Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1540216
Tell us about the editing process with Brian Kates. Did he come on-set at all? "He didn't come to Uruguay, but he did visit the set a few times in New Jersey, although once he saw where we were, he wasn't racing to come back. But we were in constant touch, and he would send things every day, and I would get to have a little conversation with him, so we were working during the whole thing, and then on weekends, he'd come in and have a session where we could really go through things." What were the main editing challenges? "After shooting the musical numbers, we were able to shoot the prison movie in order, which was a great luxury, especial- ly for the actors. So, the first test came after shooting a week's worth of prison scenes and having Brian put it together with the first Hollywood scenes to see if that was going to work, and luckily it felt like it did from the start, so that was a relief. But then, later, you discover things when you first put it in front of an audience. The first cut was about 15 minutes longer, and you discover that it's overstaying its welcome, that the story's been told, and there are scenes I love, which we didn't need. Originally, there was more stuff happening at the beginning of the film that I think made it a little hard to focus, and so we had to get back to the simplest idea — one guy shows up in the other guy's cell, and the drama begins, and so anything before that turned out to be superfluous. It's one of those things that seems obvious in retrospect, especially for someone who wrote the script, but somehow you must go through that other thing to get there, and that's why I love the whole post process, and why editing is one of my favorite things. It's where making the film really all happens." What was the trickiest scene to cut? "There's a point about two-thirds of the way into the movie when Valentin is finally opening up to Molina, and there's this unofficial rule in musicals, that you should have another number coming every eight or 10 minutes. And we follow that rule until this chunk, where we have a 17-min- ute stretch that is mostly just the drama of what's happening between these two men, including some long dialogue scenes. Sometimes we'd cut it too tight, and we'd lose the sense of those breaths that are so important, so we'd put those back, but then it'd be too much put back, and you had to hold the audience for those scenes. So, to me, it was gratify- ing when we showed the movie to the first two test audiences and you really couldn't hear a pin drop during that long sequence. It was the thing I was most worried about, and it was the trickiest." Do you find test screenings helpful? "I do. I have a typical home projector system and I had friends over every weekend, as did Brian, and I would show groups of two or three or four people the movie, before we did an official test, and it is that mysterious thing — you share it with people, and it alters the movie. It alters your own perception of the movie, so I did a lot of that." Talk about how important sound is to you, and what was involved? "Nothing's more important in a musical than getting the music and sound right, and the thing you're always chasing is that sense of the electricity of a live performance. I think that there's some- thing deadening in a movie musical when it feels too perfect and processed, and it doesn't have that 'oomph' of where you can just feel the musicians, and that was always our goal. We did a first mix in New York, and then we went to LA, where our mixer, Jon Taylor, has his own studio at home. Then we finished up at Universal, and I think we reached our goal in the final mix in LA." It's obviously not a huge visual effects movie, but there are some, right? "Quite a lot, and Phosphene did them all. The big challenge was to complete all the sets that we built on these sound stages in New Jersey, but in the style of a movie from the 1950s, so they were not creating photoreal skies and moun- tains and stuff like that, but instead they were creating the occasional painted backdrops, as they would have used back then, or some kind of vintage-feel- ing process shot for scenes in cars and things like that. So, it was really using cutting edge VFX to go back to the past, and the crucial thing was that it all had to feel analog, and not digital." The film looks so visually beautiful. Did you massage it a lot in the DI? "Yes, because late in post we totally flipped our idea about the look we'd decided on when we were shooting, and even in the way that the dailies were processed. That idea was that the film-within-the-film, the Hollywood musical, would have some grain, and a slightly softened image that reflected the lenses of the time, while the prison would, by contrast, be this super clear image. But I suddenly thought, it's not literally the movie, it's actually Molina describing the movie in his head. So, what if we make it look like the ultimate 4K Blu-ray resto- ration of this musical, so vivid and clear that you see every bead on the gold dress when Jennifer arrives at the ball? And then, instead, we add the grit and grain to the prison movie? And we tried it, and it worked so much better, even though it was the opposite of what we were intending to do in the DI with Tobias and our longtime colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3. So, I'm very happy with the way it turned out." www.postmagazine.com 11 POST SEPT/OCT 2025 The color grade was applied at Company 3. Brian Kates edited the feature. Jon Taylor helped create the desired sound mix.