Interview: Ash Brannon, Director of “Rock Dog”

Posted on February 24, 2017 at 2:42 pm

Ash Brannon directed “Surf’s Up” and co-directed “Toy Story 2,” two of my favorite animated films. He took on quite a challenge writing and directing the endearing new international production “Rock Dog,” inspired by a Chinese graphic novel about a sheepdog from Tibet who wants to be a musician. I was lucky to get a chance to talk to him about it.

Like the surfing penguin story “Surf’s Up,” “Rock Dog” is the story of an animal character who is passionate about something unusual for his species. “Characters with big dreams, impossible dreams, those are always a place to start when you are making the movie, aren’t they?” Brannon said.

He especially enjoyed working on an international production that came from China. “I hadn’t heard of the comic book. It was very big in China but not outside of China so the producer on the show told me about it and I was kind of intrigued by the challenges of the show. Doing something with fewer resources of time and money and a chance to build my own front-end team to put the story together. Also, I thought it would be fun just to work with some different cultures and discover what we have in common, what we don’t have in common when it comes to making movies, and so that’s kind of the long and short of it. The pleasant surprise was that stories like this work pretty much all over the world. Especially the musical theme shows music as universal, a thing we all have in common. It’s a really magical story, too. When you see a kid bang on pots and pans or strum a guitar or play the keys on a piano for the first time and discover that they can make sounds and eventually pleasing sounds that can really touch the hearts of people, that’s an amazing magical thing. And so, I wanted to tap into that and I discovered in working with the Chinese artists that they feel the same way. So, it was nice to kind of transcend some boundaries in making this movie.”

The film is inspired in part by the real life of the rock star who wrote the graphic novel. “He’s pretty much like Bodi in this story. He was going to go into international finance. He was in business school and then he heard a Bruce Springsteen song one day in college. This is back in the 80s or 90s, so you can imagine what kind of bootleg it takes to get Springsteen songs into China, but he fell in love with music and asked permission from his mom and she said, ‘Yes, go follow your dream.” He went off to Beijing, taught himself music. He was busking in the parks and he went from a very, very modest beginning to quite a fortunate career.”

The look of the movie is also very different from the graphic novel. “One great gift that Michael gave the team, because it was entirely an American team of artists who put the movie together, was his generosity and his trust in letting us go where we thought we needed to go and adapting the graphic novel and that extended to the designs. One reason we had to kind of depart from it was to simplify the characters because of our budget and make sure that nothing was too complicated so everything went in a simplified direction for that reason.”

One of my favorite things in the movie was the opening sequence, done in a dreamlike collage style. “It was something that the partners in China really wanted. I think they liked the opening of ‘Kung Fu Panda,’ for example, kind of a 2D graphic style. We really wanted to set up very quickly and bring you into the story almost like a book to help you understand the setup of this village of sheep and the guard dog and how Bodi’s father ended up locking up these musical instruments away for fear that his son would stray from the path of making sure he grew up and became the next guard to protect the sheep. So, it was a nice shorthand way of doing that and that’s kind of how we approached the opening.”

The rock star voiced by Eddie Izzard in the film lives in a fabulous mansion, and Brannon explained that they took advantage of one of the benefits of animation — there is no limit to imagination because what they create does not have to built. “We had a fantastic art director named Christian Schellewald who I met at DreamWorks and I let him run with the concept of what a rock star’s house must look like when money is no object. So we went outlandish with the enormous waterbed and the massive living room and the over-the-top music recording room. It was fun just to do things you can only do in animation that would look kind of crazy in live action.”

He said that in casting the voice actors, who include Sam Elliott, Luke Wilson, and JK Simmons, “naturalism is key. I really like actors who embrace improvisation and who can really act through their voice only. I mean when you think about it, live action actors bring so much to their performances visually, right? Their facial expressions, gestures, and so forth and their looks. When you take all that away sometimes actors don’t have anything left. So I look for actors who can really bring a texture that is interesting to listen to, people who can emote entirely with the voice alone.”

The movie features a rock ‘n’ roll park based on a real-life park in Japan. “These kids are amazing, as talented as anybody who’s getting record label deals. They are singing their hearts out. You can go anywhere even in America and you find these musicians in New York or LA, San Francisco, anywhere they have such passion for making music you almost feel like if they could not make music they wouldn’t survive, it’s like breathing for them or eating or drinking. So, that was the thing that struck me and its universal. People need to make music. It’s part of what sustains us on earth. And that’s the feeling I wanted in our movie.”

