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www.postmagazine.com 20 POST JUNE 2015 Northern California (the team included sound designer and supervising sound editor Al Nelson and sound designer and re-recording mixer Peter Horner). ILM did all the VFX in San Francisco, so we spent most of our time in the final months up in the Bay Area. I grew up in Oakland, so it was great to be back home." The film was edited by Kevin Stitt, whose credits include X-Men, Lethal Weapon 4 and Jack Reacher. How did that relationship work, as you didn't really know each other before this? "Kevin and I hadn't worked together before, so we had this trial by fire, where we had to learn each other's language in a high-stakes scenario. Now we finish each other's sentences. It's like a marriage that starts with two people trapped in a submarine. The relationship gets close quickly." There are obviously a huge number of visual effects shots in the film. How many are there? Who did them? Who was the VFX supervisor? How did that work? "All our visual effects were done at Industrial Light and Magic. We had a thousand shots. It sounds like a lot, but compared to most effects-heavy films these days, it's on the low end. Tim Alex- ander was our VFX supervisor, and he got a much-deserved Oscar nomination for The Lone Ranger. That film had some very complex work integrating practical effects with CGI. It was all designed to feel real and plausible in a period set- ting. His work here had to do something similar, as we not only had to believe the animals were real, but that this theme park existed. The story fails if you don't believe the world. We built all our sets, and there was very little greenscreen. Tim and Glen McIntosh, our animation supervisors, worked together to make the audience accept that this was a real place you could actually go to. If they had failed, I don't think the movie could work. Actually, if any of us had failed, the movie wouldn't work. There are so many ways for something like this to go wrong, and only one way for it to go right. It's not fishing with dynamite, it's fishing with chopsticks." What was the most difficult visual effects sequence/shot to do and why? "Our final shot is over a minute long. It follows a dinosaur battle that tracks a group of people in and back out of a building, and then… well, I won't spoil it, but it involved knitting together dolly work, Technocrane and a camera mounted on the back of a motorcycle. It took more computing power to render than any shot ILM had previously tried. I found out after the fact that they weren't sure it was going to work. That might be one of the benefits of having only done this once before. I don't know what you can't do. My inexperience pushed them further than they thought was possible." Can you talk about the importance of music and sound to you as a filmmaker? "Sound is the closer. Without it, all your hardest work goes to waste. We have an outstanding score for this film, Michael Giacchino (who won the Oscar for Up) really brought it. I mixed it forward, so the music is much more present than it is in modern mixes. It's kind of an old-school way to do it, but I love the result. It makes you feel like a kid again, because this is how they treated movie music when I was a kid. It's a fanfare for what you're watching." The DI must have been vital. How did that process help? "Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3 did our DI. We shot film, so the goal was to keep those qualities and lean into them. It doesn't look perfect all the time. Film has flaws and imperfections, and it's part of what makes it beautiful. Stefan loves film and he knows how to bring out the best in the image. John Schwartzman, our DP, is an extrordinary cinematogra- pher. I'm not sure what else I can say, as the evidence will be on-screen. That's not one of the positions someone else can cover up for you if you do a bad job. It's all right there." Did the film turn out the way you hoped it would? "Yes." So what's next after this — pun-intend- ed — monster production? "There's a story I've been wanting to tell for awhile, a script I first read just after finishing Safety, called Book of Henry. I had to let it go to do Jurassic, but it became available again and I couldn't let it get away twice. It's challenging and a little intimidating. If all comes together, I'm going to do it later this year. After that, I'll probably do something on a larger scale. I'm not someone who prefers smaller films and only does the larger ones to make money or maintain relevance in the business. I love them both. So long as I can keep exploring new worlds and people, I'll be happy." DIRECTOR'S CHAIR One thousand VFX shots by ILM help convince audiences that this theme park is real. C M Y CM MY CY CMY K