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sual effects shots in the film. How many are there, and what was your approach to dealing with them? RITCHIE: (Laughs) "I'm not sure exactly how many we did in the end — it must be 600 or 700.What I do know is that where we could, we stuck to shooting real locations. And then when push came to shove, we ended up in Brooklyn to do various scenes. "To reconstruct Tower Bridge as it was being built did mean that we needed the benefits of modern technology, and Double Negative created all of the Tower Bridge scenes [over 300 shots], along with the shots of the Thames. Then Framestore did the boat, all the dockyards and the Houses of Parliament. And Cube Effects also did a few shots, and the Visual Effects Company did all the aerial sequences." POST: What was the most difficult visual effects shot to pull together? RITCHIE: "Definitely some of the stuff we did for the whole Tower Bridge se- quence.That was very tricky to get right." POST: You have a ver y strong, distinctive score by Hans Zimmer. Can you talk about the importance of music and sound to you as a filmmaker? RITCHIE: "It's so impor tant to me. Talk- ing about the whole post process, this is al- ways the spot where I get most excited. I al- ways love getting all the music and audio to- gether, so I spend a good deal of time on it, on all my films. "For this, I spent a lot of time and many late nights with Hans tr ying to come up with what we felt was as an original sound- track as we dared. And that was inspired by what was happening in England in this time in histor y, so we got quite a lot of Eastern European and Irish influence. It's basically a folkie feel that percolates the period, as op- posed to the more obvious classical and traditional and refined school of the time. So we went for something far ear thier, and instead of an orchestra we used just a few strings, with things like a banjo and zither, to give it that flavor." POST: Where did you do the mix? RITCHIE: "We did the pre-mix in London and then the final mix on the lot at Warners." [Warner Bros. Post Production Services' Ron Bar tlett and Doug Hemphill were the re- recording mixers on the film.] POST: Where did you do the DI? RITCHIE: "We did it in London at Tech- nicolor with timer Adam Inglis and the DP, Philippe Roussselot, who did a great job playing with some of the frames and darken- ing skies, that sort of thing." POST: This has got to be the biggest pro- duction you've done so far. How tough was it? RITCHIE: "It was tough. The hours were ver y long and we all had to work very hard, but I loved working with all the people, so there were no personality problems or clashes.That was easy. And it wasn't scar y, taking it on, as I had a great crew and we just worked through prob- lems as they came up." POST: Did the film turn out the way you originally envisioned it? RITCHIE: "Yes, I think it's exactly the film I intended to make, and as we were putting together the DVD material, it hit us that there are no deleted scenes. Everything I shot is in the movie. So we had a ver y tight script and we shot it and did- n't waste anything." POST: There's talk of a franchise if this is a hit.Would you be on board to do another? RITCHIE: "Well, we'll have to wait and see. I honestly haven't given it too much thought yet as I've been working so hard to finish this one. But if all goes well, who knows? It's been a very pleasant experience so far." POST: What are the best and worst parts of being a director? RITCHIE: "That's tricky! I really love being a director, and the good par ts are that you travel all over the world, you get to meet interesting people, you get an enormous train set to play with, you learn a great deal, and they pay you a good salary to do it. The bad par ts? For me, it's dealing with the promotion of your film. I'm just not very good at it." POST: What's your view of Hollywood? RITCHIE: "Thus far, it's been ver y posi- tive. This was a great experience and I've found them to be ver y filmmaker-friendly over at Warners. They're deeply smar t, deeply supportive, and it was great working with them and Joel Silver." POST: Obviously, when you're working on a film, you don't have much time to catch up on other releases, but have you seen anything re- cently you loved? RITCHIE: "Yes, I absolutely loved Taran- tino's Inglourious Basterds. It was so much fun and definitely one of his best. I just love his visual style and the way he mixes it all up, and his great dialogue." POST: What's next? RITCHIE: "I don't know. I'm not too good at thinking ver y far ahead, so I take each day as it comes. In terms of projects, I'm a chicken sitting on a few eggs, and one will crack before the others, so I have to wait and see which one it is. I just keep them warm." The DI was performed at Technicolor London. www.postmagazine.com February 2010 • Post 13 James Herbert cut the film using Avid Media Composer V.2.8 with Mojo. See our interview with him on page 14.