Catching Up with Director Elia Petridis

Posted on December 11, 2016 at 10:23 pm

I loved talking to the immensely creative Elia Petridis at Comic-Con last summer, and so was glad to have a chance to catch up with him to talk about the haunting Jesca Hoop music video he directed, a small gem.

The last time I saw you we talked about a lot of very cutting edge things like virtual reality and today we’re going to start by talking about something that’s a little more conventional, “The Lost Sky.” The first thing I want to ask you is about casting because the faces of the people in it were so interesting.

Film is such a visual medium that I’ve always cast faces. I cast for character, not for physique, I guess. But all the greats do it too, you know. I’m not in it alone.

How did this project come about?

Jesca and I are old friends. This is our fourth video together. And this is very intimate story. A few years ago, I was in a car accident. I was in the hospital and my partner left me while I was recovering. Jesca wrote this song at that time because we were friends. Many years later she came to me and she said “Look, I wrote this song, I’m looking at directors to do it and would you mind talking to one of the directors?” She told me it was inspired by my experience and other things but the seed of it was sort of what I was going through. She was like, “Elia, you have done three videos for me and this is a very personal story for you. Do you think you’d want to do it?” She said, “What’s very important to me is the theme of abandonment, what it’s like to be abandoned when you can’t really fend for yourself, you’re metaphorically left for dead, what’s that like?”

I sat down with Jesca and said, “Why don’t we do what I do and what I love to do is tell stories. I’d love to have it be a page turner, like a what is going to happen next kind of a situation. We’ve got the beating heart of the piece but what’s its skin, what genre? What does it do?” I said, “Do you want to do something Hitchcock? Do you want to do something like a little ‘Vertigo’ where he is stuck in this loop and he keeps waking up and you’ve got surprise and suspense where the first time that he is surprised but the second time that he is all suspense and the third times like a synthesis of that and you wake up and you find out that there is a real twist?”

And the more I went down that way the more I started thinking about things that I’ve always loved like the unreliable narrator. Jesca is an amazing artist and each of her songs is such a distinct character unto itself that I felt like I’d like to give this song its little place in the world. So, I started playing with the unreliable narrator and the loops and Hitchcock and shooting it like that because it’s all a metaphor for a marriage falling apart. Who’s really to blame? Is it the woman who was poisoning him? Or is it the man who has something to hide? And does he really have something to hide? Or is it all in her head? And then the two women together at the end. It’s kind of like wanting to sugarcoat the pill of all those big ideas by just really doing something suspenseful in these loops. Because the song also audibly is a loop that gets more intense as it goes along. The second verse is a bit more instrumented and layered and the third verse is much more lush so the song itself is a loop. I thought of Hitchcock’s mastery of “What happens next?” He was so good differentiating between surprise and suspense and how they are two different things.

There were moments of real emotion as we made it. When Jesca is crying in that out of focus shot, she’s really crying and there’s something about her crying — I was crying, the DP started crying, the whole crew started crying. There was something old and warm between us that she had taken it into her art form and then had handed it back. And then I had given it back in my art form, two friends that were sort of confiding in each other through their art, and supporting each other through their art.

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Interview: Office Christmas Party Directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck

Posted on December 7, 2016 at 8:00 am

Not since “Snakes on a Plane” has there been a movie title that so perfectly conjured up exactly the kind of entertaining chaos in store for viewers. Josh Gordon and Will Speck (“Blades of Glory,” “The Switch”) have a gift for wild comedy with a tender heart. In this story Jennifer Aniston plays Carol, a tough businesswoman (and martial arts expert) who is something between the Grinch and Scrooge, cancelling the Christmas party in the branch office run by her brother Clay (played by T.J. Miller) and threatening to shut down the office entirely and fire the staff. Clay and his top executive Josh (Jason Bateman) think that if they can woo a big client (Courtney B. Vance) by entertaining him at the party, they can save the office. The cast includes Olivia Munn, “Saturday Night Live” stars Vanessa Bayer and Kate McKinnon, “Fresh Off the Boat” star Randall Park. And it takes place in my hometown of Chicago with some locations I know well, including a stunt on the Clark Street Bridge. It was a lot of fun to talk to Gordon and Speck about the fun they had making the film.

I really enjoyed your Chicago locations.

