StudioDaily's Podcasts from the Front Lines

Disney’s The Finest Hours is the fifth full-length motion picture directed by Craig Gillespie, and far and away, the largest, most technically complicated, and highest-profile picture he has helmed. The movie relates the real-life story of a heroic Coast Guard rescue in the teeth of a horrific New England snowstorm off the coast of Massachusetts […]

Although The Hateful Eight is the eighth directorial effort from Quentin Tarantino, and creatively is every bit as quirky, darkly comedic, violent, and offbeat as one might expect from a Tarantino revenge Western, in filmmaking circles, the movie has garnered great interest for how Tarantino dared to make and exhibit it. With the backing of […]

Given their pedigree, one might think that supervising sound editors Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers had pretty much experienced it all by the time they launched into Sam Mendes’ most recent James Bond adventure, Spectre, but in fact, at least one aspect of the work was particularly unique for both of them — the schedule. 

The pair has been a team for 26 years, for much of that time at Soundelux, but they are now based at West Hollywood’s Formosa Group. Over that time, they have joined forces on dozens of major projects, and earned Academy Awards in 2008 for their work on The Bourne Ultimatum and in 2013 for their first foray into Bond’s world, on Mendes’ Skyfall. 

For all their experience, however, neither sound editor has ever seen a schedule like Spectre’s, since production waited until Mendes revised the script, and later, was temporarily halted when star Daniel Craig suffered an injury. The result, Hallberg recently told Studio, is that the project’s sound post-production methodology became “very unorthodox” at the end of the day.

“This was probably the tightest [schedule] we have ever seen,” he says. “By the time it hit us, we knew the schedule was already laid out to the last possible day to be able to turn it around. I think we actually finished here in L.A. with a print master three days before the premiere in London. In other words, if you are that tight on the schedule, if anything goes wrong, there is not any wiggle room. So it was a very unorthodox schedule and way of doing it — kind of a little bit backwards, as in we had to cut our material while they were still filming. If we didn’t, we would run out of time. That meant we had to update a lot of stuff as we [went along]. Then, we started pre-dubbing in Los Angeles, before we flew to London to do the first temp dub, which is also unusual.”

And a huge challenge, because as Baker Landers points out, “to get something right creatively under that kind of time crunch is the hardest part of all — it’s got to sound great and work for the story.”

And yet, both of them are quite pleased with the end product, particularly since they had to create elements to the exacting specifications of a particularly involved director like Mendes, who participates far more in sound details than most directors. They point to one of the “quieter scenes,” in which Bond drunkenly reflects in a hotel room in Morocco until he notices a crucial clue. That’s the kind of place, Baker Landers says, where the sound team could really go to town “adding a little spice” that the audience will, if they did the job right, largely not even comprehend is there — subtle sounds of a distant city, mopeds going by, a call to prayer at a distant mosque, and so on. 

Hallberg and Baker Landers discussed these kinds of challenges, and much more, in an interview with Studio for the most recent installment of the Podcasts from the Front Lines series. To enjoy the conversation, watch the video below or, to download an audio-only MP3 version, right-click here.

 

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When discussing his work alongside his longtime friend, director Steven Spielberg, on the Cold War saga Bridge of Spies, veteran film editor Michael Kahn, ACE, gives the distinct impression that the project was almost effortless. That’s because Kahn, who will turn 80 this year, has been a film editor since 1969, has been editing feature films since 1972, has edited all of Spielberg’s movies since Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, and says he has no plans to retire as long as Spielberg wants to work with him.  

“Next year, we’ll have been together 40 years,” Kahn exclaimed with pride during our interview for the Podcasts from the Front Lines series. “I love the guy. He’s a real mensch.”

Still, despite their lengthy collaboration, Kahn, who has received seven Academy Award nominations and won three times—all three wins and all but one of those nominations (for 1987's Fatal Attraction) coming for his work in partnership with Spielberg—says “I can’t think of another show we’ve done quite like [Bridge of Spies],” which he refers to as “a dialogue show.”

By that, he means the film is a cerebral thriller. While telling the true story of lawyer James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) as he is pulled into Cold War-era spy intrigue when asked to first defend a presumed Soviet spy, played by Mark Rylance, and then, eventually, negotiate his return to Soviet custody in exchange for American pilot Gary Powers, Kahn had to help Spielberg tell a true story, a period piece, and, at its heart, a story that was about matching wits, taking the measure of one’s adversaries, and trying to outsmart them. What the movie isn’t, is a typical spy thriller or, really, even an action piece at all. 

