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DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 23 POST NOVEMBER 2015 and the locations. We shot it in all these sets we built on stages in Atlanta — all the sewers and antechambers — and they were all filled with water. So we had to deal with water and fire and darkness, and it was basically lit by the flashlights on guns, and we also had a lot of stunts and fight choreography, and it was a truly miserable environment to film in for three weeks to a month. And then we had a lot of very heavy-duty VFX work by Weta, but they did a phenomenal job." Can you talk about the importance of music and sound to you as a filmmaker? "They're huge for me, and this is my fifth movie with composer James Newton Howard, who's done all the Hunger Games movies. This is the first time I've done a franchise, and by now, on the third one together, there's such a wealth of material to pull from, and such a close relationship with the story, the charac- ters, the world, that it makes the process really fun and fairly easy. We recorded the score at Abbey Road, and we're mix- ing the movie on the lot at Warners with a great team — my mixer Skip Lievsay and my sound designer Jeremy Peirson — the guys I've worked with since my first film. We actually bring Jeremy on pretty much as I start my director's cut, so he's there right from the start, waiting for reels as I'm working with the editors after we've wrapped. Then he starts building the sound immediately, so there's a real development process through the cut of the movie and you can make a lot of the creative decisions ahead of time. By the time you get to the mix stage, it's more detailing and getting into nuance, rather than having to make the big creative decisions." The DI must have been vital. How did that process help? "We just started at Efilm and it's a huge deal. What's interesting is that because of my background in music videos and commercials, I've never done a lab tim- ing. And on my first film, Constantine, the DI was this new process and I actually had to convince the studio to allow me to do it, as they'd never used it before and were a bit nervous of this new digital technique. So for me, the DI is a crucial part of post. We shot this and the last film with the [Arri] Alexa, so that helped as well, as we had the DIT on-set, and so the DP and DIT and me could come up with looks on-set that become the looks for dailies. So in terms of the pipeline, the look of the movie is much closer from the day we start shooting through to the end of the DI than it is with film, where the dailies never quite look like what comes out after the DI." Did the film turn out the way you hoped it would? "It did and I think it looks really good. The DP, Jo Willems, did a great job, and [at press time] we're still waiting on some of the final VFX shots, but I'm very happy with it." What's next? "I'm trying to figure out what I want to do next after spending the last few years on The Hunger Games. I've been developing a few things, and one is The Odyssey, another huge production I'm really excited about. And I'm developing this project at Fox with Jennifer Lawrence called The Dive, which is all about free divers, a true story. So there's a lot on the horizon." Much of the film was shot on- location — Atlanta, Boston, Paris, Germany — using Arri Alexas.