JG: Will and I grew up sort of loving the same movies and a lot of them had actually been shot in Chicago, everything from “Risky Business” to “The Blues Brothers” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” so there’s something about the city. It has a character and a quality that really is like no other city, with a subversive sense of humor, and it looks great on film. So when we were developing the movie we knew we wanted to shoot it in Chicago and luckily the studio let us shoot there for a couple of weeks to really get all the exteriors. Then we based the sets on the old IBM building. The architect was Mies Van Der Rohe who built a lot of downtown Chicago in the 70.s and we just re-created basically that building.

I read that T.J. Miller agreed to be in the film without ever reading the script, just based on the title. Is that right?

JG: He did read it eventually. But we had worked together with him on a commercial campaign for Motorola a couple years before and had such a good working relationship and a good experience that based on that plus the idea of finding the character a little bit and the concept itself, he was eager to sign on.

He was one of a group of very skilled improvisers in your cast.

JG: Yes, we were really lucky with this cast. Everybody was our first choice. And when you get talent like that you don’t want them just to read the script three or four times and then move on to the scene. So we encourage improvisation and these guys are all kind of pros in it. TJ is a stand-up and obviously Jen and Jason are really good on their feet and so you go into the edit with many jokes as you can. There is a ton that we had to leave on the floor that actually will go into the extended cut.

It’s a fairly new idea, but over the past few years we have had a series of R-rated Christmas movies.

WS: We are an R but not a hard R. There’s some drugs in it and some nudity but for the most part we feel like it doesn’t go to a place that will make anyone uncomfortable. We love movies with a lot of grit and reality in a very ridiculous situation, like “Risky Business” and “Midnight Run,” movies that have the concept that is very funny but that are really grounded in the real world.

JG: And also movies that were well made. They weren’t just comedies; they had emotion and they made you invest in a story too. We wanted to make a movie that ultimately is a Christmas movie. It just arrives through an adult kind of tone but it’s really got a heart and a fun emotional center to it. It is really about Clay and it’s and around the idea that you spend most of your life working with your coworkers, who really are kind of like your other family and then one night a year, lubricated by alcohol, you meet them and it’s disastrous but there can be a breakthrough. So that was really important to us, to have both heart and comedy.

Yes, One of you said that this was comedy plus danger, which I presume is not just the physical danger but the danger of destroying your entire professional life by what can go on at a party like that.

WS: Yes or your office physically. Obviously there are a lot of different kinds of humor in the movie. There is a lot of physical comedy and a lot of verbal comedy. The thing about an office is it’s a very democratic moment when you have this office Christmas party and everybody has got a story to tell. We really wanted to tell all of those stories so the people watching the movie can really relate to it and find themselves in the movie. So there are a lot of great parts for women in the movie, from the CEO to the intern. We really wanted to look at every experience you could possibly could have at a Christmas party.

I love the diversity in the film. Was that a conscious decision?

WS: Yes, we wanted to change things up and give the actors a lot of opportunities where you don’t always see it. There is a character that is a pimp in the movie and we thought, “Let’s make her a women and not just go down the expected kind of thing you’ve seen five times before.” That’s really the exciting time that we’re in right now. Women have really proven themselves again and again in the comedy space, and so there are all these great people to pull from and we’re very excited about it.

In an ensemble movie like this where you have so many very, very strong performers, how do you give everybody their moment, their time onscreen and yet keep it cohesive?

JG: I think for the most part we follow the script, which has a very democratic structure where each character is sort of given their moment but it doesn’t feel that unbalanced. We try to be as much an ensemble movie as possible, so we wanted to give everybody their heroic moment and their funniest moment and not really feel like we were top-heavy or are favoring one energy over another. So I think at the end of the day we wanted to feel like a whole experience of a group of people versus just focusing on one storyline.

And you have worked with Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman before in “The Switch” and they have worked with each other in other films, too. Are you developing a repertory company? What does that bring to a movie when you have that relationship, that trust?

WS: Gosh we really hope so! We really love those guys. Jason is very much in Josh in his wheelhouse. He has a very subtle brand of comedy that brings a sort of gravity to our work. And Jennifer was just brave and funny and willing to do something really different from what we have done with her before which was more in the romantic comedy space. We worked a lot with her on her character. The one thing that we struggled with internally was we wanted her to be a strong CEO. We didn’t want to do that thing where you sort of say, “Oh she has no life and she wished that she had a relationship, that she had a family or a kid.” We wanted to stray away from some of the clichés of the powerful woman who has nothing to offer. So I think what we tried to do was dig into the idea of what was motivating her drive was very thought- out, which was her childhood, and the idea that you can actually be an overachieving kid and have a sibling who is kind of troubled and that sibling gets all the attention and it leaves you really wanting for the rest of your life and I think that’s what motivated her kind of evil. So we did talk a lot about how to balance the humanity in her and not have her be two-dimensional but also not have her a cliché with that role and try to have the warmth in her kind of sneak up on you as she is helping to sort of save Clay. But in the beginning after that first conference scene you get what drives her and she is not just mean.

