Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1543098
20 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Spring 2026 DR: He likes a small nimble group and likes to move very quickly. What you see on the call sheet may not necessarily be how the day is going to go. Paul folds you in as things evolve. You just kind of let him do what he does because he knows that everybody's going to flow with what he's trying to do. RL: How did you work with the VistaVision camera? DR: You do what you can, and the Camera Department was very helpful to get rid of as much of that noise as they could. Rachel wired everybody, and she was miles ahead of the curve. We would go into scenes on Paul's show like, "Oh, this is great." We'll walk in, we'll have two booms and decide who will cover what. Then you'd see the VistaVision sitting in the corner. You just have to be okay with it. But I think the post-production teams were wizards as well. Paul's style is very Altman-esque. He doesn't want to loop. He had to really get comfortable with the fact that they can fix the noisy VistaVision camera, and we had to get comfortable with it as well. It all came together, and I was thrilled at how good it sounded. RL: You had to deal with over thirty-one locations. DR: It was difficult in terms of the number of locations. The locations themselves were not always very pleasant and there was a lot of car work. You put everything in a bag and send it off and hope it comes back with something good. There was a lot of free driving. That's the way Paul likes to do it. He likes to go off on his own and make his movie. We went to these places that were so far off the beaten track, you'd wonder why you'd go all the way there. But there's Boom Operator David M. Roberts something about actually being in the spot, that's the kind of places Paul likes to create for the actors. He takes them to these places because it provokes a certain type of emotion. It helps his actors. My recollection the most aggravating scene was the exterior phone booth outside of a market. It was a non-working phone with a sealed handset; we couldn't get anything in there. Every take, we'd move a plant mic around because shooting VistaVision, you can see everything. Even trying to get a boom in there was problematic. Also, some of the places were so blasted windy, it was just desert wind. You can conquer most of it, but between wind covers for the lavs, and wrapping the dead cat over his Sennheiser with another dead cat. It's just constant wind, wind, wind. It was a long shoot more than five months. We started in January in Northern California and finished up the end of July in Texas. We had a hiatus for a few weeks for Benicio. Paul wanted to wait for him, so they shut the company down for three weeks. RL: Was there any VFX paint out employed? DR: At times there were, it was kind of a negotiation. "Are you willing to paint this out? Is it a problem?" Then as time went on, it's like, oh, yeah, we'll just paint it out. They tried to protect the frame most of the time, but they would give us a take to get in there once they felt like they had the visual. The other thing we would do if it was really an egregious sonic invasion, they'd say, all right, we'll just wild line it right now, while it's fresh. We carried a silent camera, a Super35mm, and it would come out for intimate scenes or when they couldn't get the VistaVision camera into some of the sets.