Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1397791
before. There were places where I really pulled back and let the choreography do its work. Q How cognizant were you about having the film exist as a separate artistic creation? I knew there were certain songs cut out of the film, and I knew there were cer- tain characters that were gone or altered. While we were making the movie, I tried to forget that history. I had to make the best version of this film, and not feel the weight of what it was in the past. I wanted to respond to it emotionally. During pre-production, I went up to Jon's apartment and he showed me a bunch of storyboards and rehearsal footage cut together. I just immediately started weeping. He said, "That's a reaction a lot of people have. Remember that feeling." Q The movie has a very particular framing device. Did you back and forth a lot about how much you wanted to emphasize that aspect? It was the bane of our existence, and also the greatest thing to try and figure out. At the end of the day, you don't nec- essarily need (the framing device). We felt that it was important for a number of reasons. One, it literally created breaths between musical numbers. For Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), telling these stories to the kids is about passing on these little details to the next gen- eration before everything disappears. Personally, I like how the device screws with you every once in a while. It pulls you out right when you get sucked in. I think there's a longing to get back to our characters. I think that longing is what Usnavi is experiencing. Q What was it like working with the army of artists and technicians who made up the post team? As the dailies poured in, Jon and I looked to Mark Russell, visual effects supervisor, Tim Donovan, visual effects editor, Skylar Nichols, visual effects coordinator, and the rest of the in-house visual effects team, Coche Gonzales and John Ashby, to help develop our temps. If we wanted the man-hole cover to spin like a record scratch they could create a temp version in a couple of days. If we wanted our split screens to look like sides of the bodega store cans, they could do that too. Our shot of Usnavi rapping with the dancers in the bodega window reflection started with our in-house post team. It was the same as our giant crane shot with dancers at the end of the number. Even a visual effects light on top of the George Washington Bridge had a subtle visual effect to match to the beat of the clave at the beginning of the film. Our Long Island beach was transformed into the Dominican Republic by adding palm trees and a deeper blue to the water. Q How did the music shape the editing? Our music editors, Jim Bruening and Jennifer Dunnington, were great. During the opening number, for example, Jim and Jennifer provided 5.1 mixes we could use in the edit. They also provided a temp score by pulling apart the stems of the pre-re- cords of the music. They also helped map out how to begin the underscore (which was really the opening song) for the film. Jon and I liked a little musical motif that was at the end of the film that we wanted in the beginning, so they made a temp version for us. Th ey co u l d t h e n s e n d t h i s to t h e composers, Alex L acamoire and Bill Sherman, as a road map for the final ver- sion. As the edit of the opening became more refined, Jim and Jennifer provided detailed notes on how to get the picture to match to the music. Some were to help sync, to get a phrase or vocal to match the actors mouth, and others, helped things like how a coffee maker switch could be "tuned" ... [to] match the music. Q In terms of your working methods, did you tend to separate the musical numbers from the rest of the film? I treated them all like scenes that kept coming in. I did have a tendency to be pretty overwhelmed by the amount of footage that came in with the musical numbers. I would select little sections at a time, work on them, put them away and then work on a smaller scene. Some of the musical numbers took weeks, or even months, over the course of the entire shoot. The opening took basically from the beginning of the shoot until it was the last thing they shot, with the community chorus. If Jon wanted me to cut together something very quickly, I could always 25 F A L L Q 3 I S S U E F E A T U R E SEE PAGE 55 Myron Kerstein. P H O T O : M Y R O N K E R S T E I N