Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1513564
(1948). Does this lead you to reflect on your life and work? Schoonmaker: I do the restorations myself. I work with Scorsese, and we work very closely with the colorist and the sound restoration. "After Hours" was something we spent a great deal of time on. It's won- derful to see the film brought to life again, particularly these days with digital. You can do these amazing things to remove dirt and scratches and get the sound and color exactly right. I've worked on the restoration with Scorsese of almost all the recent movies, and also my husband's movies. The wonder- ful thing about it is you see the same scene over and over again as you are working on the color, so you get to learn the film in a dierent way. You see little things that you never noticed, particularly on my husband's films. That is a joy. I love every minute of it, and I never get tired of seeing them. ■ Patrick Z. McGavin is a Chicago-based writer and cultural journalist. Color CONTINUED FROM PAGE 52 75 W I N T E R Q 4 I S S U E production because sometimes you come on and it's already been done, the produc- tion mixer is on another set. This way, we were able to actually work collaboratively back and forth, which I thought worked out really well. CineMontage: What made this experi- ence particularly memorable? Poll: It was very meaningful for me to listen to Alice Walker take seven hours to read her 250-page book. I listened to it three times, and I heard so much subtlety about what the book meant to her. It was just in my head the whole time – that and Blitz's point of view – his two key words to me in the beginning that were about tone were elegant and grounded. What that meant to me is that we were not making a heightened musical. Even though the movie is heightened in how it uses fantasy, the movie has to work on an emotional level, which I'll be honest, I've never cried so much watching a movie I've worked on, or even a movie I hadn't worked on. I am just constantly moved by the film in dierent places. I was very aware that the movie had an unusual storytelling style, be- cause most musicals don't have this much story, but Blitz was great about coming and spending time with me while he was shooting. At the end of a shooting day, be- fore a shooting day on a weekend, he would always watch whatever I'd assembled with me, and then we'd talk about it. He'd say, "I don't want to just watch it on Pix and send you notes. I'm going to come in. We're going to spend time together, we're going to talk about things." Tondelli: The women had such a strong bond and they supported and celebrated each other at every moment. And it showed in post. It was such a joy to see that because you rarely get five or six women like that in a movie that are so devoted. When Sofia's in the gas station, we cre- ated what we called "Pleasantville," when she pulls into the gas station and there's ice cream and bells and chatter and kids laugh- ing, and then as soon as she hits the mayor, everything goes silent. All you hear are the men pulling up in their cars, taunting her, her crying out, "Please get my children out of here." And then we recorded her little son saying, "Mama, no!" Just as she was about to get hit and she got hit, and it just guts you. They were just like Herculean, these women. They just had this element of complete devotion to it. When I recorded Colman [Domingo], who plays Mister, on the ADR stage, it was the scene where he's crying in the field and he wakes up, and a very similar thing happened to him where he just couldn't stop crying on the stage. He went into this catharsis of what this was like and what he felt. Blitz finally got up and put his arm around him and they held each other and he just kept crying. I've never seen that on a stage before. Every time I see these scenes, as many times as I've seen them, it just makes me cry. I've never had this kind of experience before where you have everyone involved in a very global but small world. The post and the production people were constantly going back and forth. I was always talking to the choreographer and to the production mixers and to the producers, and we were all trying to make this thing as collectively as possible. It's one of my favorite movies I've ever worked on. Slater: For me, the thing about this movie that is perhaps a little dierent than a lot of the movies that I've worked on is it's a very emotional movie. We had one particular playback, I think it was the first full playback that we did of the movie with all the reels joined up. The end crawl finished, the lights came up, and you looked around the room. Blitz was very emotional because it was the first time that he had seen the culmination of his work. Eve n f ro m t h e ge t - go, " M ys te r i o u s Ways," which is that amazing gospel song, signals right from the beginning that you are going to be taken on a journey that is at times euphoric and highly emotional and rewarding, and at other times, there are a lot of serious things that happen within the movie and things that are quite depressing. But the one thing about the movie is it spans a long amount of time, and I think it's the first time I personally have worked on a movie that I would consider to be so epic — epic in its time span, epic in the story that Celie is going through from the beginning to the end, and epic in the emotional pull that this story has. It just reminds you how great cinema is and what movies can still do to you. ■ This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Kristin Marguerite Doidge is the author of "Nora Ephron: A Biography."