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F E A T U R E David Rogers. P H OT O : N E T F L I X take forever. So we switched over to just use color media for the whole edit, and we just monitored it in black-and-white. It saved us a lot of time and headache." Another challenging but ultimately re- warding experience for Rogers was the edit of a particular scene in Episode 4 in which Ripley is packing up the paint brushes and 30 C I N E M O N T A G E Episode 3) sooner, Lee said, adding, "There was a lot of compression of the New York narrative action that took place. Steve was aware from the beginning that we would be on borrowed time. The way the New York sequence was originally scripted and the way it was timing out in early cuts was just too long…some scenes of Ripley leaving town ended up essentially being condensed into a two-minute montage." TWO YEARS OF POST The "good graces" of Netflix allowed Zaillian the time he needed for editing – nearly two years in total – which the post- team thought resulted in a stronger show. "You don't normally get that much time on a television series," Lee added. "The approach of the series was always a lot more like the approach of a feature film, both the scheduling of it and the scale of it. And just the fact that it was a writer-director, an auteur filmmaker at the helm, meant that we were always thinking of it as one large feature film." Likewise, for Zaillian, the extended period of air time allowed for more visual exploration of Ripley's motivations through Highsmith's descriptions of events that oc- cur in real time and which she describes in great detail in the novel. Another important element of capturing the film noir quality of the source material was shooting in black-and-white. Zaillian and his cinema- tographer, Robert Elswit, spent more than 150 days shooting all over Italy, from Sicily to Venice, filming in city streets, piazzas, houses, buildings and churches to provide a sprawling landscape for the story to unfold. While allowing for a more abstract view- ing experience for the audience, the neutral color palette initially created a challenge for the post-team in Avid. "I think Steve at some point said he didn't want to even acci- dentally see the color media," Rogers said. "For doing temp green-screen comps, we initially had this process of switching over to the color media for a sequence, pulling a key, creating an alpha channel, bringing that alpha channel media back into the black-and-white project, but it was going to tools in Dickie's art studio. "While Marge [played by Dakota Fan- ning] and Tom are having this conversation, there was a lot of blocking going on and prop movement, and it was shot on the angles of Tom doing all this stuff with an A and B camera," he explained. "And so the B camera was usually following Tom as the insert, so we had a lot of different takes of him throwing boxes and things into a suitcase and moving and turning. That was a scene that is a bit of a dance to try to get everything to land just right with the lines. And so Steve had me try one where it was just all on Tom with no cuts to Marge, just to work on the blocking, trying the inserts and things, and then start to weave Marge's component into it. It was a fun sort of puzzle to finally put together, and I feel I'm very satisfied with the flow of that scene and the objects and the way things work." For Lee, it was the end montage — which wasn't scripted at all — that proved to be the most gratifying to edit. "The original ending that was scripted could not be shot because basically the camera would've had to be underwater at the bottom of a canal in Venice, and that wasn't feasible," he said. "We experimented with animation and seeing whether we could do it in CG and it didn't feel right. The idea emerged of a montage coming out of Tom's focus on a painting and a vision he would sort of have. It was a delicate dance between the images that he would see so it wouldn't just be a recap of the series. We wanted something more along the lines of a revisionist narrative in Tom's mind of himself as a great artist like Caravaggio or Picasso — that he's reflecting on his work by looking at this painting." The f inal product provides an emo - tional punch and was the result of the entire picture editorial team's ideas and collaboration, from Rogers and Lee, to first assistant editor Lillian Pachter (who pro- vided additional editing on three episodes), to the assistant editors, Devon Halliday and Michael Crocitto Kenny. It's also emblematic of the dark and light nature of the work Zaillian has become Joshua Lee. P H OT O : N E T F L I X