Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/681807
19 Q2 2016 / CINEMONTAGE Diener's involvement in Hemingway & Gellhorn sprang in part from relationships she had established earlier in her career. She had been a music editor on HBO's The Rat Pack (1998), on which she worked with Klean, and on The Warrior's Way (2010), a Chinese-language film scored by Navarrete. And her husband — composer and former music editor and arranger, Mark Adler — knew Murch from working on The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and The Godfather: Part III (1990). On the latter film, Diener was brought in as an additional music editor. The confluence of collaborators served Diener well, in spite of the fact that HBO was initially seeking a music editor based in Northern California, the site of shooting and post-production (the mix was completed at Skywalker Sound). "It was kind of a perfect triangulation, because I knew different principals, and Javier thought it would be fun to have me," she reflects. "I was lucky that I got to go up there because they were looking at local people." In July 2011, Diener traveled to San Francisco to begin what ended up being a three-month stint on the film. The work environment, involving a multitude of voices, differed from past projects. Navarrete was present throughout post-production, and Murch and Kaufman contributed a steady stream of ideas. All four worked in close proximity. "I knew that Walter would be very hands-on with many facets of the music and sound," Diener observes. "He basically puts his stamp on a lot of stuff, in a good way." Diener — joined by Kaufman and Navarrete — spent a total of two 12-hour days in Murch's editing room for music spotting sessions. "By the way, Walter is just like Hemingway — he stands when he works," Diener remembers, referring to the author's aversion to sitting while writing. During the spotting sessions, it was decided which scenes required music composed by Navarrete and which called for source music. "I was writing everything down in longhand," Diener adds, "and from those notes I generated our detailed spotting notes, which served as our roadmap for the rest of post-production." In the end, that roadmap had many detours: Hemingway & Gellhorn included 100 cues: 55 score cues represented about 56 minutes of screen time and 45 source cues represented about 48 minutes of screen time. Diener says it is one of the most music-heavy films on which she has worked — apart from actual musicals like The Music Man (2003). "I think it may take the cake because of the way it was designed," she comments. "It's Phil, it's Walter." While he was cutting, Murch made modifications to early versions of Navarrete's score, including combining or pitch-shifting specific cues. "Sometimes, I'd leave at midnight and he'd still be standing in his room working," Diener says of Murch. "He would take a lot of our work, and even the sound editor's work, play with it and then put it back." But Diener appreciated Murch's brainstorms. "For me, sometimes if it's really working, I don't mess with it," Diener comments. "But he likes to see, 'Well, what other things can we do? Where can we take this that it hasn't already gone?'" It was the music editor's task to assure that the experimentation sounded effortless. "The hard part was that there were certain spots where he did wonderful, creative, crazy things in Final Cut Pro, and then Phil fell in love with them," Diener says. "When we eventually had the final recordings of all of Javier's music spread into lots of music stems, I had to recreate what Walter had done with Javier's synthesizer mockups." For example, for a scene in which Hemingway experiences a kind of nervous breakdown while fishing, Murch enhanced the music to match the writer's garbled mental state (even merging the sound Hemingway & Gellhorn. HBO/Photofest