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www.postmagazine.com 16 POST JAN/FEB 2024 Beckner. Mandell Winter was the sound supervisor, and the film was mixed at Signature Post with mix- ers Alexandra Fehrman and Richard Weingart. "I really loved the whole post process," notes Je©erson, "and I can't wait to direct again." Biopics are always an Oscar favorite, and in Maestro it's producer/director/writer/star Bradley Cooper who plays charismatic New York conduc- tor/composer Leonard Bernstein. The movie scored seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, but Cooper missed out on a Best Director nod for his second directorial e©ort. Similarly, Oscar perennial Alexander Payne's bittersweet Christmas dramedy The Holdovers, which reunites him with his Sideways star Paul Giamatti, also scored a Best Picture nomination, but no Best Director nod. (See my interview with Payne in Post's November/ December issue.) EDITING, VFX & POST WORKFLOW As might be expected, this year's contenders for film editing include such high-profile releases as Oppenheimer (Jennifer Lame); Killers of the Flower Moon (Thelma Schoonmaker) and Poor Things (Yorgos Mavropsaridis) (see Marc Loftus' story in the November/December issue). Rounding out the list are two more modest films: Anatomy of a Fall (Laurent Sénéchal) and The Holdovers (Kevin Tent). First-time nominee Jennifer Lame, who cut Tenet for Nolan, looks like the frontrunner at press time, thanks to her tour-de-force nonlinear intercutting of the various complex storylines and scenes, some of which were shot in black & white, while others are in color. Besides managing to make Senate confirmation hearings dramatic and tense, she also masterfully managed the film's pacing and internal rhythms so that the three-hour epic played more like a 90-minute thriller. Martin Scorsese's longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, already a three-time winner, is the most nominated editor in Academy history with her ninth for the director's first Western, Killers of the Flower Moon. During her 53-year partnership with Scorsese, Schoonmaker has edited all 24 films he's made since 1980, and she says that much of the film's structure was shaped during the shoot. "As a director, he is always thinking like an edi- tor when he's shooting, which is a wonderful gift to me." The duo spent nearly a year together in the edit bay assembling the footage and refining every cut to make the film as strong as it could possibly be. "The thing that's quite unusual about it is that sometimes things aren't explained," Schoonmaker says. "You just cut to a scene with the character who's murdered. It's just thrown at you and you have to suddenly react, which is very powerful. The audience has to keep up with what's happening without being told what to think, which is some- thing that Scorsese hates to do in a movie. The structure is radical." Even after so many decades working with Scorsese, Schoonmaker says she's still surprised by the discoveries they make in the edit bay, and always feels as though she's learning something new when working on the director's projects. "He's always searching for the truth, and he doesn't like to repeat himself, and that makes work- ing with him thrilling. It's always a new challenge." Editor Kevin Tent has also enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration with director Alexander Payne. Their first film together was the 1995 Sundance hit Citizen Ruth, and he's edited all of Payne's films since then, earning his first Academy Award nomination for his editing on The Descendants, starring George Clooney. "I rarely go to the set, maybe just for a quick visit," reports Tent, who, as usual, began his assem- bly back in LA while Payne shot The Holdovers on location in Boston. "He was really focused on his coverage on this, and he's always super smart about what he needs. It's all about performance and he doesn't want to burn out his actors on wide shots and masters. He does four to six takes on average, but allows his actors to take their time and get these great per- formances. Then, when we get to the cutting room, we try to condense them and make them e¬cient and deal with pace and rhythm and so on. The whole editing process, from shooting to finishing, was probably nine months, and then we spent a month or so doing the final mix at Signature Post in Santa Monica, and did the DI with colorist Joe Gawler at Harbor in New York." Leading the VFX pack is the epic, sci-fi, action thriller, The Creator, written and directed by Gareth Edwards (see my feature story in our September/ October issue). Edwards cleverly turned his low-budget indie concept into a mega-budget-look- ing blockbuster by essentially reverse-engineering the film's whole approach to the crucial VFX. "We scouted all these amazing locations, shot all this material, and then went to ILM and asked them, 'Can you do the VFX process without the usual tracking markers, without people in motion capture? Let's try and reverse-engineer it.' And everyone was very surprised it went so well, and it cost very little. So we showed that teaser to the studio and they greenlit it." The film was largely shot on the low-cost prosum- er Sony FX3 camera and posted all on the Fox lot. "We edited for over nine months and we had a small VFX producer team with us, and did the sound there too," he reports. Godzilla Minus One is another underdog getting a lot of Oscar attention — and it's also the first Japanese-language film to earn a VFX nomination. Director and VFX supervisor Takashi Yamazaki and his small team created over 600 CG shots on a tiny budget, including an impressive title character and complex water simulation for the climactic battle sequence. For Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the final film in director/writer James Gunn's blockbuster trilogy, Gunn and his franchise VFX supervisor Stephane Ceretti oversaw over 3,000 visual e©ects shots, created by a raft of companies, including Weta FX, who were responsible for the climactic final battle sequence, Framestore, ILM, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Rodeo and Crafty Apes. Heading up the Weta team was VFX supervisor Guy Williams, who previously collaborated with Gunn on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, for which he was also Oscar nominated. He oversaw the big chal- lenges of creating "significant amounts of destruc- tion work" and the large-scale build of the Arête spaceship, along with the big battle scene, where it's slowly being destroyed. Weta also did The Abilisk Pit sequence, tackled water VFX — "always a huge challenge," notes Williams — and the battle onboard the Arete, where 18 shots were stitched together into one seamless two-and-a-half-minute action shot. For the surrounding city scenes, the team used a Director Celine Song's Past Lives earned her an Original Screenplay nomination. Emma Stone received one of Poor Things' 11 nominations.