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Behind the Scenes

How the Post Team of ‘Ferrari’ Worked Together to Bring an Auto Epic to Life

by Peter Tonguette March 8, 2024

written by Peter Tonguette 10 minutes read

By Peter Tonguette

In the world of international motorsports, the glamorous drivers, glitzy sponsors, and incredible racecars draw most of the attention, but any real auto racing fan knows that it’s the pit crew that does the heavy lifting.

The pit crew ushers the racecar into place to refuel, to detach and discard worn tires, to affix new tires, and to send the momentarily sidelined racer back to the course in good shape. If the pit crew has done its job, no one will have noticed their expeditious handiwork.

Something of the same spirit of committed professionalism and grace under pressure characterizes the post-production team on Michael Mann’s “Ferrari,” released to theaters late last year. The Neon release stars Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari, the stylish, sophisticated automotive pioneer who, as the film opens, finds his attention split between his racecar empire and his muddled personal life: He is bereft over the loss of his son with his wife, Laura (Penelope Cruz), while also maintaining a relationship with his mistress, Lina (Shailene Woodley), with whom he also has a child. This is a personal psychodrama set amid the world of high-octane racing.

For Mann, the film is the fulfilment of a long-stated wish to make a cinematic portrait of Ferrari in full: his life, his loves, and his cars. The filmmaker demanded the sort of authenticity for which he had become famous on such earlier triumphs as “Heat” (1995), “The Insider” (1999), and “Ali” (2001). On this film, engine sounds had to be authentic to the cars being depicted on-camera, and the Italian-inflected English dialogue had to sound realistic but intelligible. All of this, and more, had to be achieved on a schedule far more compressed, and a budget considerably more limited, than the filmmaker’s large-scale studio pictures.

Consequently, Mann assembled a team of post-production pros. Many had worked with Mann in the past — some for decades, others for a shorter period — along with those who were new initiates. Together, they took charge of “Ferrari” in post-production in much the same way that the pit crew is responsible for a car mid-race: they refueled the film, changed its tires, and assured that, when it prepared to make its rounds on the course of the year’s best pictures, it was in tip-top shape.

CineMontage recently spoke with some key members of this “pit crew”: picture editor Pietro Scalia, ACE; supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer Tony Lamberti; supervising sound editor Bernard Weiser; re-recording mixer Andy Nelson; music editor Paul Apelgren; and production sound mixer Lee Orloff.

CineMontage: Pietro, “Ferrari” is your first film with Michael Mann. What interested you about the project?

Pietro Scalia: I’ve known Michael for many years, and over the many years he’s been trying to put this movie together, he would contact me. I was very flattered by that. I knew of the project and the long gestation of it. Having the opportunity to work with a master, and somebody that I admired for so long, I’m happy that finally it was ready to go. I loved the script, and I had seen the evolution. I was amazed how he was able to crystallize this story so beautifully.

Pietro Scalia.

CineMontage: How did you work together in putting the picture together?

Scalia: One of the things we had to adapt very early on is the communication in the form of notes from Michael. Before he would shoot, he would share all his research and notes. During the shoot, he would note things that he liked, but when we were in Modena [Italy], it was a very tight schedule. He would come in on weekends, but he didn’t have much time to review the material. He said, “Just go ahead and follow the notes. We’ll review it on the weekends.” That gave me the kind of initial freedom to tackle the scenes, having all the information that I needed. Then we would review them on the weekends and, to my surprise, he liked these scenes, which gave me confidence.

The real editing part of it with Michael was after the shoot in Italy, when he returned to L.A. He literally went back to all the dailies, he commented on them, he recorded his reactions — very, very specific. His assistants would transcribe them, and we would get these notes. We created this giant library of notes. That’s his process. He has everything catalogued and noted.

Tony Lamberti.

CineMontage: Are Mann’s notes about his favorite takes or moments he likes?

Scalia: Exactly that, but also very, very specific. For example, in going through the takes, he noted his preferred takes, but then also the specific sections where he would stop the dailies and give you specific timecodes.

He would revisit older cuts, view them again, and sometimes make combinations. It was a continuous fine-tune to remove everything that’s in excess. How does this compare to that one? Sometimes we’d have three or four different cuts of the same scene at the same time. There are sequences that I cut 50 times.

CineMontage: Tony, you first worked with Michael on “Blackhat” (2015), and you learned about “Ferrari” while working on a director’s cut of the earlier film.

Tony Lamberti: He had this alternate edit of “Blackhat” that he showed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and on those weekends when I went in to work on it, he had all the materials out for “Ferrari.” His offices were filled with these giant poster boards of locations. He had build-sheets for the cars.

All the cars that are moving on-screen are actually replicas of the real cars. He had to build them from scratch in order to be able to mount cameras to them and put them through the rigors of production. The real cars are worth tens of millions of dollars. I’ve never worked with a director who just goes so deep into every single detail.

CineMontage: That meant you had to record the sounds of the real cars — not the replicas seen on-camera, but the actual cars they represent, right?

Lamberti: Specifically, the engines. The cars that were the replicas had little four-cylinder turbo engines in them, so we could run them all day long and beat them up, but the sound was not the real sound. The way that Michael’s attention to detail plays out is: “We’ve got to have the authentic sounds,” so that when a real racing driver watches this movie, they’ll be transported back. We started chasing down cars, and we had many, many avenues we were chasing down. The big challenge for me was: “How do you convince collectors and museums to allow you to record their highly valued cars”?

CineMontage: Once you managed to line up the real cars, how did you mic them?

Lamberti: So now we had all the cars wrangled. I had a shot list of everything that needed to get shot, and then the cutting room sent clips of the racing scenes so they could actually see on-screen what action needed to be shot. We had all the pieces in place. And then it’s just taking out the driver and performing those things. We were very, very specific: “We need starts, idles, aways.” All of these things needed to be done at at least 5,000 RPMs and above. We had all these stipulations; we need to have these cars revving their highest revs and doing these different actions. Then it was up to the guys to go out in the field and record it.

Michael has done enough amateur racing to really know what’s going on, and he’s been a Ferrari guy forever. Not only did we have to get the sound of the engines right, but we had to get the performances right, and what we liked to call racecraft. So all of those downshifts, all of the upshifts, all of the accelerations and decelerations — they all had to be absolutely spot-on to not only what we were seeing on-camera but when we’re not seeing things on-camera.

Bernard Weiser.

CineMontage: Lee, the recording of the dialogue scenes came under your purview.

Lee Orloff: It’s always about authenticity with Michael. As far back as anything I’ve ever done with him, he doesn’t build sets. If there’s a real location that we can go to, where the event takes place, we’ll be in Chicago for “Ali”; we’ll be down in Pascagoula, Mississippi, for “The Insider” in the courtroom. Once you realize that that’s his approach, you read the script and you know: “OK, so we’re going to be there.”

When it comes to racecraft, there’s no way that he’s going to allow anything on the soundtrack to be anything short of absolutely authentic. And this is stuff that’s sometimes barely in the picture, but it’s happening in the background. We’re having a conversation between Enzo and a driver on a racetrack, and the Maserati and the Ferraris are doing the time trials. He created that so that each one of those shifts, and everything in the track, supports that whole sense that you’re in the place. This is the way it would be if you were there.

Andy Nelson.

CineMontage: Bernard, you had previously worked with Mann and with Tony on “Blackhat.” What was the setup like on “Ferrari”?

Bernard Weiser: Tony and I knew that, for Michael, having the two of us be supervisors was the way to go. We knew the demands that we were walking into. I’d say this show proved us correct with that view of it. Michael likes to have direct contact. As a result, I was the one that, when I started, was immediately embedded with the picture department, starting at the very end of January or beginning of February. My cutting room was right next to Pietro and right in the middle of it all. That way, Michael could walk from room to room and discuss what he was thinking.

Andy Nelson: My experience with Michael is that everything’s evolving. In other words, he doesn’t finish a cut, come to the stage, and start mixing the sound. He’s finishing the movie in all these areas at the same time. We’ll put up a sequence on the screen and we’ll work on it with him, but it’s informing him, as we’re doing something, of what he thinks he should do pictorially. It literally comes alive on the big screen at that moment in time. He’ll move the picture editing department over to the dub stage, right next to where I am, and he’ll be back and forward because the cut will change. You have to be ready to work in a very fluid style with him.

Weiser: The first thing Michael said to me the first day I was there was that his biggest concern was the understandability of the dialogue. This was a twofold problem: You had the Italian actors speaking English, many with a very heavy accent, and then you had the English-speaking actors trying to speak English but with an Italian accent. CineMontage: How did you
address the issue?

March 8, 2024 0 comments

Behind the Scenes Features

Kevin Tent Explains the Editing Process Behind Alexander Payne’s ‘The Holdovers’

by uncredited February 27, 2024

written by uncredited 10 minutes read

By Patrick Z. McGavin

“I like to say I found editing, and editing found me,” says Kevin Tent, ACE, the Oscar-nominated picture editor of Alexander Payne’s dark comedy “The Holdovers.”

Beginning with their first collaboration “Citizen Ruth” (1996), Tent has been the only editor for Payne, on such films as “Election” (1999), “About Schmidt” (2002) and “Sideways” (2004).

“The Holdovers,” set over Christmas vacation in 1970 at a New England boarding school for boys, is the bittersweet portrait of complicated relationships among a grumpy teacher with a troubled past (Paul Giamatti), his callow student (Dominic Sessa) and a long-suffering dining-hall cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). Tent talked about editing for tone, tempo and rhythm, as well as his efforts on behalf of picture editors as the president of ACE.

CineMontage: You have edited all of Alexander Payne’s films. How did you first meet?

