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director's chair Gore Verbinski — The Lone Ranger H By Iain Blair A classic western shot on film and digital formats. OLLYWOOD — Gore Verbinski loves a challenge — and the bigger the better. After directing the first three films in the mega-franchise Pirates of the Caribbean, and following that up with the Oscarwinning Rango, he's taken on The Lone Ranger, based on the classic 1950's TV series about a masked ex-Texas Ranger who fought the bad guys in the Wild West with the help of his Indian sidekick Tonto. Disney's big-budget (a reported $215 million) feature film reboot marks another highprofile collaboration between the studio and the team of uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Verbinski, who hope The Lone Ranger will do for the enduring western icons what their Pirates of the Caribbean franchise did for pirates. It also reunites the team with shape-shifting Pirates star Johnny Depp (who also bonded with the director on Rango), who trades in his buccaneer outfit for a crow hat and Indian regalia as Tonto, and features Armie Hammer (The Social Network, J. Edgar) as the titular hero alongside co-stars Ruth Wilson, Helena Bonham Carter, William Fichtner and Tom Wilkinson. Behind the scenes, the film also reunites Verbinski with cinematographer Bojan Bazelli, ASC, who shot the director's thriller The Ring, longtime editor Craig Wood (the Pirates films), who teamed on this with co-editor James Haygood (Fight Club), and ILM's VFX supervisor Tim Alexander (Rango). Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, Verbinski talks about making the film, the challenges involved and dealing with over 2,000 visual effects shots. POST: What sort of film did you set out to make? GORE VERBINSKI: "For me, the way in was always through Tonto and telling the story through his perspective, and him as this untrustworthy narrator. It's about the relationship between these two and the collision between the laws of nature and the laws of man." POST: What were the main technical challenges of pulling all this together, and what was your visual approach? VERBINSKI: "There were so many, especially when you have horses and trains and you want to make it all as realistic as you can. Early on, we decided to shoot anamorphic, like all the great westerns, and using a combination of film for daylight and then digital for all the nighttime scenes and interiors. For the 12 Post • August 2013 digital, we used the new Alexa Studio [from Arri], and the film was the first ever to shoot anamorphic Alexa I believe. "We wanted to approach it as a western, but as an action-adventure film, not a drama, and to get away from that clichéd look of the old westerns that always used day-for-night for nighttime exteriors and that had these brightly-lit daytime exteriors and heavily-satu- brown, And the shoot was so complex technically, with all the train scenes and horses and extras, so after 150 days of that, it really takes a toll on everyone." POST: How early did you have to integrate post into the shoot to pull this off? VERBINSKI: "Right from the start. I always start thinking about post even in the scriptwriting phase and all the storyboards, and Gore Verbinski on set: "Ultimately we had over 2,000 VFX in the movie, a huge amount, and you always wish you could do some stuff over again, but we got them all done in the end." rated colors. We wanted to keep it simpler, so our costumes are all dark and monochromatic and toned-down. And since we knew we'd be shooting outside nearly the whole time, we did a lot of technical scouting where we would go to the locations and then block out our scenes months ahead of the shoot. We even used GPS and various apps to determine exactly where the sun would be by the time we got back to a particular location, and we relied pretty much on natural sunlight for all our daytime scenes." POST: How tough was the shoot? VERBINSKI: "It was brutal. We shot in half a dozen states, with a ton of locations in Utah, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Arizona and California, and also such iconic places as Monument Valley and Canyon de Chelly National Monument. We went from snow and hail to 115-degree heat, but all the dust and the dust storms were the worst. Sometimes you couldn't even see the actors for the dust storms, and you'd have grit in your food and everywhere on you. I'd take a shower at night and the water would just be www.postmagazine.com then all during preproduction. It quickly became obvious that I'd have to previs the big train sequence, so we started to break that all down right away. You make decisions based on the ultimate way you want to shoot something, then you realize you can't afford to do it that way, so you start grouping things together and you're in this strange triage mode in pre production — budgeting and re-assessing continually. "So it's a case of, ideally I'd like to shoot this at this location, but I have 40 extras already in the train car on this other day, so I should just finish them out so I don't have to bring them back again. So you say, 'This moment's really critical — I won't compromise, but I'll adapt over here.' It's like a giant puzzle of logistics, locations, issues, schedules — and post is always a key factor in the mix." POST: Where did you do the post? VERBINSKI: "At the Blind Wink offices in Pasadena." POST: The film was edited by Craig Wood and James Haygood. Were they on set? VERBINSKI: "No, they were both based at