Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/297945
14 Post • April 2014 www.postmagazine.com director's chair and try stuff and experiment with the pacing and structure of the movie. You're not just racing to execute shots. There's room to let it all breathe and to find the film within the coverage you have." POST: Where did you do the post? ARONOFSKY: "We did it all in New York, at Sixteen19, a great company we've done a lot of work with. They helped us set up a few Avids in some random office space we rented in downtown Manhattan, and we cut the whole film there and we've been doing post for over 16 months now — far longer than the actual shoot. We probably spent about seven months editing." POST: The film was edited by Andrew Weis- blum, who also cut Black Swan and The Wres- tler for you. Tell us about that relationship? ARONOFSKY: "He was my visual effects editor on The Fountain, which is where I first met him, and he sometimes came to the set, especially if we were doing a scene that had some challenging coverage in it. And some- times I'd have him come so he could quickly splice some footage together so we could take a look at it while we're on-set, and that's become more and more possible with new technology. But I also like for him to not come to the set so that he has more objective eyes when he gets to the edit room." POST: How many VFX shots are there? ARONOFSKY: "There's probably about 1,300 — quite a lot. We were actually able to do quite a lot of the effects in-camera, as we were shooting in such amazing locations." POST: Who did them and how did you approach them? ARONOFSKY: "It was a mix of ILM and Look in New York, who did Black Swan. And then we also had Mr. X, who did some work. I worked very closely with our VFX supervi- sor Ben Snow, who came out of ILM. We spent a lot of time discussing every single shot and what we wanted to accomplish, and then Dan Schrecker at Look and the guys at ILM went off and created the shots." POST: What was the most technically-diffi- cult shot to pull off? ARONOFSKY: "There were so many. In fact, the longest render of any shot ILM has ever done is in our film. It took over a million processing hours to create, and it's this pull- through shot through the ark with all the animals in it. It basically shut down the whole ILM facility for a few days every time they rendered it, so we were only allowed to ren- der it three or four times, and we had to make sure we got it totally right." POST: Can you talk about the importance of music and sound? ARONOFSKY: "Sound design and effects and music are just huge for me, and I always consider the composer to be as important to the film as the DP or production designer, and even more so in a way as my composer, Clint Mansell, usually gets involved at a script level, and starts creating music from that and then keeps working on the score all the way through to the very end. This is a long film — 130 minutes — and he created about 120 minutes of music for it. And I've always been very interested in sound design, and I've been lucky to find Craig Henighan, who've I've worked with since Requiem. He knows what we're looking for and spends a lot of time cutting sound. We're mixing in Atmos at Deluxe in New York, which is a fantastic sys- tem, especially for this film with all the rain sounds. There are also a lot of natural and environmental sounds we use — birds and animals — so we've been able to do a lot of cool stuff with Atmos." POST: The DI must have been vital. How did that process help? ARONOFSKY: "We're right in the middle of it, at Technicolor in Manhattan, and I'm a big DI fan. The DP goes through it four times and I do it twice, and the process has completely changed the way films work, as you can do so much creative stuff now, like guiding the audi- ence where to look in a shot, and cleaning up stuff that isn't working." POST: Did it turn out the way you hoped? ARONOFSKY: "Yes, absolutely, but I'm always into letting the film evolve as you work on it and you face certain limitations, and that's what's so great about post. " POST: What's next? ARONOFSKY: "I have nothing lined up yet, and after Noah, I need to take a break and recharge my batteries." Deluxe handled the mix for Noah's Dolby Atmos soundtrack. Some of the film's VFX shots involved the longest rendering times ILM has ever had to deal with.