Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524965
inspiration. We probably went more with Tony's aesthetic on Beverly Hills Cop II in the end. In terms of the camera and lens package we used, we shot with Alexa 35s and a few C series lenses, but mainly we used these really old, huge zooms that we kept on the camera the whole time. So that gave it this real '80s look. And we didn't move the camera that much, as it was so bulky and heavy. We did tests for shooting on film, but we were rolling so many cameras that it just wasn't practical." How tough was the shoot? "It was pretty demanding, as we had a big cast and a huge crew all on-loca- tion all the time. We shot most of it in Beverly Hills, and we had seven to nine cameras rolling most of the time on all the action sequences, and never fewer than three for any setup at all, so it was a lot just in terms of all the logistics and scale. But I'm a nut for prep, so I was really prepared and ready to just accept the shit I couldn't control on the day if things went wrong. So prep was key and the LA shoot was huge and crazy but fine. But we also shot the big snowplow opening sequence in Detroit over a week of night shoots, and that was very tough. It was all in-camera and we'd just been in a heatwave in LA and it was freezing in Detroit at night. That was a shock." Tell us about post. Where did you do it? "We did all the editing here at my offices in Santa Monica, and we did all the sound work on the Fox lot. We had an amazing VFX team at Scanline, led by VFX supervisor Bryan Grill, and they were in-house and partners with us through all the edit and post. I do love post. I love shooting even more." It was edited by Dan Lebental. How did that work? "I like to talk to my editor the whole time we're shooting, to see what I can do better or if we're missing things, and how it's working tonally, especially with the big action sequences. We'd send him dailies and on the rare down day I'd sit down with him and watch stuff we'd just shot. I was so lucky to have him on this, as he's an amazing editor who's cut huge movies like Iron Man and Spider-Man: Homecoming, and worked a lot before with Jerry, and he's so experienced. I really enjoyed the whole process and I learned so much during the edit, starting with the basic idea that there's the film you shoot, and the one you edit. And Jerry would come in all the time, watch a sequence, not say much, but he'd make a couple of suggestions: 'You don't need that shot, reverse this one.' And they were always spot on. He was such a great resource." What were the main editing challenges? "It'll surprise people — and it really surprised me too — but the music was a big challenge on this. I thought it was going to be easy, as the original soundtrack gave us a great jumping-off point, but it was really tricky then find- ing the right new music to blend with that. Where did we want to find the nos- talgia, and where did we want to move on from that? Lorne Balfe composed the film's score and he did a brilliant job of combining the old and the new, and evolving rather than reinventing the old sounds. All that took a lot of time and patience on his part. Then, of course, finding the right pacing and tone in the edit also took time." There are obviously quite a few VFX. What was entailed? "Even though we did as much in-cam- era work as possible, we needed VFX for some of the more complex scenes, such as the big helicopter chase. A lot of the helicopter stuff was shot for real, but we did do some green screen to get Eddie and others into the scenes. And we did a lot of atmospheric work in the shoot-outs. Scanline did the bulk of the film's VFX work, including all the squibs and gunfire in those scenes, and we had a lot of cleanup work done by Lola and [Netflix] Mumbai. Basically, we had the bones of everything in-camera, and in post we used VFX to help create atmosphere, remove cameras and rigs, and do all the stuff we couldn't handle on-set. In the end we had hundreds of VFX shots, but we didn't have whole sequences built of VFX. It was more about enhancing what we'd shot, like the opening scenes in Detroit, where we added VFX snow and rain, and removed stunt drivers and did cleanup." Can you talk about the importance of sound to you? "It's huge, and we had Chris Diebold, our supervising sound editor, with us in- house from the very start of the edit and the first assembly, so as we screened the film during post, we already had great sound. Then Paul Massey did the final mix at Fox, and we did the score on the Sony lot." What about the DI? Who was the colorist and how closely did you work with them and the DP? "We did it at Company 3 with colorist Tom Poole, and I'm very involved. He and I have worked together for years and years, and we began talking about the look from the very start, including stocks and how to create that '80s look, but also bring it into our contemporary world. Another big thing was making LA another character in the film, so we spent a lot of time on getting the right palette and finding that golden light that I remembered from the first two films. And it's been like a childhood dream for me to make this film and shoot here in LA. I'm very happy with the way it turned out." www.postmagazine.com 9 POST JULY/AUG 2024 The feature was shot on Alexa 35s and color graded at Company 3.