Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/432224
www.postmagazine.com 23 POST DECEMBER 2014 t's been a pretty good year for Hollywood, thanks to such global blockbusters as Guardians of the Galaxy, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Godzilla, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Gone Girl, The Hunger Games: Mock- ingjay — Part 1, The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies, Malefi cent, Interstellar and The Lego Movie. And audiences, happy to for- get the ongoing weak economic recovery and continuing dysfunction in Washington DC, headed to the theatres in healthy numbers, especially to see anything light and escapist. Here, four top directors — David Fincher, David O. Russell, Darren Aronofsky and Doug Liman — tackle Post's SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportu- nities and Threats) questions and air their views about the year ahead. DAVID FINCHER Gone Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network Fincher fi rst arrived on the scene with his 1992 sci-fi thriller Alien 3, and followed that up with Seven and The Game. Since then, he's established himself as one of Hollywood's most versatile and success- ful directors — and an Oscar favorite (he was nominated for Best Director for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network). STRENGTHS: "The big one is that you can't make your movie worse. By the time you're editing and color-correcting and redoing all the camera moves and adding all the VFX and sound and music, you're defi nitely making it better. And post is being integrated more and more into production — and even pre-production — so it's a more crucial part of the whole fi lmmaking process than ever before." WEAKNESSES: "I've heard from some people that you have too many options and choices now in post, thanks to all the new technology, but I've never found that to be true. All this stuff — having random access, down-res, 6K and so on — it's like having more brushes, and to be honest, I want more choices and options." OPPORTUNITIES: "The DI, especially now, gives you so many opportunities to work with your material and it's so important to me — and it's getting more and more important. It's also becoming a more and more unsupervised process, and I now can color-correct a lot of stuff on my PowerBook. The big advantage of using even a crappy display — and I've used a lot of bad desktop monitors — is that if there is a discrepancy, you'll see it. It's like music engineers who mix tracks on small, tiny speakers — if they sound good on that, then they'll sound amaz- ing on great speakers. And it's the same visually. Of course, ideally, you want to color-correct in 6K or 4K on a great pro- jector, but I've had a lot of success with pretty fl imsy monitors where minute dis- crepancies become major ones, and you can spot them immediately. And I'd like to become more and more effi cient, to the point where I could make a big movie with just 15 or 20 people instead of the usual 80 or 90 crew, and the same with post, and employ fewer people for longer." THREATS: "Thanks to all the tools, technol- ogy and software that have been devel- oped over the past decade or so, post has defi nitely been speeded up. So now you can fi nish your fi lm that much faster. But I also feel that you still need a cer- tain amount of time to think about it and what you're creating. So there's far more pressure on you to get it done, but just because it's possible to do it faster doesn't mean that that's a good thing for the cre- ative process. Pixels are great, but if they're not organized in support of a feeling and emotion, then it misses the point." OUTLOOK FOR 2015: "I think the overall movie business is pretty healthy, and Hollywood is doing what it has to do in terms of planning for the future, espe- cially with all the global markets, like China and South America, expanding so rapidly. And all the new technology and systems are making the image and sound better than ever when you go to a local theatre, so I'm very optimistic about the future of cinema." FOUR HOLLYWOOD HEAVYWEIGHTS LOOK AT THE YEAR AHEAD FINCHER, RUSSELL, ARONOFSKY AND LIMAN WEIGH IN ON TECH, TRENDS AND THEIR LOVE FOR POST OUTLOOK DIRECTORS O OUTLOOK O OUTLOOK I BY IAIN BLAIR Post is being integrated more and more into production — and even pre-production — so it's a more CRUCIAL PART OF THE WHOLE FILMMAKING PROCESS than ever before."