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riter/director Olivia Newman made her feature directorial debut with the boxing drama First Match, and followed that up with the critical and box office hit Where the Crawdads Sing. Her new film, the Netflix release Remarkably Bright Creatures, stars two-time Academy Award–winning actor Sally Field (Lincoln, Forrest Gump) as Tova, a lonely widow who works at a local aquarium and finds joy again when she forms an unlikely bond with Marcellus, a cranky, giant Pacific octopus (voiced by Alfred Molina), and Cameron (Lewis Pullman), a wayward and lost young man who comes to town in search of family. Together, they uncover a mystery that will lead them to a life-changing discov- ery and restore their sense of wonder. Behind the camera, Newman as- sembled a creative team that included cinematographer Ashley Connor, editor Tamara Meem, VFX supervisor Chris Ritvo and colorist Nat Jenks. Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, she talks about the challenges involved, and her love of editing and post. What sort of film did you set out to make? "A movie about loneliness and grief, and how it can shape us, and how our con- nections with people and with animals are so key to our survival. And I wanted the movie to be a movie for everybody, so that anybody watching it could relate to aspects of it and see themselves in it." You previously adapted the novel Where the Crawdads Sing into a hit film, but adapting a novel can be tricky. You co-wrote the script for Remarkably Bright Creatures with John Whittington (Sonic the Hedgehog 3). What were the main challenges of adapting this for the screen? "I felt a little freer with this one to move away from the structure of the book, where each chapter is written from a different character's point of view. So, we decided early on to root it in Tova's experience and point of view, and have Cameron enter her story, and cause this commotion and change in her life. In the book, Cameron and Tova's stories run parallel to each other, and they don't intersect until much later, and we want- ed to have them really influencing each other's lives and having more direct contact. So, dealing with that was the biggest challenge." You got a fantastic cast, led by Oscar- winner Sally Field. What did she bring to the party? "What didn't Sally bring? She was at- tached to this before I came on, and she was incredibly involved every step of the way. She read every draft of the script. She gave copious notes. We noodled and improvised on the set. She brought all of herself and her insights into what it is to be an older woman, and everything you want from this character, and she was willing to be incredibly vulnerable and open, and use all of that vulnerabil- ity. She also has the most wicked sense of humor." What did prep entail, and what were the main technical challenges of dealing with the octopus? "The most amount of prep we did was on creating the octopus, so we did six months of research and design to figure out exactly how we were going to create an octopus that was as photoreal and grounded in reality as possible. And then it was finding all our locations in Vancouver where we shot." Fair to say that if you couldn't create a believable octopus, this wasn't going to work, right? "Yes, and it was terrifying. The first thing we thought was, 'Can we just shoot a real octopus?' But we quickly learned that that would be impossible, because not only are octopuses too smart to be willing to be trained, they're also moody, so you never know if you're going to get an octopus who's interested in touching you and tasting your arm or not. So, then it was: How do we make this octo- pus look as photoreal as possible, and able to interact with the actors, and give them enough to work with, and have the right lighting references? Because an octopus looks alien. Even in real life, it almost looks unreal, and they're con- stantly moving. "They have hundreds of suckers on every tentacle, and each sucker is moving separately from the other. And I really wanted to make sure that we were never taken out of the movie by a fake-looking octopus. So, once we knew that we had to do this in CGI, we did a couple of things. We cast our real oc- topus out of the Vancouver Aquarium. Luckily, they had a giant Pacific octo- pus who was the right size we wanted our CGI octopus to be when we were shooting. So, our VFX team at Untold Pictures, who did all our VFX, shot hours of footage of it in its tank, and when they were animating our CGI octopus, they would do side-by-sides so that everything was based on a real, live oc- topus. We never had the octopus doing anything that we couldn't point to a real reference of an octopus doing. "And then we shot in an actual tank, and we had a puppet built that was about the same size as our CGI octo- pus that had the same color and similar texture for lighting reference. So, it was a combination of puppet, VFX, and then an actual octopus. And the goal was always to shoot and use footage of the real octopus interchangeably with our CGI, so that hopefully the audience won't know when they're seeing the real versus the fake octopus." Tell us about the shoot. "It was a very fast 33-day shoot, and OLIVIA NEWMAN - REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES THIS NETFLIX FEATURE'S CG CHARACTER PROVIDED UNEXPECTED POST OPPORTUNITIES W DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 10 POST MAY/JUNE 2026 BY IAIN BLAIR Director Olivia Newman