Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/914212
65 Q4 2017 / CINEMONTAGE weeks to decompress, and I finish my version of the cut. When he comes back, he watches the footage by himself, takes extensive notes and sends them to me; then I do a completely new version based on his notes. By the time I finish, there's a version that I cut by myself, and a version that he thought of by himself. Then we join forces and start working together. He's very specific about the performances he wants to use. His version of the cut is usually our blueprint. Leslie Shatz: Todd is a director with a strong vision, but he's also really collaborative. He operates at a very high level aesthetically and has a lot of references. You've got to bring your A-game because he's going to be talking about movies from the '50s, '60s and '70s, and you should be prepared to understand the meaning of the references. He wants to be surrounded by people who understand him and tries to solicit their opinions — including from assistant editor Perri Pivovar, who did a lot of the preliminary sound work before I came on. It informs Todd about what the possibilities are, but in the end, he makes his own decision — which often goes against what everybody else said! CM: In Wonderstruck, there are two starkly different worlds and stories that you're creating and moving between — both in terms of time period and the characters' inner worlds. How did you define them? AG: Rose's story was defined by the way she perceived her world, and also the way we chose to portray that world visually rather than sonically. It's very tactile; she builds models, she constructs things out of paper, she touches the meteorite, she has a deeply curious mind. So I tried to emphasize those qualities. Ben's story is different — not only in the sense that it takes place 50 years in the future, but he just got struck by lightning and his whole world has changed. He's learning how to communicate, he's trying to re-think how he's going to travel through his world from this point on. So the idea was to play with sounds, as paradoxical as it may seem, but to transition from a life of hearing to one where you perceive things in different ways. LS: It was one of the biggest challenges I've had, because there are no precedents for what we were trying to do, except for the clichés that people use to represent deafness, such as the ringing tone or muffled sounds. Todd rejected all of that, and rightly so, because he said, "This just makes it sound like they're hearing it when they're not." But we wanted to get inside of the characters' heads. We needed sound that would be a metaphor for what they were hearing — or what the impulses of sound might have done in their brains, had they been able to hear. It took quite a bit of experimentation, but I found myself using musical instruments or musical-type sounds in non-musical ways because those could not be mistaken for real or concrete sounds. I used an autoharp to make percussive sounds. When watching the movie, you probably won't be able to recognize these Wonderstruck. Amazon Studios