Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/501792
26 CINEMONTAGE / SPRING 2015 Yemen. Both environments are located in deserts and have some eerie physical similarities. "It's interesting to contrast the two environments because it makes us understand that we are also vulnerable to the same kind of drone warfare in which we are engaging," he continues. "In addition to that, there are stories within Yemen that we only learn from the screens in the GCS trailer, an 8-by-30-foot metal box. And what's happening on those screens really determines the work day of the GCS crew." But then there's a pivotal scene where there's collateral damage and two children are killed. "That makes the drone pilots — and us — start to question the whole idea of what they're doing," Staenberg reflects. The way they approached Good Kill, Niccol and director of photography Amir Mokri, ASC, went to Morocco for about a week during pre-production and shot what would become plates for use in the GCS trailer, as per the script. For the scene when the arms dump is blown up, they found a building and shot it using helicopters and cranes in a way that it could be manipulated in post and put on screen as the drone's point of view. Meanwhile, Staenberg spent about two weeks in pre- production doing a very rough cut just of that material. "We put in a few stock explosions I got off the Internet," he says. "But we had no shots of the actors, so I cut the scenes like we were there. And Andrew used those on the set to work with the actors to achieve the performances we have in the movie." Then Staenberg completely re-worked this template once he commenced his actual edit. Interestingly, though, the experience on Good Kill reminded him of one of his favorite movies — Das Boot — because of the sense of claustrophobia and the mounting tension the filmmakers were trying to capture. "One of the challenges was how to handle those GCS scenes — having the actors interact with the screens," Staenberg recalls. "These are actual scenes in the GCS trailers that show the pilots and operators what the drone is seeing. I had a lot of over-the-shoulder shots and others that grounded you in the location. But then more and more as we went through passes in the movie, Andrew and I started having philosophical conversations about how we wanted to handle these shots. So I started making them more full-screen because we found that this perspective puts you better inside the heads of Tommy and the other characters." An important editorial challenge, however, pertained to creating a character arc out of Hawke's minimalistic performance. His conflicted protagonist internalizes