CineMontage

Winter 2015

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27 WINTER 2015 / CINEMONTAGE feel works while making sure we got the emotion equally from both sides — in Iraq and when the character is at home." The Iraq, stateside and flashback sections of the movie were deliberately paced somewhat differently to separate the nature of the emotional content of those different sections, according to Roach. Additionally, the movie features more close-ups than typical in an Eastwood picture, because of the solitary nature of being a sniper had to be highlighted by "clearly showing emotion through his eyes and reactions on his face," along with "creating the tension between the character and the subject, since his job was to take that person out," he adds. "That is a very powerful aspect of this movie." American Sniper was the second consecutive movie Eastwood has shot using digital cameras (the first was Jersey Boys) — the first digitally acquired films of his long career. Roach says one advantage creatively of this change was that it allowed the editors to more easily and instantly access larger amounts of Eastwood's coverage. "There was quite a bit more footage on this one and, in many cases, action shot with multiple cameras," he explains. Adair is one of the few Boyhood crewmembers to stay on the project for 12 years — long enough for her and Linklater to work on 11 other projects together during the time it took them to build the story of a boy [Ellar Coltrane] going from first grade to college. Generally, she says, Linklater shot a few days each year, and then Adair followed with a few weeks of editing before closing the project down and waiting a year before repeating the cycle. Central to being able to make it all work, she says, was Linklater's decision to shoot the entire movie on 35mm film in order to avoid multiple formats and looks. Although the project lived for 12 years, Adair says that reality made her job easier creatively, in some ways. "Rick and I had the opportunity to look at footage edited and assembled before he shot the next sections each Gary Roach, left, and Joel Cox. Photo by Wm. Stetz Sandra Adair.

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