Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/426326
www.postmagazine.com 17 POST NOVEMBER 2014 rehearsing but shooting the rehearsals and then fi nding it all in the edit. And so what we began the day doing on set, by the time we wrapped that scene out, we might have turned it on its head and discovered something else. So when we got to post, the engineering challenge of putting together a fi lm like this is pretty big. We'd discovered a lot of new things, and we knew we had the material to do it, but how we'd originally imagined it coming together got altered and refi ned by all the new discoveries we'd made, and all the rewiring we did." Can you give an example? "The fi rst act used to be much longer, and there were scenes designed to establish the complicated relationship between the two brothers. But once I watched the scene at the start where they warm each other up and then wres- tle at the beginning, and Dave breaks Mark's nose, I realized everything you need to know about these guys you see in this scene. So we could just lose those other four, fi ve scenes, and you under- stand it all and who they are to each other — and all without hardly a word of dialogue. It was just right there, and that's the beauty of post." How many visual eff ects shots are there in the fi lm? "Quite a few — and far more than you might imagine in this kind of fi lm. Jake Braver was the VFX supervisor and he used several vendors, including Phos- phene, Look Eff ects, Method Studios, CoSA VFX and Hammerhead. But it wasn't the kind of sexy VFX shots — it was mainly stuff like crowd replacement, the helicopter at night scenes, quite a few make up touch-ups, adding the Foxcatch- er logo to a plane's tail and so on. Then we slightly enhanced the du Pont estate home and added extensions to the end." Can you talk about the importance of music and sound to you as a fi lmmaker? "I think that of all the various disciplines in fi lmmaking, sound is probably the most under-appreciated and misun- derstood. I worked with this fantastic supervising sound editor, Paul Hsu, who did Life of Pi, and we did some of the mix in LA with Deb Adair and then a few days back in New York with Tom Fleis- chman. Every scene has its own tone, and frequencies that are felt but which don't really stand out too much, and that goes for the visuals and the subtle way in which the camera may be moving, but also the sound of everything. Every room tone has been selected from a palette, and even the same room, as you go back, like with the gym, may change subtly. So the fi rst time we visit the gym, the room tone is a distillation of a trumpet note that you'll hear in a few moments, from the fi rst real cue in the fi lm. And as we revisit the gym again and again, we move towards these higher-pitched, irritating frequencies — the noise of fl uorescent lights and so on, as things get ratcheted up. Every scene has that going on." All that attention to detail sounds almost like you were trying to create a silent fi lm, where you don't need dialogue, or even music cues? "You're right in a sense, because if you eliminate all the music and dialogue, you could just listen to all the various room tones of this fi lm, and you would have a whole experience. It's the kind of subtle stuff that no one will ever notice, but I do believe that it has a big eff ect subcon- sciously. And that's just one aspect of the whole sound design. Paul, like Greig, is su- per-sensitive, and we began talking about what each scene's about, and where we pick it up and end it, and every little decision within that also plays into the big picture. So when du Pont arrives drunk at night and bangs on Mark's window, there are all these specifi c sounds — the crickets before you hear the car stopping on the gravel, and then the sound of the tires sliding a foot in the gravel, and then the honk, and I said to Paul, 'Can we hear him honk like he's six beers in, six Jack Daniel's in?' And he'd give me exactly that right honk." The DI must have been vital. Where did you do it and how did that process help? "The DI is hugely important to me, and again, when you have a feeling about the soul of a fi lm, it's not just telling a story — it's serving the story. How do we see it? And how do you conjure the conscious- ness of a fi lm, the mind of a fi lm? Every little fi ber and ingredient contributes to all that, and the color can obviously make or break it. We shot on fi lm and colored it in a true fi lm space, and Tom Poole, the colorist at Company 3 where we did the DI, personally shares an aesthetic with what the fi lm is, I feel. And to me it's pretty honest and organic. Films are like people to me — you trust them or you don't. And given the capabilities of the DI room today, it takes a real discipline to not use all the bells and whistles. I don't think we've got 20 windows in the whole movie, and we rarely said on the set, 'We'll just fi x that in the DI.' Once you get in the habit of doing that, it's very hard to know where to draw the line, and know when you've gone overboard or not." What's next? "I've got a couple of ideas, but right now I'm sort of stalling. It's always so tricky, knowing what you'll still feel passionate about in two years." DIRECTOR'S CHAIR Company 3 performed the DI, giving the fi lm an honest and organic look.