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DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 15 POST SEPTEMBER 2016 and really good in period stuff. He's got that old-fashioned manner." Is it true that your composer, Alexandre Desplat, told you not to cast anyone as Cosme if they weren't a really good pianist? "Yes, he said, 'Don't get an actor for the role — get a pianist,' but then Simon's name came up and we met and he really can play well, so he was perfect." Although the film's set in New York, you shot a lot of it in The Beatles' hometown, Liverpool. Why? "Because shooting on location in New York's a nightmare, and Liverpool's built with the same granite used to build mid- town Manhattan, and Liverpool has four streets that look exactly like mid-town Manhattan used to. So if you need that period, that's where you go." You do a lot of period pieces. "So people say, but I'm very unaware of it. I don't think about it much. I just do mate- rial that I like, whenever it's set." You've always loved location shooting, and the great Danny Cohen, who also shot your last film, The Program, and the Oscar-nominated films The Danish Girl and Room, shot this. What did he bring to it? "I asked him, 'Is this going to look like a British film or an American film?' And he said, 'Definitely American,' so I thought, perfect. He's got this fantastic eye and he's smart. I kept telling him to watch all those great films by Ernst Lubitsch, to get that '40s look and composition." Where did you do the post? How long was the process? "It was about five or six months, all in London, and we cut it at Goldcrest, where I've done all the post work on my last few films. Philomena was done in a much crappier place. I'm afraid it all depends on the budget." Do you like the post process? "I love being on location and shooting, but it's always hard and full of problems, whereas post is so calm by comparison, and so different from all the money and time pressures and chaos of the shoot. It's far more analytic and methodical, and it's when you discover the good choices you made as well as your mistakes. It's where you actually make your film with all the raw elements you've amassed along the way." You again worked with editor Valerio Bonelli, who cut The Program and Philomena. How does that relationship work? "He was based in his edit suite in Soho the whole time, so he didn't come to the set. But we talked all the time and as usual he just started assembling as we went. The way I work, I really depend on my editor to have an objective view of what I'm doing, and he's a very clever editor, and I remember him as a film student. But he just walked out on me to do another project, and he's not cutting my next film. I had to get someone else." Who did the visual effects and how many visual effects shots are there? "I always use the same team. Union VFX did them all and Adam Gascoyne, who did Philomena and The Program with me, was the VFX supervisor. He did that extraordi- nary shot where the camera pans up the length of Fifth Avenue, and we also added a lot of stuff, like The Brooklyn Bridge. We probably had several hundred VFX shots Director Frears (inset) once again partnered with editor Valerio Bonelli.