Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/17668
way. All the visual effects were created by Pixel Magic, and the visual effects supervisor was Ray McIntyre, who was on the set con- stantly along with Andy Fowler, Disney’s vi- sual effects supervisor. So any time we had a question about what was possible, we had them right there to fix any problem. “Most of the shots were so we could add crowds in the backgrounds and the stands, as we weren’t always at the locations we were meant to be at. So we’d have a back- ground plate of Churchill Downs, for exam- ple, and add stuff in. In post we cleaned up a lot of stuff, but our visual effects budget was quite small, so that also limited what we could do.“ POST: How important are sound and music to you? WALLACE: “They’re so vital to any film. I worked with composer Nick Glennie-Smith again, who’s done all my films as a director, and he’s brilliant.Then we had this great inter- play between the score and the sound de- sign, which was all done by Ben Cook and mixed at Lantana.The editor is also a key part of keeping that all together. So I try and keep my eye on the ‘big picture’ and the ‘why’ of it all, and they understand the ‘how’ of it all.” POST:Did you do a DI? WALLACE: “Yes, at EFilm with colorist Steve Scott. It’s pretty amazing what you can do now in a DI, and we did stuff like lighten- ing the horses’ masks so you can see their eyes more brightly. I really wanted to see a lot of color,so we were also able to saturate them a bit, to show off the colors of the silks and so on.That was a nice contrast to the al- most vicious, kinetic immediacy we got from the Olycam footage.We did some cosmetic precisely simulate various film stocks and lab processes during color correction.] POST: Did the film turn out the way you hoped? WALLACE: “I’m an extremely ambitious guy and I always want everything I do to be the best I can possibly make it, so it really helps to work with such supremely gifted people, both in front of and behind the cam- eras. I expected great things from Dean and John and everyone, and the results have ex- ceeded all my expectations.” POST: Is film dead? WALLACE: “No, I honestly don’t think so.This was my first time shooting digitally and I was very impressed. It’s just so efficient and I do think the digital world will keep improving. Right now, I think they’re both so close in image qual- ity, and I don’t think this movie would be a bit more beautiful had we shot it on film. And it might have gone a bit slower in terms of the shoot and post. Going digital was amazingly efficient — to the point where we actually came in $1 million under budget and two days ahead of schedule, which is un- heard of. Disney was thrilled.We Visual effects, most of which included crowds, was done at Pixel Magic. The DI was done at Efilm on EWorks, its proprietary color system. work. It’s now so easy to take out wrinkles or whatever.” [Scott used EWorks, a propri- etary computer-based color correction sys- tem that offers LUTs that are created to shot the whole film in just 45 days on a schedule no one thought we could possibly do.The previous film our producers worked on was about ice hockey, with people in- stead of horses to control, and it took them over 90 days to shoot. So there are big sav- ings in time and money. But I still love film and I think it’ll stick around for a while.” POST: Hollywood’s gone 3D crazy it seems. Any interest in doing a 3D film? WALLACE: “I love 3D in the right film and it’s a challenge, so I’d definitely be inter- ested. For me, the key values in any cinema are emotional depth and visual lyricism — a Lawrence of Arabia kind of experience.That’s what I aspire to. Right now, 3D still feels a touch gimmicky in a lot of films, but I thought Avatar was so brilliantly done that it got me thinking about 3D and its possibili- ties in a whole new way. So I’d love to try it at some point.” POST: How did you get involved in Entourage? WALLACE: (Laughs) “It’s a funny story. Our casting director, Sheila Jaffe, also casts Entourage, and I was joking with her about a writer/director friend of mine who’d been on the show, saying ‘How come he gets to be on the show and not me?’ I don’t watch much TV, but I love the show! Anyway, she’d just laugh and we’d kid around, and then suddenly one day I got a call from them to do it. It began as a single episode and it turned into a three-episode arc, and I’ve gotten more calls about that than anything else in my whole career.” POST: What’s next? WALLACE: “I have a dream project set in Russia during the American Revolution, and I’ve been working on that for years. That’s my passion project. But I’ve also got some other scripts I’m working on. I’m hop- ing that Secretariat will help redefine me, as all my other films have had so much killing and bloodshed.” www.postmagazine.com October 2010 • Post 15 DP Dean Semler shot close-ups of the horses on the new Olympus PEN E- PL1. The rest of the film was captured via Panavision’s Genesis. ALL PHOTOS: JOHN BRAMLEY