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DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 19 POST NOVEMBER 2016 were locked up is still there as well, so we shot all those scenes in the real places, although we couldn't shoot inside the real cells as they were just too small. So we had to double that. It was a pretty gra- cious, straightforward shoot, 40 days, but it's also the first period piece I've done, and you need time to get that stuff right." Do you like the post process? "I love it. It's really wonderful for me and the closest I ever come to having a 9-to-5 job and being a real parent and husband, as I can take my son to school in the morning and then work all day and come home again. This film fell into place very easily, and they don't always. My last film was a very grueling post." Where did you post? "I always do all my offline editing at home in Austin." You edited the film with Julie Monroe, who's now cut your last three films and who's cut a lot of films for Oliver Stone, including Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Tell us about that relationship and how it worked. "She lives in LA but was willing to move to Austin, and we just set up a little ed- iting suite and started working after the shoot. It all flowed pretty easily as I wrote a 96-page script, and we had a 113-min- ute cut, and there was never that mo- ment where you go, 'What massive scene do we have to take out?' Which is what usually happens. You're at well over two hours, and you're faced with trying to restructure the whole film to make cuts. But that never happened here. I shot very tightly as I usually do, and maybe I had more takes, but that doesn't mean more set-ups. We shot exactly what we wanted to use, and the way it works is that Julie starts cutting while I'm shooting. She wasn't on the set. She was in LA and got the dailies and she'd call me if she felt I'd missed something, but otherwise I just leave her alone. It's her time to get to know the footage and own it a bit, as I'm so specific about how I want the edits to go. And this time I challenged her to cut without any temp music, so the assem- bly was a brutal experience. If you think it's quiet now, watch it with no music at all (laughs)! But it was very important for me to know what the real emotional beats were, not ones calculated through music. If it was there, I wanted to feel it on its own. So after the assembly, we began at the very first shot again, and you really have two cuts going on — hers and mine, with hers as a reference, and then she improves mine with timing and pacing and it starts to become 'our cut.'" Can you talk about the importance of music and sound in the film? "Sound is so important and I've been very fortunate to always work with Will Files, the supervising sound editor. We went to college together and he's a phenomenon, and he really understands my aesthetic. He's one of those bizarre people who, even at film school, knew he wanted to do post sound work, and right out of college, he began at Skywalker and immediately start- ed rising through the ranks. He just has a great ear for sound, which can get really fake and phony really quickly if you're not careful. Even in that first scene where it's just crickets, we went through several itera- tions to get it right, bringing them down to where you don't really notice them." Where did you mix the sound? "On the lot at Fox." This is obviously not a VFX-driven piece, but in period films the VFX play a big role. "You're right, and we did them all with The Mill. I did my first commercial with them, for the Rio Olympics, and they really impressed me with the level of their work. I knew there'd be two key VFX shots in the film, apart from all the paint-outs of modern stuff; one was where the Lovings' son is hit by a car, which we did with a tracking shot of the boy with no car, then one with no boy and no car, and finally one with the car, and they composite them all together. The Mill did a lot of work on that. And then we had a snowy land- scape scene near the end, and we used fake snow in the foreground, and then the VFX took care of all the snow in the fields and trees, and you'd never guess it's VFX." How important was the DI on this and where did you do it? "It was very important, and we did it at Efilm with colorist Mitch Paulson, who did the last few films with us. The DP, Adam Stone, gets on really well with Mitch, and we've all been slowly perfect- ing the process." What's next? "I just signed a deal with Fox to develop a big sci-fi movie, based on an old title, Alien Nation. I've wanted to do a big studio film for a while, so it's exciting." The Mill provided VFX services for the film, with Efilm handling the digital intermediate. BEN ROTHSTEIN, FOCUS FEATURES