Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512899
www.postmagazine.com 23 POST NOV/DEC 2023 some new blood and a new kind of thinking. So I think, yeah, it's a combination of the two." How long was the shoot? Were you shooting mostly on stages since much of this world was created through production design? Robbie Ryan: "We started like September 20th and finished (around) December 15th. I think it was like a 45-day shoot, or 50." Yorgos Lanthimos: "Something like that. But of course, there was a lot of pre-production, and building the sets started early on. As soon as I envi- sioned the film, I thought that we should build the world, because it was such a specific world that we had to build most of it in a studio. Actually, I think if we could aˆord it, we would have built everything in the studio. There was there's a small part of it, like a 10 percent, I think, that we used real loca- tions, but even then we tried to kind of make them feel very similar to the sets. We added elements on location and we adapted them to look according to how the rest of the world looked. [There's] very little that we actually shot on-location." What drove the decision to shoot on film? Robbie Ryan: "Well, since The Lobster, Yorgos kind of decided that film was the way to capture cinema, and I think we both loved shooting on film. Because of The Favourite, it was a given that this one would be on film as well. We tried out some new film stocks as well. People like to say it's more expensive, but I don't know if I fully agree…I think (it) can be a false economy to say 'digital is cheaper.' I think you can kind of balance that out. I feel we were aware of what celluloid might bring expense wise, but we weren't over using it." Is that a matter of really planning out your shots and not allowing for happy accidents? Yorgos Lanthimos: "It depends really. There might be some instances where you do want that. For example, when we're in Lisbon, the dancing scene, we were shooting with two cameras at some point. Robbie was shooting the guests while they were unaware of being filmed, which is something that you just shoot and hope that you'll get something. I don't think we did in the end." Robbie Ryan: "We did we did cover the dance scene very well." Yorgos Lanthimos: "But the rest of the time, I think we discuss when we're there on-set. We rehearse the scene briefly with the actors, and then we fig- ure out the kind of shots we want to do. And then it's specific, but we also see how it goes. If some of the shots that we imagined don't necessarily cover the things that we want to do, then we might come up with another shot. It's a little bit of an AD nightmare, the fact that they don't know how many shots we're going to do in this scene. But we make that clear from the beginning." Robbie Ryan: "Instead of an AD telling us, 'How many shots do you want?' We'd say, 'How long have we got to shoot the rest of the scene?' And in a way, we could then figure out how to achieve that and get it done in the time we had, and to be able to move on to the next scene." I see you did some shooting on an LED stage. Can you talk about how much of the world was captured in-camera? Yorgos Lanthimos: "A lot of it was painted back- drops, mainly — fully-built sets. But then there were a few moments, like on the boat, there was a huge background that needed motion, as well as movement, so we decided to do that with a huge LED screen. Sometimes we needed to add on to the world that we built because we used so many wide-angle lenses that even if the sets were huge, we would still see the ceiling of the studio. So we would basically add on the top of it…We also shot a lot of miniatures, as much as we could. Even if it was added on in VFX, it was actual stuˆ that we shot, we created, or painted, or made ourselves." Where are the miniatures used? Yorgos Lanthimos: "The wide shots of the boat — the boat is a miniature. Alexandria itself — the islands with the carts — that's a miniature. Alfie's house — the whole house and the gardens are miniature." Robbie Ryan: "London Bridge was a miniature as well." What did Company 3's Greg Fisher bring to the color grade? Robbie Ryan: "Yorgos and myself were in the grade for about three weeks. Greg, he's a very patient and technically-competent grader. He was able to get what Yorgos was trying to get. The Ektachome, if I remember right, we had a grade from another scanner. We like scanning stuˆ, and we scanned another stretch and ran it through another scan- ner, and we were able to see deeper into the blacks. Yorgos liked it, but it had lost a little bit of its special sort of interest…We were talking about maybe shooting each scene on a bit of Ektachrome so that we'd have that as a reference — the Ektachrome (to) sort of inform a little bit of how he would have graded the color 500." Yorgos Lanthimos: "It was just simple though. It was just color…adding more contrast that it kind of resembled a little bit more the Ektachrome stuˆ. We wanted it to look diˆerent. That's why we shot on diˆerent stocks, but in order to bring the nega- tive closer to the Ektachrome, we just added quite a bit of contrast. As Robbie mentioned, the initial scans of the Ektachrome had even more character to them, although they had some technical diŸ- culties. So we scanned it again and then we lost some of that character. It was Greg's task to kind of bring it back to what we liked initially from it. And the black & white stuˆ was more straightforward. I think it was a matter of finding the little color that exists in black & white to make it so that it cuts Editing BY MARC LOFTUS Editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis has a long work- ing relationship with Poor Things filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos. The two began their collab- oration 25 years ago, working on commercials, and have gone on to partner on a half-dozen films since, including The Favourite and The Lobster. "He is a genius filmmaker," says Mavropsaridis of Lanthimos, noting his ability to capture both movement and expression. Mavropsaridis cut Poor Things on an Avid system, working out of rented space in Athens, Greece. "I started doing the assembly as soon as the film started," he recalls. "The production [began in] October. By December, they had finished the production, and then it took us another six months to finish. You have to un- derstand, there was a lot of material. I guess it was about 90 hours." Mavropsaridis points to "the reveal" as one of his favorite scenes, where Dr. Baxter is explaining to Max McCandless how he finds his subjects. "We have to insert/cut in-between the dialog and the picture — the color picture — which was very interesting in that sense," the editor explains. He also points to Bella's dance sequences. "The dancing, I liked a lot. It was a very dižcult scene, because we have done a lot of dance scenes. It had to be somehow diŸerent, but then it also represents Bella Baxter's char- acter in this small scene. The excitement. Her awkwardness and not being able to move, but also her free will and her dedication to enjoy life and not let somebody else control her. So it was very interesting to mix these things and keep the fun of the situation and the excite- ment of the situation."