Kevin Tent: We both lived in the same Silverlake neighborhood and knew the same group of people but had never met. I was an editor for Roger Corman, and I had done some art films. When he had his first feature ready to go, he asked our mutual friend, the editor Carole Kravetz, for a recommendation since, as he put it, he couldn’t afford her. She recommended two people, and I was one of them. We hit it off in an interview, I think he liked that I had worked at Roger Corman’s and I had also cut this independent film by Tamra Davis, “Guncrazy” (1992), that made a pop. We had challenges. “Citizen Ruth” (1996) was a low-budget film, and it was the first time he ever directed. We had a good time, worked hard and I think ultimately made a good movie. Alexander is a loyal director and person, and when he got his next film off the ground, “Election” (1999), he asked me to cut it. Anyone who had anything to do with that film had a huge career bump.

FUN IN THE SUN: Dominic Sessa and Paul Giamatti in “The Holdovers.” PHOTO: FOCUS FEATURES

CineMontage: How has the creative dynamic evolved?

Kevin Tent: He keeps the filmmaking process in perspective, and he doesn’t let it consume his brain in a bad way. There’s pressure, but he remains cool. We just close the door and go to work. I don’t really think about what we do or how we do it. We just keep trying things. We both have radar or a spidey sense that warns us that something is not yet good. So we just keep cutting and experimenting. As he once said. “Every day we make this film suck less.” Those are really good words to live by in a cutting room.

CineMontage: Many of your films together, like “Citizen Ruth” and “Election,” have a very specific tone. They are comedies, but not typical ones. How do you capture that?

Kevin Tent: Yes, sometimes you’re laughing at very awkward or uncomfortable moments. Like many of his other films, the characters in “The Holdovers” are very well-drawn. They’re realistic in a sense that they are flawed, or maybe the better way to put it is: they’re “human.” And then he takes these realistic and relatable characters and puts them in situations. Often funny, awkward situations. I think the humor (for the audience) comes from watching these characters squirm. In the cutting room we are always looking for the most honest performances which are sometimes funny, sometimes not. The tone is in some ways baked into the film by the screenplay and Alexander’s directing, but we are certainly diligent in the cutting room of supporting whatever that tone is. We’re also cognizant of the transitions in the shifts of tone.

CineMontage: The premise of the story changes and narrows to just three people. How did you want to handle that?

Kevin Tent: It’s a great twist and an unexpected one for the audience. I think it’s a nice surprise for them when they realize, “Oh this is the movie we’re watching.” I was very happy to see they didn’t reveal it in the trailer. It’s a twist that comes like 45 minutes into the film, which is later than what’s more or less expected in today’s cinematic culture. Our attempt to handle this was to do our best to get the twist to happen as soon as we could with simple pacing and tightening. We really couldn’t get to the moment much earlier without dropping scenes, which kind of hurt the movie. It seems there was enough interesting stuff going on with the characters which kept the audience engaged till the rest of the boys left the school and the movie became about our three heroes.

CineMontage: The lead character played by Paul Giamatti has some affinities with Miles, his character from “Sideways” (2004). Twenty years apart, but you’re doing interesting variations and themes.

Kevin Tent: Paul is a phenomenal actor. Always delivers, always knows his lines, always matching his action, always giving great reaction shots to other actors’ reads. He’s hands down the editor’s best friend. He nailed this role.

CineMontage: You humanize him, but never soften him.

Kevin Tent: I think that is something we watch for in the cutting room, making sure moments never become too sentimental or saccharine. We wanted to be emotional, but not over the top.

CineMontage: What were the great challenges of weaving together these three blocks, or character tapestries?

Kevin Tent: Well, hopefully we were successful in juggling and balancing these three great characters. They all have a lot going on and we were cognizant of making sure they were represented fairly and equally. Where we really weave and bond them together is the Christmas party. I thought this was a really interesting series of scenes. I was worried that the party would feel like a big tangent to the audience and that we’d lose them. But there’s so much emotion going on for each character that I think the audience embraced the whole 10 to 12 minute sequence without disengaging. Angus has his first kiss, Mary grieves, and Paul sees his chances at love evaporate. All heavy stuff, with the backdrop of what should be a joyful evening.

CineMontage: In terms of shaping performance in the editing room, how has your approach evolved over the years?

Kevin Tent: In all honesty, I’m not sure we’ve changed our approach too much in shaping performances over the years. I mean, I guess our process has evolved some, or we’re more confident, but we’re basically doing exactly what we did on “Citizen Ruth.” Alexander gets great performances on the set, and once we have them in the cutting room, we just keep refining and experimenting. I would guess 80% of our cutting choices are guided by the performances we choose. Ever since “About Schmidt,” we’ve made a conscious decision to cut less, to let performances play out. If we can avoid interrupting a performance with a cut, we’ll do it. Not always easy, but that’s our initial goal when we start. We are both big believers in the power of a strong performance.

CineMontage: When the story shifts to Boston, did you alter the rhythm of the film?

Kevin Tent: That’s a good question. I’m not sure if we altered the rhythm or that we took the audience out of the claustrophobic confines of the school and put them on the road. We opened up the picture with driving shots, cityscapes and I think it was a breath of fresh air for them (the audience). The characters were doing more too, bowling, skating, Mary laughing with her sister, all three were more active. This with our music choices and I guess the pacing up of scenes probably makes it feel like we altered the rhythm.

CineMontage: Alexander Payne has directed some significant stars, like Jack Nicholson. Was that a different dynamic?

Kevin Tent: We don’t really think about the actor’s status when cutting. When he got Jack Nicholson for “About Schmidt,” that was a big deal. And I think he was a little intimidated at first, it being just his third film. But we approached his performance like all the rest and Jack was great. It was a thrill as an editor to work with his footage.

I remember when Jack’s very first dailies came in, it was a simple scene, with him on the phone with his daughter. Alexander had him do a number of takes. Jack was amazing, each take was great, and each one was different in subtle ways. It occurred to me then, “Jack’s worth every penny they’re paying him.”

CineMontage: You’ve also directed several narrative films, most recently “Crash Pad” (2017). How has that influenced your work as an editor?

Kevin Tent: I should clarify, I didn’t really direct any of those early Roger Corman movies. I was an editor who was hired to fix them. I would steal scenes (car chases, space wars, etc.) from Roger’s other movies and cut them into his troubled films. Trying to liven them up and make them less bad. For my sins I was awarded directing credits. I did direct a movie recently called “Crash Pad” in which I learned a lot. I have always respected directors immensely. Life on the set is intense. As editors we have it pretty good. We can sit there, sip our coffee, look at our takes, try things and if it doesn’t work try something else. The set is nothing but chaos and craziness. So my empathy for directors has only deepened from my experience directing.

CineMontage: How did a Buffalo kid like you wind up in Hollywood?

Kevin Tent: I loved watching movies as a kid but certainly wasn’t any kind of cinephile. I had no idea editing existed. I saw Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” however, and I look back at that as a possible spark of something. There’s a scene (starring our very own [MPEG President] Alan Heim [ACE]) where a producer comes to the cutting room and watches a new cut on a moviola. As he watches he becomes thrilled as the cut has gotten better. I remember thinking what happened there? Anyway… somewhere in my youth the vague notion of working in movies became enough that I packed my bags and moved to Los Angeles. I didn’t have a clue how or what I was going to do when I got here. I wound up going to LACC where I took an editing class and cut my own films. I was kind of hooked. And then… I got my first job cutting lame educational films. After doing that for a couple of years, I got a chance to re-cut a movie for Roger Corman and I’d have to say that’s where it all started coming together.

CineMontage: As the president of ACE, what are your goals for the organization, especially given the current state of the movie industry?

Kevin Tent: ACE is a great organization. Editors are the best people. I love them. They’re smart, they’re funny, they’re good people. Fortunately, we have an amazing and dedicated staff (led by Jenni McCormick and team) who run everything and make being President easy. It’s an exciting time at ACE. We’re really growing, both in the U.S. and internationally. As far as the future goes, I’d like to see us do more with education. We are actually taking steps to expand on that now. We’ll be seeing some exciting changes soon.

Patrick Z. McGavin is a Chicago-based film reporter and critic.

February 27, 2024 0 comments

Behind the Scenes Features

The Post-Production Team on Remaking ‘The Color Purple’ as a Musical

by uncredited February 15, 2024

written by uncredited 12 minutes read

By Kristin Marguerite Doidge

Elegant and grounded: that’s how director Blitz Bazawule described his vision for the new musical film, “The Color Purple,” to picture editor Jon Poll when they first got started.

“I knew the film we were going to make would have to depart from the 1985 movie in terms of tone – and that we’d have to find our own visual language that would carry on sonically,” Bazawule said. “As we navigated the trauma and abuse in the story, we knew the fantastical elements had to come from reality.”

Oscillating between reality and fantasy, the post-production team – including Poll, Kheireddine El-Helou, additional and first assistant editor, Paul Massey, sound engineer, and supervising sound editors Julian Slater and Renee Tondelli – helped Bazawule strike a balance between style and substance as he took the helm of his first feature film. The coming-of-age period drama is based on the stage musical, the 1985 dramatic film directed by Steven Spielberg, and the 1982 novel of the same name by Alice Walker. The new version stars Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, Colman Domingo, Corey Hawkins, H.E.R., Halle Bailey, Phylicia Pearl Mpasi, and Fantasia Barrino in her film debut.

BUDDIES: Director Blitz Bazawule, left, with Jon Poll. PHOTO: WARNER BROS. PICTURES

“I couldn’t have been luckier to have had as phenomenal a post team as I did,” Bazawule added. “Jon is one of the best. He’s cut tons of brilliant movies. Same was true for Julian and Renee. They all brought something special to the big, massive moments and also the intimate moments.”

CineMontage recently spoke with Poll, Slater, and Tondelli to learn more about how the post team worked diligently to capture the full range of emotions in all the moments of the film, scheduled for a Christmas release in theaters.

CineMontage: How did you first get involved and what was it like working on this movie?

