Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1353865
tell us about them? JJ: Well, Denzel, we worked with using the iPad and the clips in the Todd-AO system. He did it at his house and John Lee was there. Jared is a night guy. He's a very accomplished musician. He did his clips and did quite a few takes on each one. I assume John Lee was on the phone with him. Jared has this huge studio off Mulholland. It used to be like a government film studio. If you get a chance, it's called just Jared Leto's Film Studio. He turned it into a huge recording studio. SSS: Cool. JJ: Rami was all over the place. He was in Budapest or somewhere shooting a film. We were trying to track him down. We got Rami toward the end of pre-dubs or the beginning of finals. He came into the Burbank facility of King Soundworks. Basically, he was completely isolated from the stage, then there's the control room, then right adjoining is a mix stage where Darren and John Lee would be. We weren't in the same room. We had to wipe down the room 90 minutes between characters. We didn't have that much to loop which was good. He was spot on. SSS: Were you able to get them recorded in a day? JJ: It seemed like a year because it was last minute, what's the best way to go. At the time, Warner Bros. was developing a kit that they were delivering. They were doing a lot of post on television. So they were delivering these built-in kits. And trying to find Denzel, he was shooting his next movie, so we scheduled him the last three or four days. The principals all recorded within a week. We had already pre- dubbed the dialogue so we had to go back and do that stuff. SSS: How on earth did you record Group ADR? JJ: Recording Group was always a big question. How can we get it done? It finally got down to all of the Group performers all had their own home studios. So that was the last thing we had recorded. Darren had to do a lot of incredible work to get it all recorded and in sync because a lot of it was recorded wild. There was "suspicious slating," we'll call it that. So we put it together and it was the last thing we put in. As you do, we'd take a half-hour to an hour on the reel, pre-dub it, then you'd go into the final, same thing would happen. That was the last thing to put in. I call those things "the stone in the shoe." You're walking along and it hurts, and it's so good when you get it out. (laughs) SSS: So your "stone in the shoe" was the ADR as a whole or just the Group? JJ: Ah, yeah, you're getting closer and closer… Darren is a pretty laid- back guy and I saw him get a little tense about "Well, we don't have anything scheduled, we couldn't get anything scheduled." There were all sorts of parameters and we were trying to figure out what they were. You can't bring the talent onto the lot. They had a remote system set up. It seemed to me kind of difficult because you need the director to be close by. We kind of bypassed that. Warner Bros. was also having a lot of other issues that were much more pressing on their end. Understandably so. You suddenly lopped them off at the knees as far as the population available to actually do these things. Management structure. Let me be absolutely certain about this. They did a stellar job in helping and supporting us getting this mix done. That was the big thing. We didn't know when we were going to start to mix! We can't bring anybody new in because we didn't know what the (COVID) tests were back then. Once we started with a crew, they stayed on it pretty much and did their own self-quarantine throughout the whole show. SSS: So, you recorded ADR after dialogue pre-dubs? JJ: Yes. There were shifting ideas of what the protocols were (for COVID). Warner Bros. didn't want to have anybody come onto their lots. The only guy that would be on the lot was the ADR mixer. They were working via Zoom for everybody else. Of all the films I've worked on with John Lee, that's just not how he works. It's an imprint on his films. So that was a stumbling block for a lot of it. It was latching on to the characters at the right time. Jared was doing an album so I think he was stuck here. Denzel was getting MacBeth ready to shoot that. SSS: Now your lead characters were not available. Is that why you had to wait? JJ: Yes. Rami was not available. The other thing though, it was really about what was okay to work with, what could we do, because if you look at it, and I looked at it the way the studio looked at it, especially like a guy like Denzel, he's going to come in, and, you're not necessarily looking at him as the actor, he's a commodity. If he gets sick, and he's shooting another film, they're screwed. SSS: It's the COVID issue, right? JJ: Yes. The studio was looking at what was the least amount of flack we can get because we have a whole bunch of liability here. Nobody would come out and say, "Well, let's do this." March, April, May, we looked at COVID a little bit differently than we do now as far as who is actually in the crosshairs as far as susceptibility and such. So there was a lot of that. I understood what the studio was doing at the time, but once I get a schedule, I'm driven to finish it by what the schedule says. SSS: But you recorded your ADR after dialogue pre-dubs. That means your dialogue editing was compromised or had to be sacrificed for the ADR. JJ: I wouldn't go that far. I would say that we prepared for the best or the worst and we had options