolproof, but without them there's no one strong hand and point of view guid- ing the process." OUTLOOK: "Younger audiences will go back to theaters, but older audiences will come back much slower I fear. And because of COVID, the quarantine and all the streaming platforms out there now, they have many more reasons to stay home. But personally, although there's great shows out there, I don't think sitting at home and watching TV is nearly so satisfying as going to the movies, which is a whole different experience."