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director's chair the avenue, including the inau- gural motorcades of two presi- dents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. Staying true to the historical record, Eastwood also used Nixon's eulogy at the end, "word for word. I had to leave all the curse words in, since Nixon recorded every- thing — cost me an R rating, but it's completely accurate." THE POST Eastwood is renowned for working fast and being very loyal to his key creative team and crew. On J. Edgar East- wood once again teamed with such regular collaborators as DP Tom Stern, who has worked with Eastwood on Invictus, Gran Torino and Change- ling among others, and editors Joel Cox (an Oscar-winner for Unforgiven) and Gary Roach, who's worked with the direc- tor since 1996. Cox has worked with Eastwood for over 35 years now. "He started working for me as an assistant editor on The Outlaw Josey Wales back in 1976," Eastwood, "and he took over when Ferris Webster, states with whom he co-edited films like When Eastwood and crew walked into the Library of Congress (top photo) they knew they had to shoot there. "It's so impressive," says the director. locations in DC. For the various horse track scenes, the team reviewed video of tracks in Del Mar, California, and Baltimore, and then built a section of tiered box seats. DP Tom Stern then shot DiCaprio and Hammer "watching" the races with a greenscreen behind them. The CG backgrounds of vari- ous environments were later integrated in post with footage of different races that spanned several decades. But some locations couldn't be faked on camera or in post, including the Library of Congress. "It's so impressive, you just want to shoot it," says Eastwood. "The moment we walked in, we knew we'd have to try for it, whatever part they'd make available to us." In the end, the filmmakers were given a lot of access to the library — "and a lot of help and cooperation from the FBI," he adds. "We did shoot from Hoover's balcony, to get the shots we needed." To help convey Hoover's perspective from his office overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, visual effects supervisor Michael Owens and his team created various period versions of 14 Post • January 2012 Every Which Way But Loose and Escape From Alcatraz, retired. I think we've done over 30 films together since then and again, it's a very collaborative relationship." Cox and Roach edited on the Avid Media Composer. (See Post's December issue for an interview with Cox and details of the process.) Does he ever feel the urge to bring in fresh blood? "Sometimes we use a lot of new people, and the last few crews have had some new faces," he reports. "But it's good to have staple people you can always depend on, and you hate to pass over someone who's great at the job just to try new blood. There's nothing wrong with the old blood if it's really good. Sometimes when someone's not available you'll try someone new and like them, and then it's a dilemma who you use the next time." For Eastwood, editing is when you have "the most control over a film, because you can make almost anything happen as long as you have the pieces and planned for it. By this point in my career I know exactly what cover- age I have. I've always liked editing because it's www.postmagazine.com when you breathe life into it." Editing J. Edgar was "a pretty complex task" he allows, "because of all the jumping back and forth from one era to another." The director says he's always been a "big fan" of the post process. "I enjoy all of it. The shooting is fun to some degree. In the old days I used to be far more impatient with the shooting. I liked it, but I didn't know how to pace myself as well. So at that time my favor- ite part was editing, because you'd gotten rid of all the crew and there's no pressure. You're working with one person. But now I like shooting a lot more and I don't kill myself with it so much. But post is the time when you really get to see what you have and make the film you want to make." As usual, Eastwood composed the music for J. Edgar and worked closely with music editor Chris McGeary and sound editors Alan Robert Murray and Bub Asman. "Music and sound are so important," he notes. "The use of, the choices of when to use it, when not to, are all very important. Some directors don't care too much about it and they figure they've done their job when the story's told, but to me it's an important factor because it's like a finishing touch that can really make the difference. It adds to the soul of the movie. I've seen movies that had no music and I loved them. Sometimes it's over-used, so it's a question of selectivity." All the post for J. Edgar was done on the lot at Warner Bros. Visual effects and digital animation were done by Method Studios in Vancouver, with additional visual effects done by Lola Visual Effects. The DI was done at Technicolor with colorist Jill Bogdanowicz. So what's Eastwood's ultimate take on Hoover? Was the man so repressed that he couldn't love anyone — or express that love? "I think he loved Tolson for sure, and probably Gandy, too," says the director, who also brings up Hoover's seamier side. "His second-in- command at one point, Sullivan, took the fall for writing the [blackmail] letter to Martin Luther King Jr. Sullivan claimed he wrote it, but Lance figured — and I agreed — that Hoover was such a hands-on control freak that Sullivan wouldn't have written it without Hoover knowing about it. "I think he's an enigma, even in death," he states. "I don't think anyone will ever really know the whole truth. There's a mystery quality to him, which is fun — it's certainly much more fun to speculate about someone like that who had done so much, and try to solve that mystery, than know everything about him. Then maybe it wouldn't be worth telling as a story."