Poll: My agent called me and said, “Warner Bros. wants you to meet the director for ‘The Color Purple.’” I said, “Call the studio and tell them this is a mistake.” I got on the phone and said the same thing to Blitz [Bazawule]. He laughed, and we had a two-and-a-half hour interview in the middle of a very busy workday on “Father of the Bride.” It was just a great first dose of Blitz, because Blitz does things in a more thoughtful, thorough way. He does everything that way.

Tondelli: I’d worked with Julian on a few movies that we were doing back-to-back, and I’d worked with Jon for 26 years. He asked me to help him do this movie. I said we should get Julian, and everyone fell in love with him. That’s how we got started as far as our crew went. Working with Blitz was just a wonderful experience for me. He’s a novelist, he’s a musician, he’s a painter, he’s a filmmaker, he’s a composer. He had such a clear vision of what he wanted, and it’s just so delightful to work with people like that because you can offer things and he’ll listen to them and say, “What if we did it like this?” He was so involved in the process for me on so many levels. He would spend mornings with Julian and then afternoons with me. It was just so great to have soup-to-nuts with your director before you go on the mix stage where he’s heard every single thing, he’s signed off on it, and he remembers.

Slater: He’s such a mature film director and I cannot wait to see what he does next. He had such a vision of taking the embryonic feel from the movie and the musical and kind of turning that into a new thing for a modern-day audience. He’s the best kind of director because he has a very clear vision of where he wants to go, but equally, he’s open to suggestions and understands ideas from other people can also be really useful.

CineMontage: How did he describe his vision for the film in terms of tone?

Poll: He said when he first heard about “The Color Purple” and read the script, he thought, “How do I wrap my head around this? Why are we remaking this movie?” What really drew him to it were Celie’s fantasies, which are very prevalent in the book right upfront. He said, “I see a lot of the musical sequences coming out of her fantasies.” The second musical sequence in the movie, “She Be Mine,” really sets the table. At one point, someone had suggested taking that out, but it gave you your way into the movie and understanding how far this could go. There’s a chain gang, women washing clothes, she’s singing about having her baby, and it really set the stage.

Julian Slater.

Another big part of pitching the fantasy was the scene with the giant gramophone, which he had done a pre-visualization for. In fact, he thinks that helped him convince Fantasia to do the film, because this was close to Fantasia’s life. This is really difficult territory. When she saw that, he said, she saw he had a different take.

CineMontage: What made the film’s sound unique as compared to the stage musical?

Slater: We obviously have many more tools in our arsenal, sound-wise, than what you get with a stage play or a live musical. And there’s a progression in the music in and of itself. It starts off as gospel, and then we go to blues, and then we have jazz. Blitz wanted these musical sequences to be very much part of the sonic fabric of the movie. We had fun using organic, natural sounds in certain ways. As Renee said earlier, you go from emotional highs to emotional lows quite quickly. We had a thing where using cicadas and insects that, on one hand, can be quite laconic and relaxing and a beautiful sound, to something that, if you overplay them, both in their intensity and in their level, they can go to this very intense, ratchety sound. You may notice in the movie that we have this constant theme when Celie is scared and oppressed and threatened, these insects kind of mirror her emotional state and they go from being quite a soothing, relaxing sound to quite an intense sound. There’s a moment where she’s giving Mister a shave on the back porch, and she’s obviously considering doing something a bit different to him than just giving him a shave. And there, we overplay the insects to quite a large degree to kind of amp up the emotional state that she’s in.

HOLD HANDS: A scene from “The Color Purple.” PHOTO: WARNER BROS. PICTURES

Tondelli: Julian and I wanted to try to get some recordings of the actual dancers doing the Foley, their steps on their own. We had told Blitz about this, and he said, “Oh, okay, that sounds good.” And then the producers we talked to said okay. So we went down the line and kind of talked to all of the people that could do this, and eventually, we had really good sound mixers: there was Steve Morrow and Richard Bullock and Nick Baxter, who was our executive producer, but who did a lot of the work with playbacks and earwigs [sound piece] and all of that. One night when they finished “Push da Button,” the song that Shug [Henson] sings inside the juke, Richard and Nick miked the whole place with booms on the top and then they had boom operators doing closeups, and they gave 55 earwigs to the dancers and did playback. And we got the best, just pure Foley. Of course, we enhanced it and things, but it was really nice to be able to get that and to also work early on with the production because sometimes you come on and it’s already been done, the production mixer is on another set. This way, we were able to actually work collaboratively back and forth, which I thought worked out really well.

CineMontage: What made this experience particularly memorable?

Poll: It was very meaningful for me to listen to Alice Walker take seven hours to read her 250-page book. I listened to it three times, and I heard so much subtlety about what the book meant to her. It was just in my head the whole time – that and Blitz’s point of view – his two key words to me in the beginning that were about tone were elegant and grounded.

What that meant to me is that we were not making a heightened musical. Even though the movie is heightened in how it uses fantasy, the movie has to work on an emotional level, which I’ll be honest, I’ve never cried so much watching a movie I’ve worked on, or even a movie I hadn’t worked on. I am just constantly moved by the film in different places. I was very aware that the movie had an unusual storytelling style, because most musicals don’t have this much story, but Blitz was great about coming and spending time with me while he was shooting. At the end of a shooting day, before a shooting day on a weekend, he would always watch whatever I’d assembled with me, and then we’d talk about it. He’d say, “I don’t want to just watch it on Pix and send you notes. I’m going to come in. We’re going to spend time together, we’re going to talk about things.”

Renee Tondelli.

Tondelli: The women had such a strong bond and they supported and celebrated each other at every moment. And it showed in post. It was such a joy to see that because you rarely get five or six women like that in a movie that are so devoted.

When Sofia’s in the gas station, we created what we called “Pleasantville,” when she pulls into the gas station and there’s ice cream and bells and chatter and kids laughing, and then as soon as she hits the mayor, everything goes silent. All you hear are the men pulling up in their cars, taunting her, her crying out, “Please get my children out of here.” And then we recorded her little son saying, “Mama, no!” Just as she was about to get hit and she got hit, and it just guts you. They were just like Herculean, these women. They just had this element of complete devotion to it.

When I recorded Colman [Domingo], who plays Mister, on the ADR stage, it was the scene where he’s crying in the field and he wakes up, and a very similar thing happened to him where he just couldn’t stop crying on the stage. He went into this catharsis of what this was like and what he felt. Blitz finally got up and put his arm around him and they held each other and he just kept crying. I’ve never seen that on a stage before.

Every time I see these scenes, as many times as I’ve seen them, it just makes me cry. I’ve never had this kind of experience before where you have everyone involved in a very global but small world. The post and the production people were constantly going back and forth. I was always talking to the choreographer and to the production mixers and to the producers, and we were all trying to make this thing as collectively as possible. It’s one of my favorite movies I’ve ever worked on.

Slater: For me, the thing about this movie that is perhaps a little different than a lot of the movies that I’ve worked on is it’s a very emotional movie.

We had one particular playback, I think it was the first full playback that we did of the movie with all the reels joined up and the lights, the end crawl finished, the lights came up, and you looked around the room and Blitz was very emotional because it was the first time that he had seen the culmination of his work.

Even from the get-go, “Mysterious Ways,” which is that amazing gospel song, it signals right from the beginning that you are going to be taken on a journey that is at times euphoric and highly emotional and rewarding, and at other times, there are a lot of serious things that happen within the movie and things that are quite depressing.

But the one thing about the movie is it spans a long amount of time, and I think it’s the first time I personally have worked on a movie that I would consider to be so epic – epic in its time span, epic in the story that Celie is going through from the beginning to the end, and epic in the emotional pull that this story has. It just reminds you how great cinema is and what movies can still do to you.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kristin Marguerite Doidge is the author of “Nora Ephron: A Biography.”

February 15, 2024 0 comments

Behind the Scenes Cover Story Features

How Jennifer Lame and the Post Team Helped Turn ‘Oppenheimer’ Into an Epic Smash

by uncredited February 8, 2024

written by uncredited 70 minutes read

By Jennifer Walden

It wasn’t quite as daunting as building the first a tomic bomb, but putting together “Oppenheimer” was still no easy feat.

To assemble what became one of the biggest features of the year – an epic about the controversial physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the fabled Manhattan Project during World War II — the director Christopher Nolan chose award-winning editor Jennifer Lame, ACE, who also edited his previous film, “Tenet.”

“It’s always helpful to get one under your belt with a director, to learn their approach to filmmaking,” Lame said, “Chris [Nolan] does it a little bit differently with regard to the film workflow, the dailies workflow, and the finishing film workflow. So getting to know him and his process was helpful. This second time around, we already had that familiarity, that shorthand, which made it easier.”

Easier, perhaps – but the process still presented plenty of challenges. “We’re introducing a lot in the first 20 minutes: setting up [both] black-and-white and the color [film stocks], setting up who Oppenheimer is personally and his relationship with Strauss [a rival played by Robert Downey Jr.], setting up Room 2022, and setting up his scientific life,” she said. “I just wanted to nail that first 20 minutes in a way that would let the audience settle in and get to know this person, yet not feel bored. I was constantly aware of that pacing. You have to keep up the momentum, but not make it feel rushed, and that’s hard to achieve with a three-hour movie,” she said.

And then there were the technical challenges, which presented some Ph.D.-level puzzles to solve.

Filmgoers who saw “Oppenheimer” in theaters this summer had numerous viewing options, from analog film formats including IMAX 70mm, 70mm, and 35mm to digital options like IMAX digital, Dolby Cinema, and standard 4K digital cinema. Nolan is known for shooting on large-format film stock, so for him, the IMAX 70mm presentation provided the ideal cinema experience as it most closely represented how the film was originally captured.

