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§MA/MSc in Film and Television Production with SoundApply now for 2020york.ac.uk/tfti/study/postgraduateONE YEAR MASTERS
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§MA/MSc in Film and Television Production with Visual E ectsTheatre, Film, Television
and Interactive MediaMOVIEMAKER.COM SPRING 2020 2710 others, so that I can form
this movie and edit it out in
post.” In this case if we decided
to get all that extra coverage,
we just wouldn’t have made our
night, and therefore we couldn’t
have had our movie.
We blocked more, we
prepped more, and above all
we cast the right people. All of
the actors were all in on this
approach. I’ve had other actors
on other projects who were not
ready for the sort of approach
I just described: this moving
of the performance carefully
to the place that it needs to
be. And I’ve had collaborators
that wanted me to hire actors
that were not right for the
goal. The number one goal is
finding the right people and
not compromising. We had to
push our shooting dates twice
in order to get the right actor to
play Fay and here we are years
later, and I’m so glad that I
stood my ground on that—that
we didn’t compromise and go
with anyone other than Sierra
McCormick.
If I boil it down to one
objective, we wanted something
that could exist across multiple
mediums. So in twenty years,
it would be cool to see this as
a play. We wanted to be able todo something that in five years
could be turned into a graphic
novel or a radio play. That’s
something that was done a lot
in the ’40s. You have a movie
that was popular like
The Third Man, and then
the same actors who play their
part come in, and they make
a 60-minute radio play of it.
We wanted something that
can move around, to feel like it
was multiple things. Sometimes
when people come at
The Vast of Night and critique it,
they’ll say this film would have
made a better podcast,
or a better radio play, than
a movie. That’s more of a
compliment to me than a
critique. I like the idea that you
could fire up this movie on your
phone, put it in your pocket
on your commute to work, and
have an exciting experience just
hearing what’s coming through
your headphones. The bold
choices, like cutting to black
and letting characters tell long
stories, were formed by the idea
that we wanted it to oftentimes
feel like it was a radio play. MMThe Vast of Night premieres
on Amazon Prime Video on
May 29, 2020.