Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/763341
www.postmagazine.com 10 POST DECEMBER 2016 DIRECTOR'S CHAIR Hollywood and seeing that the marketing of that sexiness was paramount — I saw it as a fascinating and ridiculous situation. So I wanted to explore all those ideas in the film, the idea of sexual guilt and repression, along with the story of Howard Hughes, this larger-than-life character." What were the biggest technical challenges in making this? "There weren't any huge ones, although it's a big period piece and that always creates problems." Because that glamorous world doesn't exist anymore? "Exactly. But I had very good people who helped with all that recreation, including Deborah Ricketts, who did all the archival research, and found some great period footage of street scenes in Hollywood and Las Vegas that we incorporat- ed with the visual effects. And then there was Caleb Deschanel, who did a great job at capturing that Hollywood '50s look and style, and then we were able to shoot at the real Beverly Hills Hotel where Hughes often lived, and Musso & Frank Grill, and we built a lot of sets, and then visual effects supervisor John Scheele did a lot of work. But it wasn't that complicated a movie to shoot. I came in on schedule and budget." Do you like the post process? "I do, a lot. The only part of it that I find quite difficult is that I don't like to show a film before it's ready, because with my films, they only get ready at the last minute. To quote Cocteau, 'A poem's never finished, it's just abandoned,' and that's how I feel. I like showing it but not to people who then have to decide what they think of it. That's danger- ous, and you only have one immediate response. So post and editing is where you make your film to some degree, and sometimes you have to go back and do reshoots to fill in a blank or to clarify some- thing, but I didn't do any reshoots on this." Where did you post? "I edited it at my offices up on Mulholland, the usual place, and then we did all the rest of the post and sound mixing over at Sony on the lot." You edited the film with four editors — the great Billy Weber, who's been nominated twice for an Academy Award (for Top Gun and The Thin Red Line), along with Leslie Jones, Robin Gonsalves and Brian Scofield. How did that work? "I like to kick it around in editing and I'm there every day. Billy, who worked on Bulworth with me, started off and then had to go off and cut Jack Reacher with Tom Cruise and Ed Zwick. And Leslie is the daughter of Bobby Jones, who was my editor on Heaven Can Wait and Shampoo. And for Robin, this was her first main editing job after being an assistant, and she was on the movie the longest. And they all worked on it simultaneously, and on all the same scenes, kicking it back and forth. And I wound up with the luxury of being able to take a long time over the edit in the final process with Robin." Can you talk about the importance of music and sound in the film? A lot of directors feel it's half the movie. "I wouldn't say half. I'd say more like 95 percent. (Laughs) It's just so important and I choose all the music myself and work very closely with the sound team, supervising sound editors Mike O'Farrell, Dave Giammarco, mixer Deb Adair and the rest." This is obviously not a VFX-driven piece, but in period films the VFX play a big role, and you tend to make period pieces. "Right. In fact, I haven't made a movie that wasn't a period piece. Even Shampoo was a period piece as we made it in '74 and it was set in '68." Talk about working with visual effects supervisor John Scheele, who did Dick Tracy with you and whose credits include W and Alexander. "He's incredibly skilled and he worked very closely with Deborah Ricketts. They did all this research for over two years and found a lot of old VistaVision footage from the late '50s and early '60s, with all the cars driving around Hollywood, and then we built uåp the visual effects for the plane sequences using actual photography they found. But for the Spruce Goose itself in the scene where Howard Hughes takes Frank for a hamburg- er, John recreated it completely with CGI. And then he did a lot of clean up and taking out all the modern stuff in shots and so on." Did it turn out the way you first envisioned it, or did it morph into something else? "A film never turns out the way you first envision it. And you hope it doesn't, because it gets better as you go along — or it should. But this pretty much came out the way I hoped it would. As I said, I had all these initial ideas in mind, but sometimes you do your best work when you don't have anything in mind and it just happens when you're thinking about something else. And I was able to indulge that in my career as I got lucky with my first film, Splendor in the Grass, with Elia Kazan. So then I didn't have to go and do a bunch of movies I didn't want to do, and I've never produced a movie I didn't want to do. I've been very lucky." John Scheele supervised the VFX, which involved creating period-accurate 1950s settings. Director and star Beatty, on set.