Working with film took Lame back to the dawn of her career. Lame noted that most editors her age and younger have worked only in the digital world, so the film workflow may not be familiar to them. “My first job was working on a film movie, ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.’ That was shot on film, the dailies were screened on film – everything. I feel lucky to have had that early opportunity to work with film.”

LENS: Hoyte Van Hoytema, cinematographer. PHOTO: TBD

Nolan tapped long-time collaborator DP Hoyte Van Hoytema, ASC (member of ICG Local 600), who lensed “Tenet,” “Dunkirk,” and “Interstellar.” He and Hoytema chose to shoot “Oppenheimer” on IMAX 65mm (15-perf) and 65mm (5-perf) using Kodak Vision3 250D 5207 film, Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 film, and a specially created IMAX 65mm black-and-white (B/W) film stock named Eastman Double-X 5222.

The black and white IMAX stock didn’t exist before this film. Nolan wanted to shoot the scenes with Strauss in black and white as this represented Strauss’s either/or, “black and white” perspective. The color stock is used for Oppenheimer’s perspective. Since there are two time periods intercut throughout the film — the making/testing of the bomb (color) and the security hearings (b/w) – the idea was that the use of color and b/w helped to make that clearer for the audience.

TESTING: Making “Oppenheimer” required
crews to get familiar with film workflow. UNIVERSAL PICTURES

Creating a new type of film stock for “Oppenheimer” posed a few challenges. Hoytema said, “First, we had to ask Kodak if they could manufacture IMAX 65mm B/W film. Since it was never done before, they had to investigate if they could manufacture it. From the beginning, there were many engineering challenges. One was the thickness of the backing on the film stock, and the chemical makeup of the emulsion. It’s all very different. Theoretically, you can put emulsion over a strip of plastic but how does that work for the rolls, and in the camera, and how it’s developed at the lab? Those are aspects to consider.”

Several rounds of testing were necessary to achieve the desired result. Initial problems were the amount of dirt and scratches on the film as well as strange light arc effects due to the thickness of the backing. “We had to re-engineer the cameras a little bit – redo pressure plates in the cameras in order to omit reflecting issues,” said Hoytema, who shot “Oppenheimer” with both IMAX cameras and the Panavision System 65 Camera.

Additionally, the team had to convince the lab, FotoKem, to accommodate their processing needs for the new film stock. “They had to install gigantic tanks at their facility so they could switch between chemicals to develop the color IMAX film and chemicals to develop the IMAX B/W film,” explained Hoytema. “At every stage along the way – from the manufacturer to the rental house to the camera technicians to the lab – everybody was engineering to try to make it work. But the first time we saw a test projected, we knew that this was going to be it. We knew exactly what we had to do to fix certain problems to make it a valid shooting medium. Once we decided this in our minds, we knew we had to convince the lab to do it because it was a huge operation for them as well.”

BOOM: Cillian Murphy watches an atomic test in “Oppenheimer.” PHOTO: UNIVERSAL PICTURES.

FotoKem provided film processing, duplication, and telecine. They liaised with additional editor Michael Fay – brought on to the film by Lame, who happened to be editing “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” during the production of “Oppenheimer.” Fay helped coordinate the processing schedule with the lab because switching from 65mm color to 65mm B/W took three days. “Processing 65mm B/W negative uses completely different chemicals than those used for color processing. So FotoKem had to devise a method to drain all the color chemicals, clean the processors out, and then reload them with the appropriate B/W chemicals. We got that down to about two days towards the end of the schedule,” he said.

Michael Fay.

Coordinating this changeover – to minimize downtime and allow the team to screen the footage sooner – was one of Fay’s many tasks on the film. As was orchestrating the transportation of the film to the lab and back to set, which typically took two days depending on the distance between the shooting location and the lab in Los Angeles. For instance, when shooting in New Mexico, production would do a film break at 7 p.m. The transportation department had a team of drivers who would drive the film back to L.A., breaking up the 13-hour journey into manageable chunks for each driver. The next morning, the film would arrive at FotoKem and be processed. Prints would be struck and sent that afternoon to the Los Angeles-based editorial team for QC who would report back any technical issues to the team on set. The L.A. film editorial team, led by 1st Assistant Editor, Tom Foligno, would then break the printed takes down into daily rolls, prep them for telecine, and hand them off to drivers that same night. The drivers would bring the prints back to New Mexico in time for the dailies screening the following afternoon. “We screened dailies every day, watching our dailies from two days prior,” Fay said, “Chris [Nolan] really believes in screening dailies as a company every day.”

A dailies trailer was set up on location and outfitted with projectors capable of playing 70mm and 35mm prints. “We screen a 35mm reduction print of our IMAX dailies because there are just no IMAX projectors small enough to fit into a trailer, but we were able to watch the dailies of the 5-perf 70mm footage,” explained Fay.

Tom Foligno.

Since the production schedules were based on location and actor availability, sometimes the footage shot in 65mm B/W – such as the scenes with Robert Downey Jr.’s character Lewis Strauss – would be held for days, or even weeks, before it was processed at the lab. Fay noted, “This was mostly an issue at the end of the shoot when we, by necessity, needed to do a couple of shots in B/W on this day, a couple of shots in B/W three days later, and another day’s worth of B/W a week later. We would hold all that footage until we amassed enough material that it made sense for us to convert the lab to B/W. Since we were shooting so much color, we didn’t want to slow down the color processing because that was the bulk of the material. But it was a little tense while we waited to see those B/W dailies we shot weeks ago. Was there a scratch? Was there some other issue that we would only be aware of once we got to see that footage? The wait was a little tense.”

In addition to large-format film stock, several shots were captured on 35mm color film on an ARRI 435ES. According to Fay, these were primarily VFX shots on which they wanted to have a very slow-mo effect. He explained, “We were looking to shoot 150 FPS, which the IMAX camera couldn’t do. The fastest it will shoot is 48 FPS, but we wanted a slower look than that.”

As mentioned, FotoKem telecined the dailies, creating HD 1080p 24fps MXF files for the Avid workflow. During production, 1st Assistant Editor, Nick Ellsberg, and the L.A. editorial team started the process of syncing them, organizing them, and prepping them for the editor Lame.

All the telecined assets from FotoKem contained key code information from the physical film, preserved in the master clips as metadata. These numbers correspond to the physical negatives, so all the cuts that Lame made in the Avid could be matched back to the original film. Before picture lock, the team held several screenings on film, including the 10-week Director’s Cut screening and Friends and Family screenings. Once Lame locked picture for a screening, Avid’s list tool was used to generate an assemble list (cut list). This list was given to the film team, who used it to conform the workprint to match Lame’s cut. According to Fay, “The workprint conform started about four weeks into the director’s cut. Chris screens his director’s cut on film, and that’s a 70mm (5-perf) screening, so it was a mad dash to get everything ready.”

‘Waiting for the dailies got a little tense.’

Avid’s list tool was also useful for generating a cut list for the 65mm (5-perf) negative, but the footage shot on IMAX film required a different approach. Fay turned to VFX editor Ed Marsh, who designed a custom database tool to generate a “minus list” for the IMAX footage. Fay explained, “Basically, IMAX doesn’t use traditional Avid-generated cut lists. They prefer a different kind of list called a ‘minus list.’ These lists transform a traditional cut list by taking each key number and rounding the feet+frames up to the next whole zero frame, and then counting backward to the frame requested. This approach allows IMAX to visually confirm the requested key number on the work print and negative before cutting. Ed’s custom database tool automated this step and generated the minus lists for IMAX. The IMAX negative cutter used that minus list in conjunction with the 35mm workprint to check for accu-racy before cutting the negative.”

So, once the locked cut was approved, the final cut lists were given to the film team to conform the workprint. Once this matched the locked cut, they would give the conformed workprint and a negative cut list to the negative cutters. Fay said, “We did two of these. We did a 5-perf 65mm negative cut and then we did a 15-perf IMAX negative cut. Both of those require different workprints and different sets of lists to go to the respective negative cutters.”

Cutting the actual negative is a very purposeful and very manual task, noted Fay. It is not something that can be automated. “We want someone – a human with a brain – who is considering every cut and making sure that the cut they are going to make is exactly correct, that it has been confirmed on the workprint, and has been confirmed on the cut list, so all of their information is correct, and it’s all matching.”

If there was a discrepancy, which could potentially happen, the negative cutter would catch it before a cut was made, and inform the editors. They would investigate it, correct it, and issue a new list. “Having a negative cutter who is very methodical and very careful is a really important part of the process,” said Fay. “For ‘Oppenheimer,’ we had negative cutter Simone Appleby, who cut ‘Dunkirk’ as well. It was so reassuring to have someone so methodical and diligent with their work, to report back if there were any questions, and to make sure that what they were doing was exactly correct. There were 3,300 cuts in the whole movie. Every single one of those is carefully considered, and carefully cross-checked, and then needs to be executed. Ultimately, Simone was joined by additional negative cutter, James Manke, who came on to help finish the negative cut. With so many cuts, it took a bit longer to do (a little over three months). The two of them are amazing.”

For all the challenges, the finished prod-uct is in many ways a tribute to the medium of film, in all its old-fashioned grandeur.

In fact, Hoytema is seeing a renewed interest in film with his students. He said, “When I give master classes, students are always in awe of the medium. They think that you need very specific precision and you need to follow a lot of rules. But, even if you’re a little bit rough with your light readings, the chance that you end up with an image that is interesting or inviting is pretty high. I always encourage people to just do it; don’t be afraid of it and drive it like you stole it. Don’t be too precious. You’ll very quickly see an interesting result or something that is useful – something that can capture a little bit of the soul of what you’re observing in real life. It’s easier than you think.”

Lame added: “It’s difficult to find people who can learn the film workflow quickly since it isn’t taught anymore, which is sad. What’s nice, though, is there’s always a correlation between the digital workflow and film workflow, since the digital is based on the film world. So when you explain the film world to someone who hasn’t had the experience, they can start to understand it pretty quickly when they think about the digital workflow.”

