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www.postmagazine.com 15 POST NOV/DEC 2024 OUTLOOK FILMMAKING with a 75-inch screen and Bose ampli- fiers. So, when you think of watching at home, it's not the old TV setup. I've been to some art theaters, where there's may- be 30, 40 seats, and it's the same quality screen as you would have at your home, but now you're in the movie theater. So, it isn't about the quality as much as it is the fact that you're sharing it with other people, because that's one thing you don't get at home. So, there are certain things that theater attendance really does well. One is comedy movies, be- cause parents love to see their children laugh with other children. And, of course, movies of wraparound spectacle: IMAX, surround sound and graphic horror mov- ies, because those are date movies. And then you have the art-house movies. But beyond that, there's really no reason for theatrical cinema. And in fact, fewer peo- ple today take cinema seriously. When I was young, I took cinema very seriously. My kids don't take it very seriously, and when viewers don't take it seriously, it's hard to make serious films for them." JOHN CROWLEY We Live in Time, Boy A, Brooklyn, The Goldfinch The Irish director got his start in the- ater before making his feature film debut in 2003 with the award-winning Intermission, a black comedy crime thrill- er that starred Colin Farrell. Since then, he's built a diverse body of work that includes the acclaimed Oscar-nominated rom-com Brooklyn. He's also directed for television, including episodes for the HBO hit True Detective and the tech- heavy sci-fi show Black Mirror. STRENGTHS: "I love the whole post process, and the thing I love most about post is the thinking time you have when you're trying to solve a problem. You don't have to do it today. You can come back to it tomorrow and in theater it's a little bit different. You have a real dead- line, an audience and live actors who are needing to move forward with the process. So in post, I love to be able to sit with an editor and pull a problem apart, and if you want, you can go at it for an hour, six hours, a whole week, or you can walk away from it and go at something else and come back to it. It's very differ- ent to the actual shoot, where the time pressure is everything and there's always that clock ticking in your head." WEAKNESSES: "I'm not sure I would describe it as a weakness but one of the challenging things in post is continually trying to see and hear the work with fresh eyes. It's why screening your film for a test audience is always so revelatory. But I find the score results and focus group infor- mation far less interesting than the quality of listening and attention in the room during a test screening. You suddenly have blinding clarity on what's reading well and what's muddy or uninvolving." OPPORTUNITIES: "The grade is a big opportunity to sculpt the look. For instance, on We Live in Time, I knew that shooting contemporary London isn't very easy and trying to do it in a way that doesn't feel like you're trying to make an American movie is tricky. It's not gritty realism, but it's not aspira- tional rom-com land either. So, you're landing into an area which is about naturalism and communication of emo- tion largely through faces and bodies, and spreading it out to the rooms, and then when you want to go wide, finding something beautiful and graphic. And there are lots of frames in the film which are almost abstract, which we discussed at great length both on-set and in the grade. So the first time the two protagonists meet in the hospital corridor after the car crash scene, they are against white backgrounds, because I wanted it to feel slightly dreamlike and almost like they're in the afterlife, and there's no visual information at all in that until you come wide. So, there's plenty of that kind of playfulness in there, and expression and expressivity within the ballpark of realism, which you can highlight in post." THREATS: "The thinking time you get in post — the time to worry at some intractable problem, walk away from it and come back to find you have a way of solving it — is still one of the great luxuries of post production, even on a tight schedule and a tight budget. But there's also pressure in post, where you have screenings with financiers, and then test screenings and then ultimately the audience. So, there's a little bit of anxiety always. Is it as clear as it can be? Is it as good as it can be? Is it too long? Is it too short? So, post can also be quite a stressful time." OUTLOOK: "I'm hoping that mid-bud- get, grown-up films will find a more secure footing in the theatrical land- scape again." Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh with We Live in Time director John Crowley.