Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/915639
www.postmagazine.com 27 POST DECEMBER 2017 OUTLOOK O DIRECTORS efficiently. The edit on Darkest Hour took about six months, and for the first time — as I'd committed to directing a play, Life of Galileo — I took a six-week hiatus to do that, and I found it to be so helpful, when I came back to it with fresh eyes. So I plan to take a break like that during editing from now on." OUTLOOK: "Obviously the whole indus- try and the way movies are made and distributed now is changing very quickly. But storytelling will always adapt, and that won't change fundamentally, be- cause we need stories. My chosen form to tell them is in movies, but I directed an episode of Black Mirror last year, which I really enjoyed doing, and there's no doubt that a lot of what's happening in TV today is really exciting and interest- ing. Making the kind of adult dramas I do in movies is definitely much harder now, and that does worry me. But then you also have all the new streaming platforms, and companies like Netflix and Amazon getting into creating content, so I feel the future is pretty bright. I'm optimistic." MICHAEL APTED Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorillas In The Mist, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The World Is Not Enough and The Up Series The versatile British filmmaker began his career in TV as a researcher on The Up Series, which he first worked on back in 1964, and which he returns to every seven years like clockwork (56 Up came out in 2012, and 63 Up will air in 2019). Comfortable in any genre and equally at home making big budget tent poles or micro-budget documentaries, Apted's movies range from prestige Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning dramas (Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorillas In The Mist), to thrillers (Unlocked, Gorky Park), comedies (Continental Divide), music documen- taries (Sting's Bring on the Night) and a blockbuster Bond film (The World Is Not Enough). He's also directed such TV proj- ects as Ray Donovan and Masters of Sex. STRENGTHS: "You can fix so much in post, and you can get yourself out of all sorts of trouble these days, thanks to all the tools available, which never existed when I began making movies. It's pretty amazing what's possible now, although I'm not one of those directors who says you can fix it all in post. If you didn't have a good stab at it during the shoot, I'm not sure you can ever recover or entirely turn it around from being a dreary first cut to being something really terrific. You've got to have the bones of something good if you're going to make a good film in post. That may not be quite so true if you're doing a big Marvel superhero movie full of VFX, or a Narnia or a Bond film, but if you're doing an adult drama, like most of my films, the heart of the film has to be in the shooting. So I don't think you neces- sarily make a film in post unless it is one of those spectacular VFX films." WEAKNESSES: "There's always that feeling that you can keep messing about with a cut or VFX shot or whatever, and never want to stop because it's so easy in post now with all the digital systems. I'm not putting post production down, but I think you pretty much know if a film's going to work at all when you see the first cut, even if it makes you feel ill, which is usually the case. You can see if the heart of the film is there, and if it just lies there like it's dead, probably no amount of work in post can rescue it. I suppose because of my documentary background, I feel that the gathering of the material is crucial, and without the right material all the work in post will only highlight the problems and initial weaknesses of your material." OPPORTUNITIES: "The wonderful thing now in post are the endless opportuni- ties you have in editing and mixing, and the endless ways you can strengthen the core performances and all aspects of a film. Maybe you want to give it a slightly different look than the one you were able to get while shooting, and it's so easy now. There's so much flexibility, and while you can only go so far with per- formance, short of re-shooting stuff, you have the chance to radically alter tone and pace and use music and sound de- sign to emphasize and highlight things. You can make it more elegant in post, or sweeten it, or darken it, or speed it up or slow it down." THREATS: "I think the big one is proba- bly the same for all directors — the way they're trying to shorten the whole post schedule more and more, and you need to be very careful to keep your resources available for post, and not let them get used up in production fixes. Often they try and cut you short on the post budget now, and you have to fight that. The sim- ple truth is, you never have enough time and money for post, as you could go on forever working on the film." OUTLOOK: "So much is changing with distribution and new platforms and ways of viewing, like streaming. And you can make a lot more films now, thanks to the technology — although I'm not sure we need more. And I think maybe audiences are finally tiring of huge VFX films that are all spectacle with no heart. That's what was so interesting about Wonder Woman. It clearly had a beating heart. It wasn't just a construction of post production. It had some humor, great action and more life to it than many similar films. Same with Dunkirk. Audiences really embraced both, so that's hopeful for the future." Unlocked