Jennifer Walden is a freelance writer specializing in post-production technology.

February 8, 2024 0 comments

TEAM SPIRIT: Picture editors David Canseco, left, Todd Zelin, Joseph Ettinger, and Justin Bourret.

Behind the Scenes Features

For the Post-Production Team of HBO’s ‘Righteous Gemstones,’ the Devil’s in the Details

by Peter Tonguette February 1, 2024

written by Peter Tonguette 12 minutes read

By Peter Tonguette

Its characters may or may not be righteous, but over the course of three ecstatically entertaining seasons, HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones” is clearly one of the most riotous, raucous, and rowdy shows on television.

The comedy tells of the family life, business operations, and assorted scandals of the Gemstone family, televangelists who seek to reach souls over the airwaves and in-person at their megachurch, the Gemstone Salvation Center. The imposing patriarch is Eli Gemstone (John Goodman), but circling around him are a constellation of memorable characters, including his offspring: associate pastor Jesse (played by series creator Danny McBride), youth pastor Kelvin (Adam DeVine), and church singer Judy (Edi Patterson).

Watching “The Righteous Gemstones,” viewers might often have the feeling that the Gemstones’ sacred and profane travails might lead just about anywhere, but the show is the product of the disciplined and creative work of a group of collaborators committed to a unique comic vision.

Produced by Rough House Pictures — the production company founded by executive producers (and frequent show directors) McBride, Jody Hill, and David Gordon Green — the show is shot (and often edited) on location in South Carolina.

The postproduction team is led by picture editor and co-producer Justin Bourret, ACE, who has worked on the series since the pilot. Joining Bourret on recent seasons are editors David Canseco, Joseph Ettinger, and Todd Zelin. Re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor Nicholas Renbeck, MPSE, has been with the show since the beginning.

CineMontage recently asked the editors to discuss the virtues and vices of the Gemstones and the joy of bringing their travails to life.

CineMontage: Justin, what excited you about working on the pilot?

Justin Bourret: I had met Danny and the whole Rough House gang on season 2 of “Vice Principals.” They liked my style, and several years later, when the pilot for “The Righteous Gemstones” came up, I got a call that Danny wanted me to edit it. The script by Danny was really well done. I got a good sense of each character, and the story was nicely laid out. These scripts, in general, are really tight. I came out a couple weeks early to help with the camera and makeup tests, and I was able to see the table-read. It was like magic. I could tell right away that all of the actors that he picked just gelled together.

A scene from “The Righteous Gemstones.” PHOTO: HBO

CineMontage: Is it tough to edit pilots?

Bourret: They are a hard nut to crack because, even on some really good shows, the pilot may be good, but you don’t really have a sense of what the show is going to be about until a couple of episodes in. The pilot for “The Righteous Gemstones” gave a great sense of character and story, as well as nailing the tone, which is this sort of tight-rope we have between comedy and drama.

CineMontage: How would you characterize the tone?

Bourret: We are making a comedy, but it’s a comedy where if you stripped away all the jokes, you would still have a very interesting drama or other type of film. Each season sort of takes on a different genre. Season 1 had this Coen Brothers-style, blackmail plot. It also had a little Western flair to it. Then, season 2 had the gangster thing going on, and then season 3 delves more into family dynamics and the militia.

CineMontage: Joe, you came onto the show on season 3 after being a fan during the first two seasons. What did you respond to as a viewer?

Joseph Ettinger: As a viewer and as an artist, I love dark comedies. I find a lot of joy in storytelling that has dramatic irony or dissonance. These characters are almost comedically monstrous, and yet you can’t help but cheer for them in a weird way. That’s such an interesting fine line to walk. It’s such a challenge creatively to create that tone and atmosphere for the show.

CineMontage: David, is it a challenge to get audiences to invest in characters who are so outrageous?

David Canseco: A lot of it comes from Danny and the writing and the directing. But John Goodman is really our foundational rock. He really grounds the show. We need to make sure that we beat out these character moments so we understand what’s going on. You need to believe that these characters are real in some sense, and then that lets us get away with the comedy. Bourret: You are doing a balancing act. You have a full scene that’s very funny even if it’s dark, but then on a dime, you have a scene that rips your heart out. What you always have to keep in your mind as an editor is what you are trying to relay in a scene and how that is going to affect not only the scene that came before but scenes coming later.

CineMontage: In general, what is the workflow like on the show?

Bourret: Like many TV shows, we work in blocks. Most of the episodes were shot together throughout the whole shooting schedule, so we were a little all over the place. Some days one editor would get hit a little hard, and there would be a week where the other editors would get hit a little hard. As they’re shooting, we’re editing and immediately showing scenes to one another, to the director, and to Danny.

Canseco: They shoot a lot of footage. Normally, for a day of shooting on a TV show or a movie, you get two-and-a-half or three hours. This show pushes four or five hours. The scripts are loaded, and there’s a decent amount of improv. Once we have an editor’s cut, it’s rare for something to be under 40 minutes, and usually it’s closer to an hour.

CineMontage: Are there particular scenes where the actors do get a chance to go on riffs?

Todd Zelin: Probably the scenes that have the most improv are the scenes at Jason’s Steakhouse. First of all, those scenes take 12 hours to shoot, so that’s a full day for the actors. It’s one of the few times that our amazing cast is all together in one room. They definitely riff and play off each other. One of the big indicators of whether or not they like the idea they’ve come up with on-set is they’ll do it over and over again in every take to make sure they have a version of it in every angle. Then they’ll come up with new things here and there, one-offs that they’ll say just once on an improv run.

CineMontage: How do you handle that material as an editor?

Zelin: For my editor’s cut, I’m going to deliver the best version of what’s on the page plus what I just think is funny. If they’ve done a certain improv run over and over, I’ll know that at some point they will want to see a version of that improv run cut together and maybe multiple versions of it. Once we’ve screened it, I’ll try different versions of the same improv. Sometimes someone will say, “I just want something punchy here.” I’ll go back in and I’ll look: What else is here? What else did they do?

CineMontage: Joseph, talk about how the post team works together.

Ettinger: So much of the tone of the show is set in the edit bay, and we are super-fortunate to have a group of editors that work in collaboration. Editing can be an isolating job sometimes, and certainly not every show has a sense of community. This is definitely a show where, when I was finding my footing or feeling a little insecure about some of my first cuts, I could take them to the other guys and talk through stuff. We bring in assistant editors. We bring in PAs. A good idea can come from anywhere.

CineMontage: There’s a cutting room set up in Charleston, South Carolina, right?

Canseco: We all kind of pepper in at the beginning. Everybody who works on the show is in LA, but once the schedule comes up, we all just find our way out to Charleston in different ways.

Some people drive out because they have pets. We go to this very small town that doesn’t have a lot of filming, and we kind of take it over. We work out of a shopping mall.

CineMontage: Is that helpful?

Canseco: You definitely feel like you’re part of this weird community that we’ve built.

CineMontage: Justin, what’s it like editing John Goodman’s material?

Bourret: You can tell when you’re editing someone who is a seasoned actor like he is. He knows exactly where his character is going, and he also knows when he’s in a close-up. It’s definitely an art that I have noticed in actors who have been around.

Ettinger: The cast is phenomenal. In particular, I love getting Edi’s dailies. She is a joy to cut because she always gives you so many options and you have varied perfor-mances to operate with. Especially with the unique tone of the show, these actors are so dialed into what this world needs to feel like. You rarely have moments where you’re struggling to find the right beat.

Zelin: The actors give amazing performances. They’re hitting the drama hard when they need to, and they’re hitting the comedy hard when they need to. Part of what makes it work is the show takes wild swings back and forth. You’ll go from heart-wrenching when Eli is in the hospital after getting attacked by the cycle ninjas, and then you cut outside to everyone freaking out and puking. You’re always playing in those extremes.

CineMontage: Nicholas, what are you trying to accomplish on the show from a sound perspective?

Nicholas Renbeck: I hope we are able to give the show, in some subtle sense, its own personal sonic voice. We thought a bit about bugs and birds of South Carolina, how those sounds come out when the Gemstones are in nature, or on their compound, and definitely in the nighttime scenes. Sometimes we can push the sounds of, say, crickets and cicadas to help add to the tension of a scene. There is definitely the idea of wealth vs. poverty with the Gemstones that I like to explore when possible. In the Salvation Center, the family compound, and Jason’s Steakhouse, we look to make things sound a bit more pleasant, and have some fun playing with the megachurch audience’s reaction and interactions with the family on stage. We contrast that with when the family is in a poorer location — say, a roadside motel, where we’ll push the highway traffic sounds, rattier-sounding cars, unpleasant air-conditioning units. Plus, every season there are fun vehicles to give voice to. There are a lot of action sequences for a 30-minute show.

CineMontage: How do you work with the overall post team?

Renbeck: Danny works very closely with the picture department as they put things together. A majority of the time, they are choosing how they see the show moving along sound-effects-wise, and they put in placeholders. Some of the stuff is just right to begin with and we just need to sweeten it a little bit, and other times the sound department will fill it out a lot more. Before each episode, Justin and I will have a conversation on what we need to accomplish. We’ll go through every single episode before the sound crew starts on it. For something like the locust swarm at the end of season 3, we definitely needed to discover what that was going to sound like.

CineMontage: What are we hearing during the locust swarm?

