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July/August 2025

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the car door closing was his idea. We might not have had a big budget for mix- ing, but he absolutely cared about the details and really elevated this movie in such an important way." You had three editors on this: Joe Klotz, Max Ethan Miller and Sarah Flack. How did that work? "I've worked with Joe for many years. He cut my first two films, and Mammals, and he was remotely editing in England, as he was also doing Lena Dunham's new Netflix show. And he was so busy on that we knew we had to bring in someone else. So Max, who was Joe's assistant on one of my movies, was promoted to editor and he took over based on Joe's availability. And then when we got to the very end of the director's cut, I felt we should bring in a female editor, for that point of view. And I was interested to see what Sarah would feel about the story, and she came in for the last six weeks and worked with Max. So, we never took it away from Joe or Max. We just needed another set of eyes, and they all worked together." What were some of the main editing challenges? "First of all, we edited everything remote- ly. I was never in a room with Max, Sarah or Joe, and that's challenging. But the big one was getting the tone right. There's a version of Amanda's story where it start- ed to feel a little too 'rom-comy' with the lawyer who helps her, and I didn't want it to get too 'cutty.' It had to be a more vis- ceral experience. The most difficult scene to cut was probably the courtroom scene at the end, because we shot it at 4am, and courtroom scenes are hard. Rose's performance in it is incredible, so I didn't want to cut too much, but then I had all these great choices of people to cut to, so we spent the most time on getting that scene right." What was involved in terms of visual effects? I assume the beautiful rainbow in Seattle was one? "No, that was real. I was on the hotel bal- cony in Seattle in the morning of our 24- hour shoot, it suddenly appeared and we managed to shoot it. We had two com- panies — Gow VFX and Atlantic Pictures, who did great work doing all the cleanup and removing stuff that was Jersey, and putting in signage like a street sign or a license plate. Then, Filmograph did all the automatic writing scenes, the titles and some other transitional things for me. They developed the whole writing- on-the-screen bits and we went through a series of six or seven comps on that, because it's challenging to get it right. I didn't want anything too whimsical, like an insert of Rose writing in a diary, and I didn't want to put text on-screen, because it's not that kind of movie, and anytime we tried it, it just felt too silly." Tell us about the DI. "We did it at Picture Shop in New York with colorist Sam Daley. Vanja was on an- other show, so he was looking at every- thing remotely, but he had worked with Sam before, and then I would come in and review things with Sam, and spend all day with him, just looking at shots. He has such a keen eye, and he would even find a mistake in a shot that's out of focus. He'd say, 'The depth of field is not right.' And he would tweak that. We were going to license a grain, and he was like, 'No, don't do that. I can do this for you.' So we developed a proprietary grain layer that made the film more cohesive and more cinematic. And just his choices about palette and tone were so good, as it was tricky. He'd say, 'The pink might be too pink here. It's just popping too much.' And he understood emotionally that if it's too bright, it does take you out of it in a tonal way. And we looked a lot at Paris, Texas, in terms of very specific reference points. He was also able to help us out with some visual effects stuff with her car. We bought a car for the shoot, but it was blue, so we had it painted maroon, but then they forgot to paint the door jams, so Sam went in and fixed all of that. Sam eventually just had to kick me out, but we worked really closely together on it. He's an artist, and all his work really did elevate the movie cinematically." What's next for you? "I'm on Season 2 of the Jon Hamm series Your Friends and Neighbors. I'm directing six episodes and executive producing. And then I have a couple of movie projects, one that I wrote that we're in the process of casting, and hopefully we'll shoot soon. And I'm attached to a big action comedy, which is not exactly what I'm known for, but I'm very excited about it." www.postmagazine.com 11 POST JULY/AUG 2025 Goldcrest and Picture Shop both provided post services for the feature.

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