We have also worked with Rob Corddry before and T. J. on the commercial campaigns. So we love collecting really smart and talented people and if we’re lucky enough to continue to work with them in the right way we absolutely will.

Did you collect a lot of stories from friends about disasters at office Christmas parties?

JG: It’s amazing when you say you are making a movie about an office Christmas party how many people come up to you and offer stories. So we just started collecting these stories and we wanted give the audience an experience that they expect, hitting all the things that you expect to see when you see this kind of movie but then also really taking the audience to unexpected places and surprising them.

What makes a successful office Christmas party?

JG: It depends on what you define as successful. I think for us it is always the typical stuff which is great music, great lighting and an open bar but I think that’s what is fun about the idea of the movie is that it can be just rife with danger. Office Christmas parties usually are really bland and when you have to actually use it to save your company and that’s the tool that you get in your quiver it’s really miserable.

WS: And by nature offices are places that are meant to repel real emotions and too much fun. They tend to be pretty dry places so as a theater to set a sort of raging party they usually don’t mix well, which is why I think they are so funny and why they are so rife with potential for a movie. We all set out to make the office Christmas party that we wish we did go to. Now we feel like we have.

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Interview: Kenneth Lonergan on “Manchester By the Sea”

Posted on November 18, 2016 at 3:28 pm

Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan spoke to a small group of journalists about his exquisite new film, “Manchester by the Sea,” starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, and Gretchen Mol. Affleck plays Lee, a man who is the guardian for his teenage nephew Lucas after his brother dies. He has difficulty adjusting because he is still dealing with a loss of his own.

It is not the usual Hollywood story of redemption and it includes some surprising humor, so we began by asking him how he developed the script.”I just try to be as strictly faithful to what I imagined it would really be like as possible and hope that that would give a ring of truth to it. It was a little bit of a special challenge with this story because he does go through some things that really no one should ever have to go through and nothing like that has ever happened to me, fortunately, and I wanted to be respectful of that and not rub people’s faces in it too much and not exploit it for sentimental value. I felt a little funny writing a story about this terrible thing that really happens to people so I wanted to treat it with some respect and some verisimilitude and part of that turned out to be including other things are happening too, like the fact that the kids life is totally different. He’s had a rough time, too, but he is very resilient. He is young and he has got a lot going on and there’s a lot of life bubbling up around Casey’s character that he is not a part of. The draft before last I think was a little too heavy, like a little too grim, a little relentless. I had shown Casey the script just to get his opinion and he agreed with me. So I didn’t take out anything but I added a little bit more, some other elements around Casey’s character. We’ve all had the experience. You walk out of a hospital room in terrible distress and a bunch of kids walk by and they are shouting and laughing or you walk by a couple having some idiot fight that you have had yourself many times and it’s just the whole different level of experience side-by-side with yours and that to me felt more like life than just being grim and heavy about everything, letting the grimness and heaviness affect the whole world of the movie.”

The movie trusts its audience to be patient and lets the information about what his going on and what has happened in the past come out gradually. We asked about the jigsaw-puzzle construction of the film. “The initial draft of the script wasn’t going too well. It was started before the accident, before the tragedy, it started at the beginning and it just went chronologically and I got bored very quickly so I started over. I’ve often done this when I don’t know what to do, I just throw out everything and I only leave what I really like. And the first thing that I liked was him a shoveling snow and doing his chores as a handyman. So that’s where I started and I had written all this material about what had happened to him in his past and when I brought that in later as flashbacks when he’s going home, that felt really full and good to me so that had a side benefit of creating a certain amount of suspense. Like what’s with them? What’s going on with him? And doling out the back story in sections I think creates a little bit of interest in what’s happening with him, what happened to him to make him so seemingly detached and strange. I figured if I can follow it, I figure the audience would be able to follow it. I’m not really, really good at guessing what people are going to like or what they’re going to be interested in and so I just to interest myself and hope and figure they will come along with me.”

