Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1531981
Spring 2025 – LOCAL695.COM 27 2024 proved to be a busy release year for Steven Morrow and his team with three feature films, Juror #2, Joker: Folie à Deux, which as of this writing made the Oscar shortlist for sound, and Saturday Night. Steven wanted to talk about his long working relationship with Director Jason Reitman and their fifth collaboration on the film Saturday Night. Steve: I was very lucky in that I was Jason Reitman's first mixer on his first movie. At a certain point, he said, "That's it, I'm going to bring you anywhere I go." It's the same for Eric Steelberg, his cinematographer, so we've all worked on all these movies together, we just know each other and work together really well. I went up to Canada for Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and Atlanta for The Front Runner and again for Saturday Night. So, he likes what he likes. He understands and he really appreciates production sound on his movies. He doesn't like to loop anything. The interesting thing, Jason always likes his headphones hard-lined, so he gets a direct cable from us so he can listen to what we're hearing, which is nice. PS&V: The film took quit a while to get in production. Steve: Jason talked to me about this movie back in 2020. The original idea was to be one big continuous shot. We weren't going to cut, we'd roll for an hour and ten minutes, and then we would just stop and reset and do it again the next day. A lot of people told him he was kind of crazy for thinking that would be a good idea. But I had been planning to do it that way. Then about nine months before we started shooting, I heard that we're now shooting on film, and I realized we can't shoot continuously for that length of time. But there were going to be a lot of oners. We kind of broke it down and thought, okay, what's the biggest scene that we have, and how many actors are in that scene? What do we need to cover? The biggest scene was thirty actors, plus some live music. Every day it's going to be a variation of that, but the maximum is going to be up to thirty actors, with speaking roles, and some without. However, anytime we have an actor with a number on a call sheet, they're going to get a mic. The way that Jason likes to shoot movies is he'll add dialog here and there, and just give somebody something to say. Or we'll just tell the actor, hey, you're in character, speak, talk, and if the actors are "gun-shy" they might say, "I don't want to overlap dialog." But we'll tell them, you overlap, do whatever if you're in this scene, don't