Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541406
D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 5 I 2 5 Shot to Remember: Sideways — continued from page 22 12 Before the audience knows Miles will get up to drunk-dial his ex-wife, Kevin and I thought we'd seed into his brain an interior phone ring that grows and grows until it becomes unbearable. It's a long pre-lap that suggests the temptation that Miles tries unsuccessfully to combat. We kept saying, what if we started even earlier? At first you think it's almost part of the music, and then little by little it emerges as a sound on its own. We spent quite a long time on the entire sound design— deceptively complex—getting those techniques of sonic subjectivity just right. How long do you keep the real dialogue live, and how do you imperceptibly make it disappear to venture exclusively into where that internal ringing sound is drilling a hole in Miles's brain? These techniques are not new, of course, but they are fun and effective to deploy. 12 13 The moment Miles's ex-wife says hello, we snap out of his subjectivity. The score stops, and we're teleported back inside the cafe, where we hear the background music and restaurant walla and all that. Yet the fact that we've been increasingly lengthening the lenses hits its apex during this phone conversation—most of it shot in closeup with a 150 mm lens. We wanted Paul to have complete freedom, but in this sequence, if the First AC couldn't keep up with him and we went out of focus, it was fine. That's the forgiving part of shooting a drunk guy with a long lens. That pay phone didn't exist there. We put it there so that we could get a shot over him and be able to see the length of the restaurant. 13 14 After the ill-advised phone conversation, Miles staggers back to the table and plops into the chair. The girls get the cue that something fishy is going on and politely excuse themselves to go to the powder room. The camera slides over to change the axis, both to show the restaurant and more importantly to imply the complicity between Miles and Jack—this is a different, separate section of the evening. Whenever you shoot a long sequence, particularly locked in one fixed location, you obviously want to think about it in zones and how to break it up visually, psychologically, so it's not just the same damn shots over and over. It worked out nicely that when Jack and Miles are alone, we could change the axis into a section of the sequence belonging just to them. When the girls return, the camera slides back over to the initial, "we're-on-a- date" axis. In the entire movie, I think I'm proudest of this sequence. All the departments put a lot of time into making sure it went just right. In a way, it's the centerpiece of this modest little picture. 14 CELEBRATING THE CRAFT