Post Magazine

D I R E C T O R ' S C H A I R N EW YORK — Filmmaker Jonathan Demme will probably always be best known for his chilling thriller The Silence of the Lambs, which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. But this director/producer has built up a diverse body of work over the past 30 years, including Philadelphia, Married to the Mob, Something Wild and Beloved, and in recent years he's focused more and more on documentaries. Appropriately enough, his new feature film, Rachel Getting Married, was shot in HD — on Sony F900R, F900R HDCAM SR and a Canon XHG1 — and has a documentary feel and the look of a home movie. A family drama, penned by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney Lumet), it stars Anne Hathaway as a recovering drug addict who gets out of rehab for the weekend of her sister's wed- ding, where she's confronted by past and present demons. Here, in an exclusive interview, the direc- tor talks about making Rachel Getting Mar- ried, his love of post and documentaries. POST: What sort of film did you set out to make? JONATHAN DEMME: "The most beauti- ful home movie ever.The two basic reasons I made this are: I fell in love with the script, and it offered me a chance to work in the indie mode and in a style I've been admiring and am excited by. And I had a bee in my bonnet about Anne Hathaway, and luckily she wanted to do it. We shot for nearly six weeks and just let the camera roll as it was HD, and as we didn't waste any time setting up shots, we could move very quickly, which kept it all ver y spontaneous for the actors, which is exactly what I wanted." POST: Your cinema verite feel and approach reminds me a lot of Robert Altman films. DEMME: "I bask in the comparison [laughs]. I love Altman and his films and style, and for me it was always a big challenge to all filmmakers — would you dare to work this way? [laughs]. I also love Lars von Trier and a lot of the Danish films, so what I really tried to do here was capture some of that loose, any- thing-goes approach, and at the end of the film I actually include a thank you to Altman." POST: Is it true that several of the actors were also shooting handheld HD footage that you later used along with all the material shot by your DP Declan Quinn? DEMME: "Yes, which helped with the spontaneous feel I wanted, but it meant we also had so much coverage to go through in post. I barely watched dailies on this shoot. I was just glued to the monitor all the time. I barely talked to the actors and went into the room where they were shooting as little as possible, and as a result, at the end of each day I knew exactly what we had." POST: All that footage must have been a big challenge for your editor, Tim Squyres, whose credits include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Altman's Gosford Park. Had you worked with him before? DEMME: "Never. He barely came on the set with me. He was back in New York in his cutting room getting the footage. I got to know him on the job and, of course, knew his great credits, including the film he'd done with Altman. I told him I was taking this very docu- mentary approach. I warned him that there would be very little regard for matching on the set, and he was totally unfazed by that. "I've been lucky enough to work with re- ally great editors over the years, and Tim did something that's never happened to me be- fore: I began to get DVDs of cut scenes while I was still shooting. So I'd look and tell him, 'That scene's coming together ver y nicely,' and no sooner had I said that, version two arrived, and he'd already edited a totally different version of the scene using all differ- ent material. And sometimes there was even a third version, and I was slightly over- whelmed and disoriented by it all, and I thought, 'Gosh, since they all look good, it's going to be ver y confusing tr ying to select which version to go with.' But it was great fun and verification of the fact that, yes, all this material can go together — and in a va- riety of ways." [Editor's Note: Squyres worked on two Avid Media Composer 2.8 Adrenaline HD systems, editing DNxHD 36 all the way through.] POST: How did your documentar y ap- proach affect the edit and post? DEMME: "In terms of what's in the fin- ished movie versus the script, 100 percent of the script is in the movie, but there's another 30 percent of stuff that wasn't in the script — things we filmed that added accents. "For example, the wedding had been written with highlighted moments, and it skipped from key moment to key moment, all of which are in the film. But I also felt chal- lenged in setting up a moment, then another, and I realized that, consistent with our wish to make this feel as documentary-like as pos- sible, the easiest way to do it was to just let all the actors stage an entire wedding, do everything, fill in whatever blanks in the script were there, and then just edit it all out later. Jonathan Demme: Rachel Getting Married By IAIN BLAIR This director embraced HD for a film that feels more like a doc than a drama. Jonathan Demme: "I adore the magic of seeing what happens when different images are juxtaposed with each other and you add sound and music — the magic of a story unfolding through editing." 24 Post • October 2008 www.postmagazine.com Rachel Getting Married was cut by editor Tim Squyres on an Avid Adrenaline HD system.

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