Renbeck: Oh, the Foley and sound effects team went full-on there. We definitely have a lot of sound elements playing at that point, more than I can totally recall. We had actual tracks of locusts flying, pumped up with crickets and grasshoppers along with some evening peepers, and a 17- year cicada recording I had recorded a few years back, which adds an eerie, sort of otherworldly effect to the swam. Rachel Wardell, our sound effects editor, very creatively added in some stampeding animals, a motorboat engine, and processed helicopter blades to give the whole swarm a bit more body and shape to it. Whenever the swarm would “reach out,” like a hand of God trying to grab someone, we added a low-end bass drop effect to give it a final sell. On the Foley side, our team of Marko Costanzo, George Lara, and Ailin Gong did a fantastic job covering the hundreds of locust wings, flybys, and insect impacts. (Ed. note: To read more about Ailin Gong and her work, please refer to the “What Our Members Do” feature on page 20.)

CineMontage: Justin, is “Gemstones” a show that changes a lot in post from a picture-editing perspective?

Bourret: The scripts are very strong. Sometimes we rearrange scenes, but it’s more about cutting out things that we just don’t need. We say, “Do we need to say that line that many times?” Or “This scene says it better than that scene, so let’s eliminate the middle scene.” Danny lets the editors bring their own sense of style. He loves style and creativity. Every once in a while, we get a scene that maybe is not popping the way we wanted it to, and he’ll turn to us to come up with creative ways to execute what he was looking for. Sometimes it may be to make a montage out of something that wasn’t a montage.

Ettinger: It’s a testament to Danny’s ability to bring people into the world, and that includes the actors, the DPs, and everyone who has to buy in. If I were in his shoes, I don’t know if I’d be able to describe what I wanted. He does such a good job of communicating that vision and getting everyone onboard, and that’s a huge part of the success of the show.

February 1, 2024 0 comments

OSAGE WISDOM: Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

Behind the Scenes Features Interview

Thelma Schoonmaker Talks Editing Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers of The Flower Moon’

by uncredited February 1, 2024

written by uncredited 11 minutes read

By Patrick Z. McGavin

Thelma Schoonmaker, ACE, knows that her famous collaborator embraces the challenge of the new.

“Marty never wants to repeat himself,” said Schoonmaker, the three-time Oscar-winning editor best known for her work with director Martin Scorsese on film classics such as “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas.” “He gets a great new idea he wants to challenge himself with, and I’m being challenged with him,” she added. “There’s never any boredom.” Their latest challenge is the Apple-financed $200 million production, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” adapted by the writer Eric Roth and Scorsese from the 2016 non-fiction book by David Grann.

PARTNERS: Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker. PHOTO: AP

Set in 1921 in northern Oklahoma, the film is a story of greed, corruption, and racism after the discovery of oil under Osage Nation land transformed the region into one of the wealthiest areas in the country. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a returning World War I soldier ensnared in a scheme concocted by his uncle, William Hale, a nefarious cattle baron played by Robert DeNiro. The emotional centerpiece is the relationship between the Osage woman Mollie (Lily Gladstone) and Ernest, who starts as her chauffeur and eventually marries her. Like Scorsese’s Netflix epic “The Irishman” (2019), this new Apple Original film is a historical epic with a three-and-a-half-hour running time.

In an interview with CineMontage, Schoonmaker talks about the challenges of finding a balance between the film’s violent historical context and its more subtle family dynamics.

CineMontage: How did you prepare for this daunting material? Thelma Schoonmaker: Of course, I read the book, and that is filled with information. I learned many things through the process as I was going. I was given books, for example, on the very interesting ways Osage dress for weddings. The women wear this military outfit, which is something that happened when they first encountered white people.

They probably admired the look of the epaulets. Things like that I learned as each scene came up. It was the same with pipe at the beginning, and the drums at the end. The drums are so important to the Osage. They actually consider the drum a person, and the keeper of the drum is a very special person who is carefully chosen. Then it’s handed from person to person as people get older. I was learning all of that with each scene.

CineMontage: How did you decide to weave in the other narrative blocks, like the illustrated Osage book, the use of photographs and film, or the intertitles?

Schoonmaker: Marty knew right away that he wanted to use the black-and-white scenes, which were shot with actual silent cameras by [cinematographer] Ellen Kuras. The idea of using silent film footage in the beginning, once the oil was discovered, was to reproduce exactly as a newsreel of those days would have looked. It was shot by Ellen Kuras with a silent film camera using black-and-white film stock. Marty even owns one of the cameras. He always knew that, instead of a different way of explaining what happened, which may be lengthy and maybe not as interesting, that he wanted to use the silent film as a way to let people know what happened and not spend a lot of time on it.

Marty said, “I’m not making a documentary about the Osage. I’m making a film about two people who are in love with each other.”

CineMontage: One of the most striking cuts happens early, with an overhead shot and Mollie’s voiceover as we see these tableaux of sorrow, violence, and loss. Thelma

Schoonmaker: That was kind of a daring thing we did with Mollie’s voice there. We haven’t seen her yet. We don’t know who she is. Hearing a woman’s voice over these men who have died, and women who have died, and there’s been no investigation of it as a criminal act — hearing that female voice is such a shock.

CineMontage: The movie is a marriage story. The key question is how authentic Ernest’s love for Mollie is. How does the cutting color that ambiguity? Schoonmaker: DiCaprio was originally going to play the FBI man. What happened was once he decided to play Ernest, both he and Lily helped Marty revise the script and make the love story the central theme of the movie. You might wonder, but most people tell me they completely believe the love story, which is the way wonderful actors do it. An FBI agent asked Mollie, “Why are you staying with him?” She said, “I love him.” The actors make it that way. Leo is wonderful at improvisation. There’s the scene where Mollie calls him over to the bed. He’s been watching Blackie steal his car, the stupid plot that the two of them came up with.

She said, “I don’t know if you love me anymore,” and he convinces her he does. They say to each other, in Osage, “I love you,” and they touch noses, which is the Osage way of expressing love. During the intimate moment, he improvises, and they laugh, and he says, “You’re going to wake up the kids.”

CineMontage: With your long history of cutting both Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro at different parts of their careers, how beneficial was that in capturing their specific styles and emotional ranges?

Schoonmaker: They are both so different in this movie from what I expected, particularly Leo. He is willing to play someone who is not very smart, who’s lazy, but who loves this woman. That’s a big departure from the roles that he normally plays. I was astonished to see how skillfully he was able to switch into this kind of a part, and how he was absolutely adamant about staying in it. He never wanted to make himself look glamorous or romantic. He wanted to develop that part as it should have been. DeNiro is also very different in this. I couldn’t believe his voice. He came up with this wonderful voice that shows a bit of age, but it’s got a very interesting character. He said at the press conference at Cannes that he really didn’t understand his character.

He played it beautifully, in spite of the fact that he couldn’t really personally identify with such a thing. There are many people in films like that, characters who are double-sided. It’s hard to handle, like “Peeping Tom” (1960), my husband Michael Powell’s film, where you feel compassion for this man who is killing people. My husband felt this man had been tortured and abused as a child, and he can’t help himself. The compassion the critics were feeling when they first saw the movie made them so uncomfortable. They felt they were guilty of supporting his crimes.

CineMontage: Scorsese has been criticized sometimes for the female representation in his films. Lily Gladstone is the soul of the film. What was your process like with her?

Schoonmaker: She is such a wonderful actress, a genius. She’s a Blackfoot who learned the Osage language. The woman who trained her in Osage said, “She sounded like my mother.” I noticed sometimes that even after Marty said, “Cut,” she would stay in character for the two or three feet it takes for the film to run out. This is a part to die for. She is the soul of the movie, her dignity, and her willingness to compromise for the man she chooses to be with. She’s attracted to him, and he’s attracted to her. I didn’t have to do anything to make her performance any better than it already is.

CineMontage: The FBI investigation is more pronounced in the book. How much did you play around with how you wanted to introduce that element?

Schoonmaker: Marty had already had to make big changes once Leo decided he didn’t want to play the FBI agent. That work was going on even a little bit during the shooting, particularly building the love story. That it was going on during shooting was a little unusual, but it’s happened before. We experimented with placing scenes around the love story, to make sure the love story was strengthened. With editing, you do move things around.

CineMontage: Did you watch the early ’20s films of D.W. Griffith, John Ford, or Erich von Stroheim to get a feel for how things moved back then?

Schoonmaker: Marty is already so familiar with that period of movies that it’s sort of in his brain already. I didn’t have to look at those movies. I knew a lot of the ones that mean the most to him.

CineMontage: The movie was shot on 35mm film. What impact, if any, did that have on your work? Schoonmaker: We do make the transition to digital right away for editing purposes. We had very highresolution footage all the way through when we were editing. So it wasn’t a matter of us having to go back when we did, for example, with an optical visual effect. We didn’t have to go back and get the negative because we already had high-quality resolution negative, which meant things were faster and we could manipulate things even more in the editing room.

We created some visual effects in the editing room, and that was because we were shooting at a very high resolution. That was really different from previous films. We have this high-resolution element for the final.

CineMontage: How do you and Scorsese resolve any differences you might have?

Schoonmaker: There is never an ego battle or anything like Marty used to have in his early days in Hollywood when he was changing the ways movies are made. If we disagree, I show him four or five options of another way to go, and he will look at it, and we will decide together which is better. It’s not ever a problem.

Sometimes we may want to screen one way, then try screening another way to gauge audience reactions when we debrief them afterwards. We settle these things in the early editing. He trained me. He taught me everything I know about editing. Our sensibilities are the same.

CineMontage: With Netflix on “The Irishmen,” and now Apple with this film, you are working outside the traditional commercial restraints. Has that been liberating artistically?

Schoonmaker: It’s the nature of the subject matter, like the long slow builds of how De Niro’s character in “The Irishman” evolved to the absolutely devastating last scene, where he’s aging and all alone. That’s what he’s earned from how he ran his life. So that build was very, very important. Similarly with this film, it’s a big story, and it needed the length. Most people tell me they have no problem at all with it. So they feel gripped by the movie right away and stay that way.

