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INDIE FILM www.postmagazine.com 13 POST SEPTEMBER 2016 How closely did you work with editor Heather Persons? "Heather is our guardian angel. She real- ly helped us carve the statue out of the big brick of marble. Because it's daunt- ing to look at a first cut and think, 'Oh my God, are we ever going to find it?' Heather was so supportive really from moment one. She said from just the little footage she had seen, 'Oh my God, I see what this is and this could be really special.' When you have someone like that working next to you, you're heading in the right place, which is great." It seemed to me like music had a very large role in this film — how important is music to you as a filmmaker? "Well, before [being] a filmmaker, music is huge for me as a person. I'm a music nerd in that I'm always trying to hear as much music as I can and I'm lucky to have an enormous lineup of people around me constantly giving me rec- ommendations. For me, when I write, I listen nonstop to music — I could never write in silence. When I'm directing, I try to listen to different music to catch a tone. And so, these were the songs I was actually listening to and to be honest, I never thought we had a chance to get this music. Josh Ritter had been a friend of mine for a while. He was bizarrely a big fan of The Office and knew [co-star] Rainn Wilson and came to the set one day and from then, I went to a couple of shows of his and we became friendly. I had said, 'Listen, we're doing this movie and I love your music and weirdly it feels like a character in the movie,' and he jumped at the chance immediately. So, Josh Ritter, which I think is like 75 percent of the music, and then the song 'Man on Fire' by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros was what I was listening to as the title theme and sure enough, we got it to be in our title. "I learned that you should actually try to get the music that inspired you during the process. We tried very hard and we had very helpful people. I think it restored my faith in the idea that in this business, that is feeling more and more box office and money driven, the love of fellow artists is still there." How do you feel about the finished product? "For me, it's an emotional movie and I think it's a movie that talks about very sentimental things — and I don't mean sentimental in a negative way. Though I think there are people who feel that any movie that's sentimental is somehow saccharin and my whole goal was that there are movies I grew up on, like Terms of Endearment, that are very sentimen- tal, very emotional, that aren't saccharin at all and deal with things in a very real way. So I was trying to achieve that. "The beauty of a movie like this, similar to a comedy, you know if it's working if you feel it. So, by the time we got to the scenes that I knew we needed to feel something, I think that not only was I feeling things but in the small group of people that I was testing, they were feeling very emotion- al. It's one of those magic tricks of, if I didn't see some misty eyes in some of the big scenes, I knew we weren't on the right path. So yeah, when we finally thought we were on the right path, ever since then, it's gotten better and better. It really was something where we knew we had something emotional and we just tried to make sure we did justice to the script, which was as comedic and funny and quirky as it is emotional, we will have something special. "I have to give a huge amount of credit to [director] Tom McCarthy, who was in the midst of his huge Spotlight awards press push, and he took the time to see the cut about two days before we had to lock it for Sundance. And he gave the most amazing notes that were so basic in their ideas and execution and it was so simple what they were saying. I remember he said, 'You've ended every scene perfectly. Everybody gets what they want, exactly at the end of every scene.' I said, 'Oh, thank you.' And he goes, 'Don't do that.' He said, 'This family's messy. Allow your scenes to have messy endings and not necessarily always tie them up in a bow…' And I went, 'Oh my God, what a brilliant note.' So we went back and just trimmed a whole bunch of scenes before the Sundance cut and truly, 48 hours before we went to Sundance, I was cutting it thanks to Tom McCarthy. I'm always about what it takes to get the movie to where it needs to be." www.postmagazine.com FOR MORE INDIE FILMS, SEE OUR FEATURE ON PAGE 24. FOR THE FULL, UNEDITED INTERVIEW VISIT Music played a large role in this film, which Krasinski says helped drive the strong comedic and dramatic scenes.