Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1230474
DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 13 POST MAR/APR 2020 Talk about the distinct look of the film and working with the DP. "We looked at a lot of documentary work, as we wanted it to feel very spon- taneous. Beasts was shot in 16mm and we shot this in 16mm too because I love the rich look you get and the texture. It just suited this, and we filmed it all with a handheld camera and at the kids' eye-level, using a special rig, so you really see it from their POV. And even though we were in these stunning locations, we wanted to capture the way kids look at their surroundings. Often they're focused on details, not the big picture, and we wanted to show that with a close lens. We also used a lot of natural light, and we shot most of the Neverland scenes in exterior daylight. We did light some inte- riors, and we lit for all the night shoots in Louisiana, but we aimed for a very natu- ral look and feel. We didn't want to make this big adventure film. We wanted all the magic to be organic, and to shoot it as if no one had any idea what was going to happen next." How tough was the shoot? "Incredibly tough. It was like an expedi- tion into the unknown. As we needed a volcano, we shot a lot on Montserrat, the most active volcanic island in the West Indies, and mainly in the volcanic area you're not even allowed into. We ended up having to build roads, staircases down ravines, and using zip-lines to get to places, and often it'd be a three-hour hike to set, so it was extremely arduous for the kids and crew, but it was also this amazing adventure that we'd all signed up for. It all felt larger than life." Where did you post? "It was a many-layered process. The edit was done for the first year in New Orleans, where I live, and I spent a lot of that time also writing the skeleton of the music. I started on my own as we cut, and as we moved the edit into early sound design we moved it to New York so we could edit in parallel with the sound design, and also begin all the VFX. And at the same time we began The Mother operation and creating the glowing Mother blood — little balls of fire, with this pyrotechnics company called Coatwolf in Ventura, CA, who used this flammable substance called Thermite, which we shot underwater in super slow-motion, along with using dirt cannons. The whole idea was to have all those VFX lean on com- positing rather than on CGI. And I rotated between the edit, sound, music and color in New York, and all the element photog- raphy and fabrication in LA. I really love all the aspects of post." Talk about editing with Affonso Gonçalves, who cut Beasts, and Scott Cummings. How did that work? "We didn't really start editing during the shoot as it was just too difficult to get dailies back from the islands. It'd take a week or more, and anyway, by the time we got them, our locations would be washed out or destroyed by storms, and so we couldn't go back and re-shoot even if we'd wanted to. Affonso began an assembly in New Orleans as we got near the end of the shoot, and then when I got back we really began editing in earnest." What were the big editing challenges? "The big one was that we had to keep shooting elements and The Mother all the way through post, so we had gaping holes in the footage available to us. And it was all so unpredictable that we couldn't just plug in things, and that af- fected not just the edit but all the sound design and so on. There were so many moving parts and we were constantly adjusting picture and sound." Obviously all the VFX play a big role. Talk about working on them with post VFX supervisor Jasper Kidd. "I love working with VFX, although it's the most foreign element to me. I started off doing stop-motion animation, so I have this archaic sense of how to create movie magic, and I love practical effects. But Jasper led this great team, and he has the same love of old-school effects, and he really helped me through the pro- cess and taught me the VFX language. A big challenge was that we didn't really design footage for VFX, so for instance The Mother had no stable points — it's all moving all the time, in water, with no camera locked-off, so it was totally un- trackable. So that limited what we could do with VFX on top of it." Talk about the importance of sound and music to you as a filmmaker. "It's everything, and it's just as important as all the visuals, especially in a film like this where so much of the story is told sonically and with the music. If I look at the writing, early stages of the script were far more verbose, with far more talking and speeches from Peter. But as I spent time with the kids, I saw how false that was. When kids are playing, they don't all talk all the time. So all the sounds of nature, the volcano and so on, became far more important, along with the music, in telling the emotional story of the film." Where did you do the DI and how important is it to you? "At Technicolor-PostWorks in New York, with colorist Alex Bickel, and it was so important, and we had a lot to do to make it all look seamless, as we shot in so many places. Our Neverland is actually a hybrid of three islands and then caves in Mexico, and each place has a different light, and the water color is radically different at each place, and although it's mainly shot in the Caribbean, it's not the usual pristine beaches. We focused far more on a raw, almost violent feel. We never wanted it to feel or look like a vacation, so we spent a lot of time in the DI." Did the film turn out the way you envisioned it? (Laughs) "Well, my vision was for it to not turn out like my vision, so yes, I'm very happy with it. I love making films this way, that constantly surprise me." Technicolor-PostWorks handled the DI.