Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/964731
www.postmagazine.com 19 POST APRIL 2018 budget and schedule. And we knew we'd have to do all the water work somewhere else, so we built a section of the bridge in a water tank down in Baja Film Studios in Mexico. In the end, we had to cut it down from 40 days to a 32-day shoot, so the pace was pretty grueling." Do you like the post process? "I love it and to be honest, it's my fa- vorite part of the whole thing. First of all, it's saner — just me and the editor actually making the film, and you're not being bombarded with a million ques- tions a day like you are on the set. And I love the whole building part of post — editing and adding all the layers like sound and VFX and so on. It's the most creative part for sure." Where did you post? "It was all done at Chimney in LA. They're a Swedish company who also do great VFX work which we did at their Stockholm facility, and we edited at Chimney LA." This was edited by Keith Fraase. Tell us about that relationship and the editing challenges. "I always shoot in a way where I give myself a lot of options in the edit, and I always find the film in the edit, even when it's a very tight script like this was. We shot it a bit different from the script, and then edited it a bit different from the shoot material, so when you compare the final film with the original script, in essence it's the same, but it's structurally different, and the emphasis is in different parts. In the end, the script was more nonlinear than the final film and for various reasons — partly because of changes I'd made at the start and then during the shoot — we couldn't get that nonlinear approach to work in the edit. So we retooled it and it was much clean- er and flowed better as a linear story. But I resisted doing that till I'd exhausted every possibility. And finding the right tone was a challenge too. I was appalled to find myself laughing in places, be- cause Ted becomes almost infantile, but I wanted to embrace all that and make it work. I'm very heavily involved in the edit. I'm there every day. Keith and I began cutting when I got to LA. and we spent a good six months on it. For me, the editing never stops, and I could just keep going and going. They have to kick me out of the room in the end when you just run out of money. As they say, you never really finish a film — you're just forced to abandon it." Period films always have a lot of VFX. Who was the VFX supervisor and what was involved? "It was Fredrik Nord at Chimney and he was very skilled, and we got these great, seamless shots, mainly background stuff and cleanup, especially on aerial and wide shots. The big sequences were fixing the bridge, which doesn't look like it used to, and doing all the car shots, mostly with green screen." Talk about the importance of music and sound to you. "I'm very hands on with sound design, like with the edit, as I know the film by then, and I knew all the mood shifts and tempo shifts and what they needed. And I didn't want to have the usual source-driv- en soundtrack, so I brought in composer Garth Stevenson who did Tracks for me, and he records a lot of sounds in analog and then in post manipulates and bends them, and gets this great in-between re- sult. And then we did all the sound design and mix on the lot at Warners in LA." Where did you do the DI? "At Chimney with colorist Mats Holmgren who was really great, like everyone at Chimney. It was a great collaboration with them." What's your view of Ted Kennedy today? "I'm so disenchanted with all politicians (laughs). I come from a family of eight kids, with five brothers, and I can't imagine having them all killed in the line of duty, and then being expected to step up and carry the mantle — and in '69 that's where Teddy was at. He was a slam dunk to be the Democratic nominee, but I don't think he had that burning desire to be president like his brothers did, but he understood all the expectations — and then fate stepped in. And after all the tragedy in his family and this whole thing, I think he just committed himself to being the best senator he could be." The film was posted at Chimney in LA. Chappaquiddick was edited by Keith Fraase.