Affleck gives a performance of enormous sensitivity. “He’s just great and I’ve always wanted to work with him. We’ve been looking for something to do together since 2002 and I just think he’s just a really special actor. I just love him everything he does. He’s just got this strange private inner life. You don’t quite know what’s going on with that but you are interested to find out. He’s really funny, he’s got an amazing depth, he is great to work with, he’s really thorough and it just breaks your heart to watch him I think in this movie.” Lee is not very expressive emotionally, a challenge for an actor. “It’s just too much, there’s more pain than a person can express or endure and every time I had him finally cracked , it felt false to me because I just don’t think he can afford to do that. I think it becomes undone after he gets himself beaten up and when he is sitting on the sofa crying, I think that’s the most he can do, kind of just let himself be undone, but I don’t think there is an eruption coming from him because it’s too much. He is warding off too much distress. So I think that’s why it just always felt like it was false to me or too on the nose or something. I mean early drafts of the script I had him pull over to the side of the road when he is driving to town and cry in the car and I was just like, ‘No, I would do that — I cry in commercials — but he is in a lot more pain than I am and he can’t afford to do that.'”

Michelle Williams, who has a small but memorable role as Lee’s ex-wife Randy, “does like to ask a lot of questions and I really like that because I like to try to answer the questions and I like to ask them myself. So we talked about the relationship when the marriage is going well, we talked about just generally sort of person she was, we talked a lot and she did a lot of work on her own about the difference between the present and the past for Randy, the past and the Randy in the present. She worked out all that stuff about her costume and her hair in consultation with me but she sent me photographs. Her haircuts might be sound like a superficial approach but this is someone whose life has been destroyed who’s starting over and stepping out. My idea about Randy is she is one of the pretty girls in high school but she really doesn’t care about that so she wears sweatpants and T-shirts, she’s got three kids, she doesn’t have time to like doll up and she has a great, really good relationship with her husband so she’s just lying in bed with a cold. And then we discussed that after her life is undone and she comes back she doesn’t have that kind of self-assurance anymore, so she is more nervous, so she needs a little bit more of armor when she goes out. So she gets her hair done, she wears makeup now and she has a nice coat and she’s just much less relaxed and that’s a real profound change based on a really devastating tragedy that she’s getting around but she’s also someone who is trying to start over and is able to do that, not that she’s going to be able to put it behind her but she’s at least able to move forward. So, it was great having those discussions with her because she is so creative and so thoughtful and so empathetic and she really worked so hard on these small scenes. She just shows up at a set and just gives it everything. And it was really freaky because we’d be working and Michelle would come and give it everything and go away and then we’d be working some more and then like two days later and give it all. I mean it’s very impressive, I love her.”

The city in the title is, as its name shows, on the ocean, and the water is important to the story. An early flashback scene shows Lee, his brother (Kyle Chandler) and his nephew having a lot of fun fishing on a boat. “The ocean doesn’t suddenly turn into mud when something bad happens to you. It is still very beautiful there. That’s one of the problems for Lee because he used to love it and now it’s agony for him. It’s also says something about the music that I think lifts the perspective of the movie a bit above the ground and maybe, to me it’s like you’re driving and you are focused and you don’t notice that there’s this big blue sky overhead and it is there and so occasionally you just see it again. I didn’t set out to do that but I think that’s one of the things the music does.”

He talked about the decision to have a resolution that is imperfect and messy, not the usual movie ending of hope and redemption. “I find people really responding to just that. There are a lot of good movies about that but we all know there are lot of really sickening sentimental movies about that that are essentially as fictional as lies, emotional lies. We all know that life doesn’t work like that. And I think it’s an insult to people’s intelligence to be preaching to them how they are not dealing with some tragedy properly. I think people are a little bit sick of that. When it’s done well it’s beautiful but when it’s done in the same old routinized sentimental way it’s kind of insulting. People go through really horrible stuff in life and I don’t think it’s so terrible to put some of it on the screen in a way that is truthful. People find that to be somewhat helpful to see your own experience reflected honestly by these performances makes people feels less isolated. I hope for that.”

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Interview: “Hacksaw Ridge” Mel Gibson, Luke Bracey, Vince Vaughn

Posted on November 6, 2016 at 8:00 am

Mel Gibson’s first film as a director in ten years is “Hacksaw Ridge,” the true story of Desmond Doss, a medic in WWII who showed extraordinary courage and devotion, returning over and over again to rescue 75 wounded men under enemy fire in a battle in Okinawa. I spoke to Gibson, and to Vince Vaughn and Luke Bracey, who play soldiers in the film.

