Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/65909
surprised when those shots come in and sud- denly make the final film look and feel real, the way you kept hoping it would (laughs)." POST: Your visual effects supervisors were Ken Ralston, who has won five Oscars for his pioneering work on films such as Star Wars, and Jay Redd, whose credits include Stuart Little and Monster House. Tell us about working with them. (See page 18 for an interview with Ralston and Redd.) SONNENFELD: "I loved working with them, and they really complement each other. Ken is a very laid-back supervisor, and he doesn't get that technical. It's all about story- telling. If you have any questions, he'll say, 'Don't worry, just shoot it and we'll figure it all out later.' Jay is much more worried about all the technical stuff. So it's a good combination, and you always know who to go to, depend- ing on what answer you want." POST: What's your overall approach to visual effects? Some directors hate them. SONNENFELD: "I love them, and I'm very involved in every aspect of them. Here's my feeling about visual effects — hopefully at the end of the movie, no one will know that there were any visual effects. I think that means I'm very interested in depth of field. I like to shoot the plates with the same lenses that you shoot the foreground with. "There are some people who have an aes- thetic where, when you're shooting with com- puter graphics, you do away with the laws of physics and every single thing is in focus. But I don't like that or believe in that. If I'm on a 21mm close-up of some actor's face on blue- Men in Black 3: Imageworks provided the visual effects. screen, I expect the background to be out of focus. And even though I could have it all in focus, I think the audience starts to realize that it's not real and that it's looking far more like a videogame than a film. It just looks fake. So I'm always asking if we can throw the background more out of focus, or should we rack focus — just things like that. Ken and Jay have totally the same approach and aesthetic — which is: 'We're making a film where the visual effects don't stand alone. They have to be an organic part of the storytelling process,' which is why I love working with them so much, because you're working with filmmakers, not technicians." POST: I hear the film has some very big set pieces full of visual effects? What were the most difficult shots to do and why? SONNENFELD: "We had two big effects sequences, one at Shea Stadium and one at the Apollo 11 moon launch. The audience will see that launch sequence as a completely exterior scene, but we shot it all exclusively on the stage, and it was all a bit annoying to shoot because we just didn't have the right stage. We did it in New York, but that's a sequence you really want to shoot in LA on a huge stage with 45-feet to the grid. But we were on a stage that was much lower to the grid, and that became a big chal- lenge for my DP [Bill Pope], as the lights had to be hung too low, which then became a challenge to Ken and Jay, because we just couldn't get the lights out of the shots. "So we ended up having to do a lot of rotoscoping and removal to take out all the lights and rigs, as opposed to just doing it bluescreen. But in terms of storyboarding and previs, we'd done all that ahead of time, so recreating Shea Stadium was pretty easy. I will say that post was a lot of work to make all these sets work, and Ken and Jay basically rebuilt our sets in post. They built CG versions of pretty much everything we did, so we ended up throwing out a little more of the sets than I expected." POST: Tell us about audio and the mix. How important is it in your films? SONNENFELD: "It's hard to overstate its importance. I actually believe that comedy lives or dies by the subwoofer (laughs). I'm a big subwoofer fan and I love using it for comic effects, and also to give manliness to a movie. I remember the first film I ever shot as a DP was Blood Simple for the Coen brothers, and they're very visual, but when it came time to choose a New York theater for the premiere, they chose a theater with much better sound but lousier projection, as opposed to one with great projection and lousy sound. As the DP I was outraged! But the truth is, if you asked me right now to choose between screening MIB3 in a theater with better sound or one with better projection, I'd pick the one with the better sound. So sound's really important to me. "I've always worked with great sound designers, and Paul Ottosson, who won the Oscar for Hurt Locker, did the design and mix- ing and effects. Tommy Fleischman, who just won the Oscar for Hugo, did the dialogue and music mixing. We did all the mixing on the Sony lot, and Danny Elfman once again wrote a great score." POST: Did you do a DI? SONNENFELD: "Yes, at Efilm with Steve Scott, who's excellent. Both Bill and I have done a variety of sessions with him, because we need to get the DI very early. I've been doing DI work throughout the whole movie so we can bake certain shots into the right timing, and then give it back to the visual effects guys, and doing it early will also help with the 3D conversion." POST: Did the film turn out the way you hoped? SONNENFELD: "No, it turned out so much better! I'm really happy with it and when I screened the final mix for the studio, they were over the moon." www.postmagazine.com Post • May 2012 15 Paul Ottosson and Tommy Fleischman were the audio post team on the film. Composer Danny Elfman provided the score.