CineMontage: Criterion has recently issued 4K editions of “Mean Streets” (1985), “After Hours” (1985), and your husband’s key film, “The Red Shoes” (1948). Does this lead you to reflect on your life and work?

Schoonmaker: I do the restorations myself. I work with Scorsese, and we work very closely with the colorist and the sound restoration. “After Hours” was something we spent a great deal of time on. It’s wonderful to see the film brought to life again, particularly these days with digital. You can do these amazing things to remove dirt and scratches and get the sound and color exactly right.

I’ve worked on the restoration with Scorsese of almost all the recent movies, and also my husband’s movies. The wonder-ul thing about it is you see the same scene over and over again as you are working on the color, so you get to learn the film in a different way. You see little things that you never noticed, particularly on my husband’s films. That is a joy. I love every minute of it, and I never get tired of seeing them.

Patrick Z. McGavin is a Chicago-based writer and cultural journalist.

February 1, 2024 0 comments

Behind the Scenes Interview Web Exclusives

Affonso Gonçalves Talks Editing Todd Haynes’ Drama ‘May December’

by Peter Tonguette January 23, 2024

written by Peter Tonguette 10 minutes read

By Peter Tonguette

From the life and death of Karen Carpenter to our inability to function in the modern world to stories of love affairs thwarted by society, filmmaker Todd Haynes has always had a penchant for high drama.

His earlier films — including the aforementioned “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story” (1987), “Safe” (1995), and “Far from Heaven” (2002) — established that pattern, but his latest film confirms it. “May December” — which Netflix released to widespread attention and acclaim in late November — enlarges the sort of story that would normally be tabloid fodder to operatic proportions.

Julianne Moore (the earlier star of “Safe” and “Far from Heaven”) stars as Gracie, a woman whose life was derailed following the revelation of an illicit (and illegal) relationship with a teenager, Joe (Charles Melton) — a young man whom she subsequently married. Natalie Portman plays Elizabeth, an actress who has been tapped to play a character based on Gracie in a new movie.

The contours of Gracie’s crimes as depicted in Samy Burch’s screenplay are said to be inspired by the real-life case of Mary Kay Letourneau, who was the subject of a thousand newsmagazine segments in the 1990s and 2000s. In the hands of Haynes and his frequent collaborator in the cutting room, picture editor Affonso Goncalves, ACE, the material becomes as strange, disturbing, and darkly comic as anything in memory.

Over a series of collaborations reaching back to “Mildred Pierce” (2011) and including the acclaimed “Carol” (2015) and “Wonderstruck” (2017), Goncalves is uniquely attuned to Haynes’ style. The editor recently spoke with CineMontage about their latest cinematic undertaking.

CineMontage: You and Todd Haynes have worked together a long time. What about the two of you click?

Affonso Gonçalves: We watch films the same way and we like similar kinds of films. Todd has this encyclopedic knowledge of film, which is really amazing. We both have a deep love of film. We have that communication. He can make references and talk about movies that he loves and ideas that he has, and I know exactly what he’s talking about. I think that helps because then I know what he’s looking for.

For every single film we’ve worked together on, he’s done extensive research for the film. He has film references, music references, and literary references. He gives those to all of us — his main creative partners. It’s great, because you know what he’s going for, but it’s really fun because it enriches my knowledge of film and filmmaking.

Affonso Gonçalves, editor of “The Lost Daughter.” PHOTO: Matt Infante.

CineMontage: What were some of the reference points for “May December”?

Gonçalves: He made a lot of references to [Ingmar] Bergman films, where he saw similarities — not only the mirror scenes, but films with women who mirror each other’s relationships. And [Jean-Luc] Godard and Joseph Losey. Then we started cutting, we kept thinking about those films.

Of course, this film has a very interesting tone. Ultimately, it’s a serious film with a serious subject matter — it’s a very morally dark and complex story — but it’s also funny. We had to shift. [Humor] not something we’re used to, or Todd is used to shooting, so it was really interesting in the cutting room for us to explore and, whenever we could, lean into the humor. And with a film like this, it really helps.

CineMontage: How did you bring that quality to the forefront?

Gonçalves: I think through the sharpness of the edit. In [Haynes’s] other films, there’s always sort of a lingering quality — the moments you get to experience and savor. Here, it’s a little bit different. We have so many scenes that are in one shot and things happen within the frame, and it is what it is; we just have to be careful when we’re coming in and we’re going out. Everything else has a little more pace, a little more sharpness. We get out a little faster than you expect. We talked about punchlines, which usually was not something that we’d talk about.

CineMontage: How do you and Todd work together? Do you cut as they’re shooting? What happens when Todd comes in?

Gonçalves: He’s shooting the film and I’m cutting. I was in LA, he was shooting in Savannah [Georgia]. When he finished shooting, I had a cut of the film. Todd doesn’t really watch dailies. He took a couple of weeks off. We sent to him DVDs of everything that was shot, so after he took a little break, he watched all the footage by himself and took notes, and he sent that all to me. By that time, I was in Portland, where he lives, so then I built a cut based on his notes. Then he came in and we worked off of that. We also had my cut, and we kind of used both of them.

Then that becomes the third cut, which is the final cut. It’s very hands-on. He comes in at 9 and he leaves at 7. We go through very, very detailed notes about every performance, every cut, the scenes, and the structure of the film. That part is similar in every film that we’ve done together.

CineMontage: Was “May December” a movie that changed a lot, or were the bones obvious from the beginning?

Gonçalves: The bones were there. It’s not a film that we did a massive restructure on. We lifted some scenes. We may have changed them a little bit around, or used different lines, but it was pretty close to the script. The work that we really did was work closely with performance, which is always something that we spend a lot of time on.

CineMontage: The movie is anchored by Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman. What was it like working with their performances?

Gonçalves: Once you pick one performance, everything else has to fall in line with that [within a scene]. It can’t be that one [performance] is too big and one is too small. Once we committed to Julianne’s performance, if the scene is anchored on her, everything else has to follow. Which is really interesting, because Natalie is kind of performing a performance by Julianne. Me and Todd have to really gauge: “Is this too much? Did she get it too close? Is the lisp too strong?” It’s really carefully building the right arc of the character and arc of the change.

CineMontage: Throughout the film, we hear the theme from Joseph Losey’s 1970 masterpiece “The Go-Between.” Was it a temp piece first? When did you decide to commit to that music?

Gonçalves: That emerged because Todd, while he was researching the film, decided to watch “The Go-Between.” It was a film that he really liked, and he hadn’t watched it in a long time. He immediately fell in love with the soundtrack to the point that he actually added it to the script. He also played it on the set for the actors.

I knew that we wanted to use [“The Go-Between”] as a temp, and I temped the film with it. It was really interesting because, when you watch [“May December”], it’s not something that comes to mind. One, it’s specific to the [Losey] film, and two, it has a specific sonic language that is not something you think of when you’re watching “May December.” The challenge was how do we fit this to the scene? So you sometimes cut in a way that’s going to fit, or you start the music a little later, or you don’t use the entire piece or just one hit.

CineMontage: There are a lot of colors to this film: it’s about moral issues, it’s also about show business and the media. What do you hope people take from the movie?

Gonçalves: I love the film. I feel like a lot of people are understanding the moral conundrums of the film. You come in with one idea, and it’s super-slippery because you can’t really trust the film — you have to make up your own mind of what’s right, what’s wrong, what is it that happened, and who was right. It’s so much about boundaries being trampled on.

As I’m working on it, I have to make my own decisions. I have to make my own judgment call. And, at the same time, I have to be true to the story and to the film, and I can’t pick sides. That’s the great thing about being an editor.

January 23, 2024 0 comments

Behind the Scenes Features

Past Production: How the ‘Maestro’ Team Recreated the Music – and Marriage – of Leonard Bernstein

by Peter Tonguette January 22, 2024

written by Peter Tonguette 13 minutes read

By Peter Tonguette

In the dictionary, the noun “maestro” is a term used for a classical-music conductor. The word confers a certain authority: the maestro, or conductor, is the center of gravity and the center of attention. After all, the conductor stands at the podium, and until he or she taps the baton and motions to the assembled orchestra players, no music is made. There is a bit of magic to being a maestro: he or she is the person who summons forth sounds from an otherwise silent page.

The new Netflix drama “Maestro” takes as its subject one of the most notable maestros in the annals of American music, and certainly one of the most visible: the conductor Leonard Bernstein. As played by director, producer, and co-writer Bradley Cooper, Bernstein is a volcanic, volatile, and unforgettable force — not just a gifted conductor, but a composer of renown (“Candide,” “West Side Story,” the score to “On the Waterfront”), a TV host (“Young People’s Concerts”), an attentive father, an adoring husband to Felicia Montealegre (played in the film by Carey Mulligan), as well as an enthusiastic participant in affairs: as the film opens, Bernstein, who was bisexual, is shown in the throes of a intense relationship with an old friend, the clarinetist David Oppenheim (Matt Bomer).

Yet the movie “Maestro” did not arrive on screens as the product of a single person. Perhaps Bradley Cooper was the conductor of the project, which was co-written with Josh Singer and which had at one point been planned as a directorial vehicle for Martin Scorsese (who remains a producer on the picture). But the film itself came to life thanks to the creativity and industriousness of a highly committed creative team, including picture editor Michelle Tesoro, ACE, executive music producer and supervising music editor Jason Ruder, and sound designer and supervising sound editor Richard King.

Tesoro first entered Cooper’s orbit following her work on Sean Penn’s film “Flag Day” (2021), which she had helped recut. Cooper had given Penn notes on various passes on the film.

“When Bradley saw my pass, which was the final pass of the film, he asked Sean, “Who edited this?’” Tesoro said. “At the time, he was still developing ‘Maestro,’ and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in helping him work on a sizzle reel, which we ended up calling a proof of concept.” Tesoro put together test footage that displayed the convincing makeup designed by Kazu Hiro to transform Cooper into Bernstein at different points in his 72 years. (The conductor was born in 1918 and died in 1990.)

