Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1488128
www.postmagazine.com 19 POST NOV/DEC 2022 OUTLOOK O DIRECTORS quite so super-possessive of a project, and I've learned to try and welcome criti- cism (laughs)." OPPORTUNITIES: "I did a pick-up shoot on my new film, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, and that's something I've never had the opportunity to do my whole career. I just never had the money to do it before, so to actually be able to go back during post after looking at your film and seeing what you might still need, and then get it is just amazing. But it takes a lot of logistical work. Luckily, we had great producers, who were very helpful in putting all of it together in terms of bringing people back from around the world for another four days of shooting. That was a first for me, and it's a different element of post, but it was so important to the final film. You can go back, re-edit and keep refining a scene that might be problematic for whatever reason. You re-approach it and re-work it. I even dream about solving the puzzle at night, and suddenly it fell into place, and that's the most amazing feeling." THREATS: "You need time to edit and time to start building in all the other elements of post, and you need a sub- stantial budget to do it properly. In the past, I've run into financial problems in post where there simply wasn't enough money to really do justice to the sound design or VFX. Fortunately, on a musical film like I Wanna Dance with Somebody, there's just no way you can skimp on the post budget." OUTLOOK: "When COVID hit, there was so much talk about streaming and the way it was changing Hollywood, and how it was the end of movies and the end of seeing them in theaters. And while it was a very difficult period, movies and theaters survived. Yes, as a filmmaker, it's far from ideal to think that more and more people now watch your movie on a phone or a tablet, but it's not just the tiny screen that's so limiting. The sound quality is nowhere near what you experience in a theater. But streaming and that way of watching is not going away. It's here to stay. It's just the way things work now. Does it drive me cra- zy as a filmmaker? Absolutely. I just hope that people first experience a film as it was intended, on a big screen with great sound and an audience." JAMES GRAY Armageddon Time, Ad Astra, The Lost City of Z The writer/director/producer made his directorial debut in 1994 at the age of 25 with Little Odessa, a widely acclaimed film, which received the Critics Award at Deauville, the Silver Lion at Venice, and nominations from the Independent Spirit Awards for Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay. Since then, the versatile filmmaker has made a series of dramas set in his native New York City (The Yards, We Own the Night. Two Lovers, The Immigrant, Armageddon Time), as well as ambitious epics set in outer space (Ad Astra) and the Amazon (The Lost City of Z). STRENGTHS: "The big one is having the chance to enhance and expand your orig- inal conception for the film, and to break on through to the other side. And in terms of my own strength in post, it's that I don't stay attached to the original idea. I do have the ability to say, allow me to steal the best ideas. Post for me represents the infinite number of choices you have to expand and improve your film." WEAKNESSES: "And it follows from that, that you should be open to all ideas, but at the same time, you have to recognize that not all your ideas are good or work." OPPORTUNITIES: "There are so many opportunities in post now, but you can hurt your film if you're not really focused, or if you lose sight of what you origi- nally had in mind as the thread. But if you embrace the technology, its effects are incalculable. For instance, you can keep shots you used to have to cut out. You can stabilize the camera when it did a weird thing. You can paint out a boom mic. And now there's this great audio repair program called Izotope RX, which allows you to keep your produc- tion sound tracks, whereas before you'd probably have to loop all the actors. The thing about production sound is, you can never reproduce all the magical little in- flections of the actor on the day, but now you have this new weapon, which allows you to clean up the tracks in a way you never could just a few years ago. So your performances have a greater authentici- ty, and that's just one small opportunity. "It's amazing what these soundtrack advances have done for the cinema experience, and dealing with sound and the mix is my favorite part of post. Sound Anne Hathaway and James Gray during production of Armageddon Time.