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all the heavy drama to draw you in. "The films I grew up with and love — The Godfather, Goodfellas, even Schindler's List — all have some humor in them. I started sending him footage and we would talk, and he would send me cuts and notes on the weekend. I remem- ber as we were starting to shoot all the courtroom scenes, he said, 'When you're in the courtroom, just make sure you give me cutaways,' because with courtroom scenes, you always have to shoot cover- age a hundred different ways. But by the third day, he said we could stop sending all the extra cutaway stuff, as he drowning in footage because we were shooting four cameras. And early on he said, 'Do you want an assembly first or do you want me to try stuff?' And I said, 'I want you to try stuff. I don't need to watch four hours of everything we shot. If you feel stuff can go, take it out. I can always look at it later.' "I truly believe the relationship be- tween the director and the editor is a collaboration. I can sit there and tell you to shave this or cut this, but — and it's true of every department head, especial- ly in post — you hire these people be- cause of their creativity and their talent and their experience and the things that they're going to see that I as a director won't necessarily see. And Tom would just bring me cuts and say, 'Look at this. I tried this, I moved this over here. You're going to hate this, but I want to show it.' And all of that is so wonderful because you start to really see your film through other people's eyes." What were the main editing challenges? "It was a huge cast, with so much going on, so for us it was the challenge of telling multiple stories and dealing with multiple spinning plates. And how many stories can you really tell? We had shot additional scenes with Goring's family and wife and daughter, but as we cut the movie and kept going, you get a sense of where the movie wants to be. And we cut all that in the end, as it was very important to me that even though it's over two hours long, it felt fast, that the pace propelled you through it and you're on a ride." Did you do test screenings? Did that help? "We did test it. I very much believe in test screenings, and they really helped us because there were certain people who were very nervous about some of our subject matter and some of the darker stuff, and we scored tremendously high. And you know, for a movie that ends the way our movie does, I feel like it plays as an audience film, so that helped us protect certain sequences in the film that we felt were very important and didn't want to lose." Are you referring in part to the documentary real concentration camp footage you incorporated, which is still so shocking even if you've seen it before? "Yes, and it was always in the script from the start. It was something we planned and actually projected on the day for real for the actors. And I had asked the actors not to see it beforehand, so the shock was real, not acting." All period pieces need visual effects. What was entailed? "Jason Piccioni was the visual effects supervisor and he's so creative. FuseFX, that is now absorbed into Folks VFX, did the VFX. I like to work practically as much as possible, just because I think it helps the actors, and the best visual effects people agree with me and tell me, 'If you can build it, build it.' But I think visual effects artists are brilliant, and there's a lot of hidden VFX. The biggest one was the sequence in the stadium, for the huge Nazi parade. The stadium does still exist, but not in the form it did back then. So, we shot that scene with Michael Shannon and Rami Malik on an airfield at two in the morning outside of Budapest with nothing around them but bluescreen. And I had Eve Stewart, our production designer, build an old-school Styrofoam model to scale with tiny actors, so that Rami and Michael could see just how small they were in the VFX stadium. And then Jason had an iPad and had built a wireframe of what it would look like, so they could stand there and visualize what was around them before we shot. And I thought that was tremendously helpful." Tell us about the DI. "We did it at Company 3 with colorist Stephen Nakamura, who's so brilliant. We did a lot of very detailed work, especially integrating all the VFX and matte paint- ing work, and I'm so happy with the way it looks." Did it turn out the way you hoped? "Absolutely, and love it or hate it, this is the film I set out to make, and I feel very grateful for having such a great post team. I really love the whole post process and being able to craft this with Tom and Ryan Price, and my sound designer Michael Babcock. And composer Brian Tyler, who I've worked with for 25 years, was such a creative experience. Everything they brought to it just elevated it. That's the wonderful thing about directing — yes, it's your movie, but it takes a village to make it." www.postmagazine.com 11 POST JAN/FEB 2026 Post production took place in Los Angeles.