The movie’s battle scenes are intentionally brutal. “I don’t think I glamorized war,” Gibson said. “I made it look hard and hopefully realistic, at least that’s what the Okinawa guys told us. There’s not many of them left but it was an experience for them. I think is not really a war film, it’s a love story because a guy went in there through filial love determined never to kill anyone or harm anyone and he kept putting his life on the line to save lives so this is the greatest act of love you could perform, to sacrifice yourself for someone else so it’s a love story. It just happens to be in the worst place on earth.

Vaughn spoke about the challenge of portraying a the sergeant who trains and then takes into battle Doss and his unit.

I have a lot of military in my family and have done a lot of things throughout the years with the USO, so I had a good point of reference for start. And then being in a unique situation playing a sergeant, that you are training a new unit and that you’re actually going to carry them over to the battlefield, you really are going to feel responsible for these kids. You have got a lot of love for them and your job is ready to prepare them to be able to go to their training and as much as possible not kind of freak out during battle and to stay alive for themselves and for their brothers in arms.

Look, you are preparing for war, so the penalty of not being up to the task is death of yourself or the people in the unit. That’s why I think there is a bit of sense of humor in some of it because you want to reach people. You can’t just come and make them tone deaf because you are screaming at them the whole time. I think like everyone has their own unique way of doing it so I think there are moments when you are really hard, you are trying to get your point across to let them know what’s at stake and your intents. And then there is other times when you try to use it a little bit of a sense of humor to try to get them to laugh and to bring them together. And I think that this presents a unique situation. Here is a gentleman who is refusing to carry a gun. You just have to understand that from a military point of view this is close quarter battles you see the depiction of it in the movie, to be in a foxhole at night, sleeping with somebody and them on watch and someone approaches and they don’t have the means to defend themselves, then obviously no one would want to be in that situation. And I think made the true story and what is so powerful about Desmond is he had such a faith such a conviction and a calling and it really transcended the moment. There is something beautiful in that and I think that when you are true to your convictions and you do stay true to what you believe in, not only are you rewarded but actually everyone else around you is rewarded as well and I think you see that resonate in the film.

Bracey talked about the “intense physical aspect to this stuff especially, the battle scenes. You spend about two months filming that stuff and I think preparation for me it was obviously very physical but not just getting in shape. There is a mental aspect to the physical side in that commitment to everything you are doing. If you take the right attitude towards it you can really tolerate it in a positive way where you can try not to give up and everything you do, you know it’s going to hurt but you know there’s so much left to go as well so I enjoyed that aspect of it, and also just kind of delving into what is a man as well. At what point does a man goes from telling another a man to harden up to the point where can empathize with him.”

Filmmaking technology has changed very rapidly, and Gibson appreciated being able to take advantage of lighter, faster cameras and better special effects.

In the old days you had two stops either way for light but now it’s infinite and you can turn day into night with no problem. You can blow frames up without any loss of quality, you can flop the shot. I mean it’s just crazy what you can do with colors and the color palette. So technologically things really advanced and you can move pretty fast and shoot from the hip but I would say filmwise, in the world of films there are restrictions if you want to make an independent film and this is an independent film. So your budgets are restricted, you have less time to do it. This is a superhero movie so don’t get me wrong, but if he’s not wearing spandex you don’t get the budget.

A lot of things had to come together to make the image happen on screen. The thing with combat or war sequences on screen is it that they have to be clear, so clarity is required but within that wider framework of clarity, almost like a sporting or chess game, you have to have a strategy that is at least readable but it has to look like chaos amidst that. So in order for all the pyrotechnics, and the stunts and bullet hits and the camera guys, the actors, the extras, the stunts guys, everything, a lot of things have to come together so that you can catch it all on the screen so that logistically speaking little bit like juggling a few balls at the same time. But there’s a lot of people doing it. You don’t do these things alone and it’s really about synchronizing the departments, the various departments to come together to really get that image that you want. And after that the special effects that was great afterwards. But the earmark of great special effects is when you can’t see them. You don’t know what the practical stuff is from the stuff that you do afterwards. There’s both — there’s a lot of practical stuff like some 800 shots I think where they are special effects. I mean there’s muzzle flashes and tracers and dirt hits and stuff like that that were put in afterwards that really add so much. So technically speaking it’s a real scheduling juggling match.

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