Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/942009
42 CINEMONTAGE / Q1 2018 she attests. "We therefore contrived to visually pluck out one actor and replace him with the other. The visual effects department painted out Spacey and prepared the background plates of the desert landscape and Arab actors. Plummer was filmed against green screen, replicating the same action, shaking hands with imaginary Arab sheiks. The green screen was shot on the first day of production so as to give the effects department the maximum time to blend the elements together." The creative challenges were just as daunting as the logistics. This was not simply a matter of replacing one performance with another. With the exception of the green-screened Arabian scene, Plummer's scenes were shot in their entirety — with all the actors assembled for the re-shoot, the editor explains. "There was no rewriting, but Plummer's interpretation of the character of J. Paul Getty was very different from Spacey's," Simpson offers. "Plummer's rhythms and inflections were entirely different, even though he was delivering pretty much the same dialogue. Plummer, being close in age to Getty, had the advantage of not being plastered with prostheses. He could muster all the guile, mischief and obdurate stubborness of an elderly gentleman at the drop of a hat." According to Simpson, it was not necessary to reshape the existing scenes surrounding the new Plummer footage, with the exception of a sequence toward the end of the film, where the young Getty was escaping the kidnappers, which was intercut with the death of his grandfather. For the most part, the coverage of Plummer that Scott shot was very close to what had been shot of Spacey. "By and large the coverage was very similar except for two scenes, which were shot in entirely different locations, and one of which had entirely different action," Simpson says. One scene showed the elder Getty character buying a masterpiece painting, but for that sequence, the original location was no longer available. For the other scene, the location change was necessitated by the change in seasons. "The film had been shot in a roasting, hot summer and re-shoots were done in a cold and frosty winter," Simpson recounts. "Chase's first meeting with Getty had originally taken place in the garden of his estate, with young ladies playing badminton in flimsy white dresses while Chase and he drank chilled champagne. The sound designer had laid in distant shooting from a hunt in the background. This had appealed to Ridley, and I think it inspired him to re-stage the scene in a wintery garden with skeet shooting. This not only allowed the ladies to shed their light summer garb for country tweeds, but also Chase had the opportunity to show off his prowess with a firearm." The re-shoot posed challenges for the sound team as well. "Since the seasons between shooting had changed, the ambiences were completely different — particularly for the exterior scenes," Simpson explains. "Birds had migrated and what had been a sweet summer breeze wafting through green, leafy foliage in the original shoot was replaced by gardeners sweeping up dried, fallen leaves. The sound department had their work cut out for them. "Apart from that, the staging of most of the scenes was identical," she continues. "[DP] Dariusz Wolski's lighting was so accurate that it actually enabled me to steal a close-up or two of Michelle Williams from the original shoot." Simpson describes working through one of the challenges she faced even before the re-shoot: "Except for the opening 20 minutes, in which there are several flashbacks relating to the history of the family and the making of the Getty fortune, the film is structured pretty much as scripted, following the chronology of the true events. The flashback proved to be somewhat challenging for an audience to follow, so we played around with the structure there." Throughout the process of editing the film, Simpson appreciated her collaborative relationship with the director, saying, "Ridley is a great communicator. He is a trained artist and loves to draw storyboards, which are disseminated amongst the Christopher Plummer, left, and Mark Wahlberg in one of only two scenes that had to be re-shot in a new location. For this scene, the new location was necessitated by the change in seasons, in All the Money in the World. Sony Pictures Entertainment