Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538125
30 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E I might be in my hotel room cutting, and I'll get a text from Mike: "Can you come down to set?" And he'll ask me to shoot a simple pick-up that he just got an idea for, while he and the main unit move on to the next scene. For example, in Episode 6, Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger) is talking to C h e l s e a ( A i m e e L o u Wo o d ) a n d C h l o e (Charlotte Le Bon). They're confronting him about the night before, when he had a sexual encounter with his brother. Mike thought it would be great to see Saxon reacting to the conversation, really upset as he's walking away from the scene, and also to see him walking through the resort long after the scene, still upset and pondering. So I went with the second unit to film Patrick walking through the resort. CineMontage: Do you have a cutting room set up on location in Thailand? Valerio: Because we were constantly moving around between locations, I trav- eled with a laptop and an external monitor and cut in my hotel room the whole time. I'd get the dailies from the set on an encrypted drive, load them myself, and then my assis- tant Zoe Bower, who was in LA, would jump onto my laptop there and organize and prep my scene bins. I'd go through them, cut for an hour or two, then go out and shoot for a few hours, then come back to cut for anoth- er hour or two, and so on. Often, I was gone the entire day shooting because I was out on a boat or somewhere more remote. Yeah, that was fun. CineMontage: There is a shocking sequence featuring a blender that is very well edited. How did that come about? Valerio: That's another example of Mike asking me to pickup some specific second unit shots of Timothy (Jason Isaacs) mak- ing the poisonous piña coladas. It was a lot of fun to shoot those things and use them to build tension as we see Timothy confront the reality of going through with the family euthanasia. I think it was always a fantasy, his imagining of it, before this. And now he's really doing it, so we wanted to make it more of an extended moment. Pong-pong fruits and trees are real. They are all over the resort, and the locals tell you not to eat them because they will kill you. In a shot from an earlier episode, we focus on Timothy as he walks out of frame, and we hold on the empty frame for a couple of beats so we see all the pong-pong fruits laying on the ground. A little clue there early on. CineMontage: There is a memorable funny moment in the series after Belinda checks her bank balance online, and you cut to a monkey screaming. What gave you that idea? Valerio: I was going through all our monkey B-roll and came across that shot of the monkey opening its mouth like it was screaming. We had shot Belinda screaming when she sees her bank account, and I knew this would be followed by a transition sequence. I thought, what a cool, organic, and elegant way to get into that transition. I'd like to give a shoutout to our second unit DP, Pithai Smithsuth, who shot all the monkey B-roll. For a commercial he'd shot P H OT O : H B O SOUTHERN COMFORT: Parker Posey in "The White Lotus."