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24 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2019 and we started building the next day with 80 locals employed by the production. After the fire, they behaved toward us as if we'd lost a child." With the Jones deal finalized, the money started coming in and production went so smoothly that it came in under budget. The entire cast and crew, including the locals, received a $650 bonus, and the film's ending credits conclude with "Thanks to the kind people of Rosbeg and Portnoo, County Donegal." The most unpredictable factor during production was the Irish weather. In Sayles on Sayles, the director asserts, "I knew how good Haskell was at making everything match and appear seamless… Some of our montages are supposed to take place in a five-minute period and they were shot on 12 different days." Every day, the call sheet would be distributed with several different shooting plans that depended on how the weather turned out. Another major concern was working with the seals. Wexler and his camera crew photographed most of the key seal scenes, but British wildlife cameraman Jeff Goodman, assisted by American Jeff Wood, also shot some of the seal footage. In addition to actual seals, several animatronic seals were constructed and used. "I told Haskell that the seals and the gulls are characters," Sayles says. "At the opening, the establishing shot is Fiona from the seal's point of view. That was the hardest shot in the whole movie. How do you get seals to look where you want them to? We had to put the seal on a fake rock on top of a raft." During production, assistant editor Plummy Tucker (now ACE), synched dailies in a cutting room over the pub. She had been an apprentice editor on City of Hope and an assistant on Passion Fish; on her next project after Roan Inish, she was already a full editor. "I like working with assistant editors who are ready to cut," Sayles notes. "I cut while I shoot, doing an awful lot of editing in my head," the director confides. Agreeing, Tucker tells CineMontage, "John is economical in his shooting and very clear about what he wants. He's incredible with story structure and character, and writes wonderfully nuanced female characters, with a real focus on authenticity. I'd assemble the scene rolls for John to cut on the Steenbeck: wides, mediums, close-ups… " It generally took a couple of days for prints to come back from the lab in Dublin, but every night, Sayles would announce, "Popcorn, dailies and Guinness," and the footage would be screened for cast and crew in the pub. The shoot wrapped on June 28. During post-production, Sayles and Tucker returned to Ireland and performed a now-obsolete procedure at Dublin's Ardmore Studios. The assistant editor recalls, "We did actual looping, not ADR. We prepped 35mm full-coat mag loops to record on. That was a throwback!" While the shooting was finishing up, second assistant editor Sheila Moloney set up cutting rooms in the garage at Sayles and Renzi's home in upstate New York to be ready for their return. The editor/ director worked on the Steenbeck upstairs while the assistant editors worked downstairs. Sayles remembers that cutting the picture to lock took about 10 weeks at the most. "Editing is where you breathe life into the film," he explains. "All of post is part of it; it's not just me, you get to enlist other people… You take all you have from actors, script, cinematography, sets, wardrobe and music — and make it better. The trickiest editing was the sequences with the seals." For those scenes and other montage sequences in Roan Inish, Tucker recalls that Sayles had shot THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY CONTINUED ON PAGE 26 The Secret of Roan Inish. Samuel Goldwyn Company/ Photofest