Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544392
but our assistant editor (Hayley Wiliams) assembled all the film as I shot. And then Nico started afresh right at the beginning of the edit. And that's how he likes to do it. He's a brilliant editor. He's worked with Plan B before. He edited Ad Astra and Beautiful Boy. "He's often asked to come in and look at films which may have gone a bit awry, so he's developed this technique of want- ing to look fresh at something instead of working on the assemblies while you're shooting. And it suits him, and it was fine by me too. When we sat down to watch it together, it was the first time he'd seen the assembly that Hayley made. And obviously the first I'd seen the whole as- sembly put together in a very long, long, long, loose, baggy, baggy assembly." Is that what it is? A very loose edit? "Nothing's cut. It's just assembled." How does that evolve? "I absolutely loved working with Nico. He's a wonderful, wonderful editor. In our discussions before we got into the edit, we knew that the script was just like a blueprint, and that we would be able to mess around with some of the positions of where the memories came. So in our script we placed them, but actually, we always knew that in the edit we might play with them a bit more, or they might end up somewhere completely different from where they were in the script. And that's so exciting when you're editing. It feels more like editing a documentary in a way than it does editing a drama." Where was the edit taking place? "I live in Bristol in the UK, so he came over to Bristol. I was very lucky that he came over to Bristol and edited in a lovely facilities house in Bristol called Films at 59. We edited there, and the assistant was in a room next door. What I loved about Nico's editing is, he has a very poetic eye. When we first sat down to watch it, I said, 'I think this film should be a poem and not a novel.' That was my big note to him. You don't have to be too literal." The footage must have allowed for this flexibility? "Yeah, because we decided before that some of these things could go any- where. So I knew that they would maybe be used in different ways. And so did Charlotte, so we tried to make these things feel like little snatches of time." What were the film's visual effects and stock footage needs? I see Gorilla VFX and Mystic Sangai Studio made contributions? "I don't think there is any stock pho- tography in there. It was all real! We did everything for real. The hawks at the beginning. There is no footage of those. In the script, it said, 'The hawks are doing their display flight.' There is no footage of goshawk doing a displayed flight that we could have used. We had to put our feel- ers out. We found a person who'd been reporting the sightings of hawks doing their display flight in March. This is when we were editing, and our cameraman (Mark Payne-Gill) jumped in his car, went down to the secret location, filmed these amazing, amazing shots on a very, very long lens. We would have maybe used stock footage, but there was none. "The pheasants flying — they're all real. The rabbits — Mark filmed them and then the VFX people did put them into the hunt sequences because, obviously, we couldn't do that to a real rabbit. And when the hawk pursues the lure, which is like a little yellow pillow on the end of a rope, the VFX people had to remove the lure and the string and all of that, and then put in the footage of the rabbit. So those things are constructed, but the hawk is really flying like that, and the rabbit is really running. None of the hawk stuff is CGI, and we're very proud of ourselves." What was the time period for post production? "We had about six months all together, I think, and the VFX people started work- ing with us quite early, just to get the feel of it. They also had to do boring things, like remove the odd light that got in the way. Boring, old clean-up. But we tried to use as little VFX as we possibly could. What I think Gorilla did brilliantly was, it's so subtle what they've done. They've maintained the real feel." Was the work with a live hawk the most challenging aspect of this project? "We had to plan all the filming with the hawks like a military operation. There wasn't much unpredictability, because by then we'd learned so much about how to do it. The previous year I'd done loads and loads of tests, filming with (hawk handler) Lloyd (Buck), so we got quite a good idea with our fantastic drone cameraman and Mark Payne-Gill, who's a wildlife photographer. We put so many months and months into the planning because we knew we were quite a low-budget outfit and we had to get the shoot done quite fast, so there was nothing really left to be unpredictable, apart from the lovely, natural things that happened with the hawk." What's next for you? "I'm doing a little bit of writing now, but I had another big television project at the same time called Prisoner 951, which was a co-thing between BBC and Fremantle. I filmed that. Then I filmed the whole of Hawk and edited the whole of Hawk. Then they went back and finished that other project." www.postmagazine.com 13 POST MAR/APR 2026 Editor Nico Luenen worked out of Films at 59 in Bristol.