Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1513564
28 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E to the director, and to Danny. Canseco: They shoot a lot of footage. Normally, for a day of shooting on a TV show or a movie, you get two-and-a-half or three hours. This show pushes four or five hours. The scripts are loaded, and there's a decent amount of improv. Once we have an editor's cut, it's rare for something to be under 40 minutes, and usually it's closer to an hour. CineMontage: Are there particular scenes where the actors do get a chance to go on ris? Todd Zelin: Probably the scenes that have the most improv are the scenes at Ja- son's Steakhouse. First of all, those scenes take 12 hours to shoot, so that's a full day for the actors. It's one of the few times that our amazing cast is all together in one room. They definitely ri and play o each other. One of the big indicators of whether or not they like the idea they've come up with on-set is they'll do it over and over again in every take to make sure they have a version of it in every angle. Then they'll come up with new things here and there, one-offs that they'll say just once on an improv run. CineMontage: How do you handle that material as an editor? Zelin: For my editor's cut, I'm going to deliver the best version of what's on the page plus what I just think is funny. If they've done a certain improv run over and over, I'll know that at some point they will want to see a version of that improv run cut together and maybe multiple versions of it. Once we've screened it, I'll try dierent versions of the same improv. Sometimes someone will say, "I just want something punchy here." I'll go back in and I'll look: What else is here? What else did they do? CineMontage: Joseph, talk about how the post team works together. Ettinger: So much of the tone of the show is set in the edit bay, and we are super-fortunate to have a group of edi- tors that work in collaboration. Editing can be an isolating job sometimes, and certainly not every show has a sense of community. This is definitely a show where, when I was finding my footing or feeling a little insecure about some of my first cuts, I could take them to the other guys and talk through stu. We bring in assistant editors. We bring in PAs. A good idea can come from anywhere. CineMontage: There's a cutting room set up in Charleston, South Carolina, right? Canseco: We all kind of pepper in at the beginning. Everybody who works on the show is in LA, but once the schedule comes up, we all just find our way out to Charleston in dierent ways. Some people drive out because they have pets. We go to this very small town that doesn't have a lot of filming, and we kind of take it over. We work out of a shopping mall. CineMontage: Is that helpful? C a n s e c o : Yo u d e f i n i t e l y f e e l l i k e you're part of this weird community that we've built. CineMontage: Justin, what's it like edit- ing John Goodman's material? Bourret: You can tell when you're edit- ing someone who is a seasoned actor like he is. He knows exactly where his character is going, and he also knows when he's in a close-up. It's definitely an art that I have noticed in actors who have been around. Ettinger: The cast is phenomenal. In particular, I love getting Edi's dailies. She is a joy to cut because she always gives you so many options and you have varied perfor- mances to operate with. Especially with the unique tone of the show, these actors are so dialed into what this world needs to feel like. You rarely have moments where you're struggling to find the right beat. Zelin: The actors give amazing perfor- mances. They're hitting the drama hard when they need to, and they're hitting the comedy hard when they need to. Part of what makes it work is the show takes wild swings back and forth. You'll go from heart-wrenching when Eli is in the hospital after getting attacked by the cycle ninjas, and then you cut outside to everyone freak- ing out and puking. You're always playing in those extremes. CineMontage: Nicholas, what are you trying to accomplish on the show from a sound perspective? Nicholas Renbeck: I hope we are able to give the show, in some subtle sense, its own personal sonic voice. We thought a bit about bugs and birds of South Carolina, how those sounds come out when the Gemstones are in nature, or on their compound, and defi- nitely in the nighttime scenes. Sometimes we can push the sounds of, say, crickets and cicadas to help add to the tension of a scene. There is definitely the idea of wealth vs. poverty with the Gemstones that I like to explore when possible. In the Salvation Center, the family compound, and Jason's Steakhouse, we look to make things sound a bit more pleasant, and have some fun playing with the megachurch audience's reaction and interactions with the family on stage. We contrast that with when the fam- ily is in a poorer location — say, a roadside motel, where we'll push the highway trac sounds, rattier-sounding cars, unpleasant air-conditioning units. Plus, every season there are fun vehicles to give voice to. There are a lot of action sequences for a 30-minute show. CineMontage: How do you work with the overall post team? Renbeck: Danny works very closely with the picture department as they put things together. A majority of the time, they are choosing how they see the show moving along sound-eects-wise, and they put in placeholders. Some of the stuff is just right to begin with and we just need to sweeten it a little bit, and other times the sound department will fill it out a lot more. Before each episode, Justin and I will have a conversation on what we need to accomplish. We'll go through every single episode before the sound crew starts on it. For something like the locust swarm at the end of season 3, we definitely needed to discover what that was going to sound like. CineMontage: What are we hearing during the locust swarm? Renbeck: Oh, the Foley and sound ef- fects team went full-on there. We definitely have a lot of sound elements playing at that point, more than I can totally recall. We had actual tracks of locusts flying, pumped up with crickets and grasshoppers along with SEE PAGE 72