That reality made Kahn’s editing work all the more impressive, considering the creative challenges he faced in building tension and pacing a piece that largely revolves around courtrooms, intense discussions, negotiations, and fearful moments of contemplation. 

“We employed a style,” Kahn explains. “We didn’t rush the show or try to make fast cuts. We went to the lines [in the screenplay by Matt Charman and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen] and played them on the characters. Sometimes, you play them off the characters, but here, we played them on the characters. We had a good time doing it, because the writing was so great, and the performances were so great.”

During his conversation with Studio, Kahn explained the challenges of editing the movie and his method of working alongside Spielberg, including their mutual transition from analog film editing to nonlinear editing on the Avid, his philosophies on making true-to-life stories, and some of the issues they are currently involved with in putting together Spielberg’s next film, The BFG, a technically complex animation-and-live-action hybrid slated to debut in the summer of 2016, among other topics. 

To enjoy the conversation, watch the video below or, to download an audio-only MP3 version, right-click here.

 

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Over the years, film editor Roger Barton has carved out a fruitful niche cutting high-octane, big-action, visual effects-loaded Hollywood extravaganzas. Indeed, his resume is chock full of Transformer pictures (three to be exact), along with Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Bad Boys II, Pearl Harbor, Speed Racer, and World War Z, among others. But all of that work, in a sense, owes an allegiance to Barton’s longtime love of the Terminator franchise. That’s because Barton insists that James Cameron’s original 1984 Terminator movie “was one of the reasons I got into film—it had that big of an impact on me.”

And Barton has other connections to the franchise, as well. Two of his longtime industry mentors are Mark Goldblatt, ACE, and Dody Dorn, ACE, who were both involved in editing the first two Terminator movies for Cameron—Goldblatt as editor of The Terminator in 1984 and co-editor along with Dorn and others on Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991. 

“In fact, I called Mark Goldblatt before I started this movie, and told him I was taking it on,” Barton recalls. “He had such a huge influence on my career at so many levels, and was real happy to hear I was on the film, because we had worked together for so many years, I as his assistant. He brings such an enthusiasm to the film. I just fed off it after I talked to him, and got really excited about diving into [this project].”

Terminator Genisys's time-travel story, connection to the original movies, and resurrection of original characters, however, is ultimately a set-up for moving the franchise in a new direction. Barton says the material therefore required its own, unique cutting approach and was, to say the least, a complex challenge. In a recent conversation, he discussed those challenges and his methods for organizing reams of footage and digital elements in order to take the Terminator story “somewhere else,” as he describes it. Watch the video, below.

 

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Irony wrapped in serendipity surrounds the fact that cinematographer John Schwartzman, ASC, ended up shooting Jurassic World in collaboration with director Colin Trevorrow under the watchful eye of the man who created the dino-franchise—producer Steven Spielberg, director of the original film that the new movie directly links itself to, 1993’s Jurassic Park. The irony comes out of the fact that Schwartzman was originally hired when the new film was first slated to be acquired in native 3D, since “in terms of resume, I had as much experience as anyone in shooting such films,” given his pedigree shooting The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) in native 3D and re-shoots for Life of Pi, also in native 3D, that same year.  

Serendipity cropped up when Spielberg and Trevorrow decided in 2013 that the project should be delayed and reconstituted. During that delay, Schwartzman convinced them that the material was not suited to native stereo acquisition after all. Among his reasons was the fact that he also had reams of experience shooting in jungle settings in Hawaii and elsewhere on films like Pearl Harbor (2001), a location where much of this film was shot. Schwartzman felt strongly that “3D in the jungle raises the level of complexity quite a lot” and “momentum will be a word that will not be in your vocabulary.”

Instead, in keeping with his, Trevorrow’s, and Spielberg’s ideal aesthetic preferences, and in the tradition of the other Jurassic Park movies, Schwartzman ended up shooting the picture on film, in a blend of 35mm and 65mm formats, and in a highly unusual 2.00:1 aspect ratio. (The IMAX 3D version of the movie was later created in post using the Stereo D conversion process.)

In a recent chat, Schwartzman explained these and other decisions, and how they were executed during production on Jurassic World for the first of Studio’s new Podcasts From the Front Lines series of conversations with filmmakers involved with major feature films debuting this year. Watch the video, below.

 

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