Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1436481
www.postmagazine.com 19 POST NOV/DEC 2021 OUTLOOK O DIRECTORS I also see the whole experience as being an emotional — even spiritual — journey, that one makes. And that's the biggest opportunity and most important aspect of post for me. You can learn all the other stuff, but not that." THREATS: "The big ones are the same old ones — lack of time and lack of money. In the last few years there's been more and more pressure to cut post schedules and budgets, and yet you have more visual effects shots in every film now, even if it has nothing to do with su- perheroes and magical powers. And you can do so much with them now, but you need the time and budget to do it right." OUTLOOK: "I'm really optimistic, as there's no point in being pessimistic. As Mike De Luca told us when we were trying to get Cyrano financed during the pandemic, 'You're either betting on the future or you're betting against it.' So I have to bet on the future of movies and I have to believe that somehow this art form that I've dedicated my life to is going to continue to grow and flourish, despite COVID and the way kids are in- creasingly streaming stuff on tiny screens and phones. I think the biggest problem with the potential loss of the theatrical experience is in sound. I love a big image and seeing the human face blown up 20-feet high and made epic. Close ups are always my favorite shots on the big screen. So if you want a bigger picture, you can just sit closer to your TV. But sound is very different thing. I design my films to be heard in a 7.1 sound system that is utterly immersive, and I put a lot of work into the sound of every film, and I often go to see a film in a cinema to just get that great sound experience. So to lose that and just hear it through the tiny little speaker on your TV or — even worse — your laptop, is utterly tragic." REINALDO MARCUS GREEN King Richard, Monsters and Men, Joe Bell The indie director burst on the scene when his first feature, Monsters and Men, had its world premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and received a Special Jury Prize for Outstanding First Feature. Green's credits include directing episodes of the Netflix series Top Boy, and his sophomore feature, Joe Bell, starring Mark Wahlberg, which premiered at TIFF 2020. STRENGTHS: "The main one for me is that it's storytelling, right? I love post because it's where you pull it altogether — all the raw ingredients, from picture and sound to VFX and right through the DI. And the post process is where you find out exactly what your film wants to be. On my latest film, King Richard, we tested it and were able to go back and tweak scenes and cut stuff or speed the pace up a bit where people felt it was a bit slow, and that's the great thing about post — you can re-order scenes and shots, and reshape your story." WEAKNESSES: "There's never enough time, however long you have. But I also worry about the running time (on) a lot [of my films]. You love everything and you don't want to get rid of a single scene. So letting go [of the film] is still something I'm learning how to do. You can go on forever, trying to improve this and that. The other thing is, you can't have any weak links on the post chain if you want your movie to work. You need great sound design, great visual effects, great grading, great everything." OPPORTUNITIES: "I love learning all about the post process. For instance, on my latest film, King Richard, I had the opportunity to do stuff I'd never done before, like working with previs and complex visual effects. It was a bit of a learning curve on both, but I loved it. In terms of the previs, we really needed it to figure how the best way of shooting all the tennis scenes, and I'd worked with storyboard artists before and it was just a different way of doing that. So I really got into previs. And then that all feeds into working with the VFX, which were crucial in how we'd shoot all the big tennis sequences, as all the VFX had to make all that stuff seamless. But then when COVID hit, we needed even more VFX work in terms of creating extras and crowds. We literally shot the final scene with just 100 extras in the stadium before COVID shut us down, and the stadium seats over 7,000, so that took a lot of VFX work to fill it up in post, but you can do it. That's the beauty of post." THREATS: "Budget — or lack of — can be a big threat in post, but I think the real big one in the past year or so was Reinaldo Marcus Green: There is "no substitute" for the big-screen experience.