Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1151081
26 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2019 a lot of material so he could play with it. Working without an Avid before the great digital changeover, they devised a different method to experiment. "John would lay the sequences out and then we'd take all the shots with handles to a video facility and transfer to tape so he could play with the length of fades, dissolves and supers — you couldn't do that on film," she explains. "Then I'd make a detailed count sheet showing how to recreate it, and we'd take that to an optical house to print." Composer Mason Daring, who has worked on all but one of the filmmaker's features, arranged traditional Irish music for the film's score. After recording some of the score at his own studio near Boston, he and Sayles recorded and cued the rest of the music at Windmill Studios in Dublin (U2's studio) with native musicians playing traditional Irish instruments. When picture was locked early in September, supervising sound editor Philip Stockton, MPSE, came upstate to take all the sound material back to prep at c5 Sound in New York City. "John's jobs were among the first on which I was sole supervisor," Stockton says (Roan Inish was the fifth of nine Sayles movies he has supervised). "When he locks it, it's all ready to go. I'm proud of the dialogue editing; the Irish accents are heard clearly among the ocean and other natural sounds." The sound editor also praised the special quality of the effects devised by Foley artist Marko Costanzo for the Selkie shedding her skin. For the fifth of the 10 Sayles films on which Costanzo has worked, he reveals, "We created a gooey world using wet chamois cloth peeling over a wet burlap sack... We did an additional pass with hand creams that worked best for the viscous slop." After about four weeks of prep at c5 on Sonic Solutions (before ProTools was developed), Tom Fleischman, CAS, did the final mix at Sound One in less than two weeks during October 1993. In January 1995, after its Toronto premiere, The Secret of Roan Inish became the first Sayles film presented at the Sundance Film Festival. Having no idea of how to market such a unique picture, studios gave it a pass on distribution, but First Look Pictures, a unit of the Overseas Film Group, stepped in for domestic distribution. Released on February 3, 1995 in the US, it earned over $6 million dollars in its initial run, Sayles' largest box office take thus far in his career. Overseas went on to distribute it internationally. As our long-term survival becomes more obviously endangered by humankind's blindness to the natural environment from which we've evolved, the reality of the myth depicted in The Secret of Roan Inish may yet find its audience. A child who wants to bring her family back together, and finds living creatures in nature to guide her — that may indeed be a fantasy. But, as the filmmaker himself confirms, "She doesn't just find the magic passageway or the magic ring. She does the hard work." If we all could do the same, we may find reconciliation with one another and with nature itself. f THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY CONTINUED FROM PAGE 24 The Secret of Roan Inish. Samuel Goldwyn Company/ Photofest