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www.postmagazine.com 20 POST JANUARY 2015 supervisor Marc Cote (Immortals). "This fi lm is about a woman in the wilderness and that's where it had to be shot," says Vallee. "We shot on the PCT as much as we could and in some other loca- tions nearby, but we were always search- ing for that kind of beauty Cheryl writes about. We shot as early in the morning as we could to capture that morning light and we shot as late as we could to grab the sunsets. Sometimes I had the impres- sion that I was making a Western, a John Ford fi lm but with a tiny female fi gure cast against these vast vistas." Like Birdman, Wild also employed an unusual approach to shooting. Belanger has been developing a unique, instinc- tive photographic style that creates a hyper-real experience by using only handheld digital cameras and shooting without any artifi cial lighting, and adapted this methodology to the great outdoors. "This technique is very liberating for everybody," says the DP. "The actors love it because once you start shooting you don't stop, and they feel a lot more connected because it's just them and the camera." As on Dallas Buyer's Club, he used the Arri Alexa, but this time added new Zeiss Master Prime lenses, and just a few mechanical lights for sequences that required it, such as shooting in the pouring rain. "We shot for 35 days, with 90 percent of the movie in Portland and then every- where in Oregon, and we shot two days in the California desert, the Mojave," adds the DP, who only used one camera. We con- sider it the cinema's point of view. It was always handheld and we shot it normal but we framed it 2:45. Jean-Marc doesn't like the anamorphic because we can't go close enough on the human face." Vallee says that at the beginning of the shoot, "he wasn't sure" how to capture "a woman alone on a trail with a back- pack and her thoughts. Are we waiting for her on the trail as she passes by? Are we following her with a hand-held dolly back? Are we behind her and walking with her with a hand-held dolly in? Are we seeing her from behind and stay there as she walks by and becomes smaller and smaller in the frame, in the wilderness? Since we weren't sure about the right dis- tance yet, Yves and I covered our backs on the set. We shot most of the scenes in diff erent ways in order to allow us in the cutting room to fi nd that distance. The hand-held dolly back won. Most of the time, we're close to Reese and we're walking with her. We're close to her face, we can easily see what she's looking at, and get a feeling of what she is thinking of. And sometimes, it was as important to see her small and far away from us, to see her among the wilderness." Ultimately, says Vallee, fi nding the right distance between the main character and the audience "was something that I discovered in the cutting room," where the mixing and melding of reality and fl ashbacks became especially vital to the editing process. The crux of the editing, overseen by Vallee, was staying inside Cheryl's head throughout, mirroring the way a person's mind moves back and forth through time and memories when they are alone. Says Pensa, "We wanted the fi lm to refl ect how people think. We don't think continuously, but we have these little moments of fl ashing back to a memory, of humming a song, of talking to ourselves, of going from one thought to something completely diff erent. That's what we were trying to re-create." Sound also played a key role, says Val- lee. "But I didn't want to use score music. I didn't want to give the audience this impression of 'fi lm watching.' That's often how I feel with score music, I become aware of it, aware that I'm watching a fi lm. So I played music on the trail in a ghostly fashion, with a reverb eff ect, very low in the distance to give the impression that it's coming from Cheryl's mind, as if she was trying to remember a song, or some parts of a song. And it became some sort of a convention to slowly introduce a fl ashback scene and to slowly get out of it. But the main direction with music was to use it only during fl ashbacks. When there is music, it's because it's playing in the scene from a sound device, a car radio for instance, or a CD player. What Cheryl is listening to in her life, is the music that we hear during the fi lm." Post facilities were provided by Fox, and the supervising sound editors were Ai-Ling Lee and Mildred Morgan. The DI grading was done by Film Factory, Montreal, with colorist Marc Boucrot, and the digital 2K conform was done at Fake Digital Entertainment, which also did all the visual eff ects. Director Bennett Miller may not be very prolifi c — his new fi lm Foxcatcher is only his third feature since he made his debut in 1998 with the acclaimed documentary The Cruise, but he's an Oscar fave and his previous fi lms — 2005's Capote and 2011's Moneyball were both Oscar-nomi- nated. Foxcatcher is also getting a lot of Oscar buzz for its unlikely-but-true story of Olympic Gold Medal-winning wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) and his more celebrated wrestling brother Dave (Mark Ruff alo), and their tense relation- ship with the eccentric, wealthy heir John du Pont (Steve Carell). The fi lm was shot in 35mm entirely on location with no stage work at all, except for the gyms, which were built inside an abandoned high school. The fi lm was edited by three editors — Connor O'Neill, who worked on Moneyball, Stuart Levy (Savages and Any Given Sunday), and Jay Cassidy (Oscar-nominated for American Hustle and Silver Linings Playbook), and the cut took about a year, "partly because we had so much material, and then the way Mr. Turner Captain America: The Winter Soldier Into the Woods OSCAR PICKS