Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/3788
D I R E C T O R ' S C H A I R 14 Post • October 2009 www.postmagazine.com houses and Fox was losing interest in it and sort of dumped it. And we did a test screen- ing for that with unfinished effects scenes that were literally just a drawing on the screen — not even greenscreen with actors in front! We had a shot that was supposed to be the Washington Monument, and it was just a drawing and so out of focus and low- res you didn't even know what it was.There was a bunch of stuff like that. So, of course, it scored really badly and then they star ted pulling money out of post left and right, and cutting shots. But this was actually a pretty fun movie to edit and do post on." POST: How many visual effects shots are there and how did it break down between Pixel Magic and Look Effects? JUDGE: "We had a bunch of typical opti- cals and about 30 visual effects shots, the main ones being the establishing shot of the factory, which Look Effects did, and then the testicle getting blown off, which was Pixel Magic, and then all the bong scenes smoke stuff. We did use some real effects smoke that's neutral, and originally it was just going to be one effects shot. But Jason did a great take where he starts coughing, and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if with every cough he just blows out more and more smoke?" At first, the Pixel guys just thought I was a little crazy.They didn't think it was that funny, but after they did it, they all laughed hysterically." POST: What was that the most difficult ef- fects shot to pull off? JUDGE: "The bong smoke scene.We had to shoot it a few times, as it didn't work at first. It's a combination of this air-blower with smoke and this guy who matched every one of Jason's breaths. You shoot smoke against blackscreen, and it's not easy to do. The vapor trail stuff on the testicle scene was also tricky. I wanted it to seem slow-motion, but also to give it the look of something with so much momentum that it's not going to be slowed down by anything. All we shot was the pipes breaking open. "I like to do stuff like that, in broad day- light, high and wide, and not do a bunch of multiple cuts to tr y and confuse people. I often feel when I see an action or fight scene in a movie, they make it so disorienting and confusing that you don't know where you are. So especially for comedy, I just like that flat-out Buster Keaton-style approach. The camera's locked off — there it is! "I think on the first take, we had the actor and glass behind him squibbed, and he hit his mark, and the rate at which the thing blew out his pants and the glass broke seemed like the perfect distance. So I went back to my physics background and said, 'OK, that's the right distance, put green markers all the way across so the thing doesn't even slow down at all.' It's similar to what you do in animation. I've always been amazed by Chuck Jones and the Roadrun- ner stuff, how they handled speed and mo- mentum. It was just amazing, and you don't see that stuff so much now." POST: You have a great soundtrack. How important are sound and music to you? JUDGE: "It's huge, especially the music, and that's another thing that went really well. Normally, I run into problems. On my other films I'd put in some songs and they'd work like magic, but then we could never af- ford them. On this, I ended up getting every song I wanted.That's the first thing I did. And it all cleared, to my surprise. We did the mix at the Sony lot with supervising sound edi- tor Steve Ticknor and sound effects editor Marty Lopez, and we recorded the score at The Music Shed in New Orleans." POST: Did you do a DI? JUDGE: "This will shock people, but no. My DP, Tim Suhrstedt, who shot Little Miss Sunshine, told me, 'Don't let them talk you into doing a DI.' Usually you're really pushing for one, and now there's only eight movies a year that don't do a DI, but I really like the way film looks and what happens when you go to the internegative and interpositive and all that. It thickens it up. "I love the way old Technicolor movies look. I wish we could go back to that look. It's the reason 24 frame looks better than 30 frame, because you don't want it to look like reality — you want it to look dreamlike. They spent all this time and en- ergy over the decades tr ying to make film look more like reality, and they lost that dream quality. But I think film stocks are better than they were 10 years ago." POST: Is film dead? JUDGE: "Not yet, and I hope there's enough business to keep labs and Kodak and so on busy, as I'd hate to see it disap- pear. It's interesting, because when I did Idioc- racy, ever yone pushed me to shoot it digi- tally, even though it wasn't really any cheaper. And now studios are backing off a bit.There's just so much more information in a negative. But I'm not knocking digital. There's some really crazy, cool stuff you can do digitally, and it just depends on the pro- ject. And for this, I wanted it to look like those old Technicolor movies." Julia Wong cut the film on an Avid — Judge provided selects reels via his laptop. Extract, which got its mix at Sony, was shot in a working water- bottling plant.