Although the “maestro” in the title is Bernstein, Cooper never intended to make a movie focused on a godlike conductor. Instead, the script gave equal time — maybe even more than equal time — to Bernstein’s wife Felicia, who had to navigate her love for her husband with the knowledge of his bisexuality. “Bradley set out to make a movie about marriage,” Tesoro said. “When he came aboard to be a co-writer, he and Josh rewrote the story to focus on Felicia and the marriage. That was what he found to be the most compelling story that he could tell.”

During postproduction, Tesoro never had to strain to give weight to Felicia’s side of a scene because her perspective was already central to the script. “Sometimes, we really leaned so heavily into Felicia that it seemed like it was all her story,” she said. “Then we had to backtrack and maybe put Lenny more into it to have the balance. Even if they did some improvisational scenes, it was always leaning towards her, or the two of them, or the family as a whole.” Bernstein’s three children are played by Maya Hawke, Gideon Glick, and Alexa Swinton.

The film, which was photographed by Matthew Libatique, ASC, transitions between 1940s-era black-and-white sequences in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, later color sequences also in 1.33, and a few bookend color segments in 1.85. The height of the 1.33 aspect ratio was especially useful during scenes of Bernstein at the podium. “When he’s conducting, you can really take advantage of the height,” Tesoro said.

Although the choice to alter the size of the image, as well as to incorporate both black-and-white and color, was a bold one, Tesoro said that her goal was to make the transitions seamless. “Typically, I always aim for the invisible,” she said. “I don’t want to lose your attention. We experimented with certain kinds of long dissolves or superimpositions, but the film would just kick it back, like, ‘This is not what I want.’” Cooper favored long takes that observed the complicated characters instead of commenting on them. “It’s a more observational style, instead of saying, ‘Oh, now look here,’” Tesoro said. “He always felt that if we had more coverage, it would feel like a movie and it wouldn’t feel like you’re witnessing real people and real situations.” A greater degree of intercutting between the black-and-white and color sequences was originally anticipated, but during postproduction, it was decided to let the two sequences play out with a minimum of switching back and forth.

Michelle Tesoro.

The shooting schedule ran from May through the end of July 2022, and then picked up again in September when additional locations became available. “I was always very close to picture,” Tesoro said. “That was probably informing [Cooper] of how things were coming together.” The interruption in filming offered the unique opportunity for director and picture editor to live with the film as it was coming into focus. During the pause, Cooper had the chance to take stock of which to-be-shot scenes were needed and which possibly weren’t; in the end, one sequence was scrapped altogether. “We kind of knew what the movie was and were really honing it,” Tesoro said. Each time filming picked up again, Tesoro was left even more impressed with the makeup design. “Every time he went back, the makeup just got better and better,” Tesoro said, pointing to one of the last scenes shot: an interview with a very aged Bernstein in a red sweater. “When I saw it, I went, ‘Holy moly.’ Many times with makeup, there are wig fixes we have to do. There are little things we have to do. Here, there was nothing we had to do. We color-timed it, which you would do with someone’s regular face.”

In fact, the interview sequence was so compelling — and provided such an insight into the character of Bernstein — that Cooper and Tesoro moved the scene to the very start of the picture (which would have originally opened with a scene, still in the film, of Bernstein being invited to conduct the New York Philharmonic). “The red sweater scene was meant to go at the very end of the film in the timeline of the film,” Tesoro said. “But we were looking for a way to ground the film in the story of Lenny and Felicia, so the byproduct of it is you are confronted with the makeup, with what Lenny looked like at that time. This was a way of saying: “This is Lenny, not Bradley Cooper.’”

Throughout the film, major structural elements stayed the same, but the film was refined and individual scenes altered or cut until late in the process. Tesoro began to see the film as a bit of a symphony of Bernstein’s life. “The music of Leonard Bernstein, as we used it in the film, completely dictated the editing,” Tesoro said. “That doesn’t mean that we edited the picture to the music, but in thinking about his music and thinking about how we were editing the story together.” The film uses Bernstein-composed music as its score, some of which Cooper had already spotted and some of which the director was saving for the right moment. “It was more about waiting for the right moment when we had the right sequence where we wanted to try to add music,” Tesoro said. “We’d go through the cues that weren’t used, or weren’t spotted for other places, to see which one would make sense not only in the timeline of Bernstein’s life but the emotion and mood that the cue would bring.” The interplay between music and picture was akin to a “conversation,” the editor added.

In several sequences, the music itself takes center stage, especially a performance of Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony No. 2” (the “Resurrection Symphony”) at the Ely Cathedral in England — a performance that, at Cooper’s insistence, was recorded live. Cooper turned to Ruder, the music editor with whom he had worked on his first feature as a director, “A Star Is Born” (2018).

“I got an early copy of the script that was in progress, and he said, ‘Look, we’ve had so much success on ‘A Star Is Born’ with live vocals and doing things live on set. What do you think about tackling this in the same fashion?’” Ruder said. “I got excited and extremely scared at the same time. I said, ‘You mean with full orchestra doing Leonard Bernstein?” . . . It sounded absolutely amazing, and it sounded like one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever heard of in our line of work.”

Cooper decided that any music shown to be performed live on camera would be recorded live on set. “We never let go of his vision: ‘If we see it, we’ve got to capture it live,’” Ruder said, and that especially applied to the sequence of Bernstein conducting Mahler at the Ely Cathedral. “The tech scout was an intricate piece of the puzzle,” Ruder said. “Ely is not the best-sounding [venue]. It’s beautiful, but it’s just like this enormous cavern. We were like, ‘This is going to be hard to record.’”

The filmmakers partnered with classical recording engineers at a company called Classic Sound. “I said, ‘Have you recorded anything at Ely?’ And they said they had done years ago a couple of recordings,” Ruder said, noting that Classic Sound uses Puremix rather than Pro Tools. “I thought, ‘These are our guys,’” Ruder said. “We discussed how to sling microphones. We figured out whether any microphones would be in frame. There were a couple you could see in the archives [of the actual performance] . . . . We came up with a strategy to shoot, and it actually, magically, worked out.”

When it came time to film the scene, Cooper, inhabiting Bernstein, stood in front of musicians from the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as a chorus of singers, who then performed selections from the Mahler symphony. “We kind of mapped it out roughly, because we were short on time,” Ruder said. “Bradley was very good about: ‘This is the section. Let’s map out the measures.’” Multiple cameras, used in several different setups, captured the scene. “When you have that many players and singers live, it’s kind of a wild animal,” Ruder said. “It was really down to a few magic takes, to be honest with you.”

For scenes that used Bernstein’s music as score, however, Cooper and Ruder discussed using the original masters from the composer’s recordings. “All we had is stereo masters,” Ruder said. “I thought, ‘Surely some sort of multi-tracks that exist, and that might help us make a little more of a 7.1 or an Atmos mix.’ But we really couldn’t get our hands on them.” Then the idea emerged for the London Symphony Orchestra to recreate the pieces. Conducting consultant Yannick Nezet-Seguin used the actual Bernstein recordings, which were being used as the film’s “temp score,” as a reference. “Yannick really studied the scenes that we had put together and the actual recordings that we were working with,” Ruder said. “At that point, we were able to do an Atmos scoring session and bring it back to a dub stage.”

The sound world of the film often had to be subservient to the music, as in a dream-like scene in which Lenny and Felicia find themselves onstage in a performance of the classic Bernstein-scored ballet “Fancy Free.” “With those more dreamlike or imaginative moments, like ‘Fancy Free,’ there’s very little Foley, if any,” Richard King said. “It’s all production sound and it’s all music. Even a lot of the production movement, like footsteps, were taken out.” During the Mahler scene, too, any background sound has been eliminated. “The world kind of comes back after [the musicians] finish,” King said. The scene was a delightful detour for Tesoro as well. “I love cutting ballet and dance,” she said. “I worked on a television show that was all ballet dancers years ago. You have to be able to see the whole body and know where to go. It was such a joy to cut this sequence because I knew how to do this. The music is always there, and it’s really a little microcosm of their story.”

On the other hand, scenes of the Bernsteins’ day-to-day domestic existence were full of the everyday noise of life. “There are several different locations that we are in in Connecticut and Long Island and Manhattan, and we have a good sense of where we are sonically,” King said, also pointing to scenes at the Tanglewood music venue in Massachusetts, where Bernstein conducted and taught. “Tanglewood had its own kind of sound to it. You’re using different birds and different types of wind through different types of trees,” King said.

One especially impressive scene has very little sound at all: a devastating moment when Felicia sits in a doctor’s office, her husband beside her, to learn that she has breast cancer. “Everybody knows the cold feeling of a doctor’s examination room,” King said. “Foley in that scene was really important — just the contact between Felicia and Leonard. They’re holding one another and touching one another and hugging after she gets the news. It’s a very emotional film.”

And it’s a picture that continued to evolve until the very end. “It’s like a sculpture,” Tesoro said. “You have to start off with this idea of what it’s supposed to be, and as you continue to carve, things just start to become more clear every time. You have to go through the process of all these steps that come in between. Or us, even during the last two months, there were certain puzzles that hadn’t been solved.” Two sequences that originally stood independent of each other — of Lenny ending his relationship with David, and of Lenny talking with Felicia about getting married — are now intercut. “But intercutting the scenes a little bit more, you’re seeing more clearly the dissolving of the relationship with David into something else, but you’re also seeing the evolving of the relationship with Felicia,” Tesoro said.

Perhaps it’s even fair to say that the maestro was overseeing the production — from afar.

“The whole goal was: ‘How do we keep Lenny’s heartbeat and human nature alive through the whole thing?’” Ruder said. “That was the goal from day one, five years ago.”

January 22, 2024 0 comments