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www.postmagazine.com 15 POST JAN/FEB 2024 footage, the team used underwater micro explo- sions combined with a massive explosion, and then did extensive compositing work to seamlessly integrate the elements. Like Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon is another epic story, but it's also quite intimate, and showcases the creativity of another enduring part- nership — that of Scorsese and DP Rodrigo Prieto, who first teamed up on The Wolf of Wall Street and followed that with Silence and The Irishman. Prieto reports that to find the right look and tone for the project, he did a lot of tests, including "all sorts of lenses and di©erent ideas about negatives and looks, even pin-hole photography, a 1917 Bell & Howell vintage camera for the newsreel footage... and infra-red." Another key element was working with colorist Yvan Lucas on the LUTs, starting in prep, and tak- ing it right through post to the DI. "All the careful work we did with the LUTs in prep was essential, as Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker spent many months cutting all the material so they could really get used to the look," he notes. "So, it was crucial that the dailies they were ed- iting with were as close as possible to what I intend- ed, and Yvan also supervised the dailies workflow." Lucas and Prieto made adjustments in the DI, but "it wasn't a big departure from the dailies," notes the DP, who reports he went for a higher level of contrast than in the other films he's done with Scorsese, "to represent the darkness that's happening in the story." Another very dark story, the British Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, about the Auschwitz concentration camp, also earned a Best Picture nomination, as well as four more nominations, in- cluding a Best Director for Jonathan Glazer, whose other films include Under the Skin and Sexy Beast. Brilliantly conceived and shot using a hidden crew, and ten fixed and remotely-operated cameras, as if it were a reality TV show, the horrors of the Holocaust are made even more devastating by a film that never shows the industrial scale mass murder of the gas chambers. Instead, the British di- rector, who adapted his screenplay from the Martin Amis novel, focuses his lens on the wholesome family of the camp commandant, who live se- renely in a lovely house and garden just feet away and separated from the camp by a tall concrete wall. Glazer calls his fly-on-the-wall technique 'Big Brother in the Nazi house,' and it's hard to imag- ine a more e©ective approach to dealing with the house of horrors right next door. The film's soundscape, created by the Oscar- nominated team of Tarn Willers and Johnnie Burn, also plays a crucial role in telling the story, as the banality of the family's everyday life is punctuated with gunfire, mu½ed screams and the sounds of engines that barely register, yet coat every scene with a sense of dread. The German-language The Zone of Interest is joined by two other acclaimed international for- eign-language films in the Best Picture category; Celine Song's Past Lives, a drama about lost love, shot in both Korean and English, and Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, a French courtroom drama that debuted at Cannes, where it won the Palme d'Or. The latter was nominated in four other catego- ries, including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, and together, the three films have set another new Oscar record for the most foreign-lan- guage films ever nominated for Best Picture. It's also notable that two of the eclectic Best Picture list — Past Lives and American Fiction — were directed by neophytes, whose lack of experi- ence belied the impressive results. South Korean- born playwright Celine Song's assured directorial film debut Past Lives is a romantic and deceptively simple film that is both semi-autobiographical and universal with its themes of love and loss. Also, strikingly intimate and ambitious in its scope, Past Lives is broken into three parts spanning countries and decades, and was shot in Seoul and New York. "I didn't know how hard it was going to be shooting my very first movie," says Song. "I think it's the first-timer bravery. I didn't know enough to be afraid, but I loved post and editing. I'm a writer, so I was looking at the editing process very much as editing text. So I honestly felt like I was the most equipped to do post. I had never done it before, but post was like my domain. And what I really loved about editing and VFX in film is that you have so much control to add and remove stu© you don't want or need." Song also loved "the whole DI process" and working on the grade with colorist Tom Poole at Company 3 with her DP Shabier Kirchner. American Fiction is writer Cord Je©erson's direc- torial debut, a comic satire starring Je©rey Wright (nominated for Best Actor) as a novelist who, sick of seeing the establishment profiting from stereo- typical "Black" entertainment, uses a pen name to write an outlandish "Black" book of his own, only to find it become a huge critical and commercial success — the very thing he despises. "Directing is something that you can't really understand until you do it," he reports. "It was sort of like a trial by fire, and just kind of getting in there and doing it." To help deal with the "very steep" learning curve in post, Je©erson relied on the experience of editor Hilda Rasula (French Exit) to help handle "all the tonal changes and pivots that the movie takes, as it goes between comedy and drama." The team edited in the o¬ces of T Street, the production company, which is base to Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman's company, and their go-to VFX supervisor, Giles Harding, oversaw all the film's VFX. All the color grading and mastering was done by FotoKem, and the colorist was Philip Ridley Scott's Napoleon received its sole nomination in the VFX category.