ARCHIVE: Cheating Death
John Lyons knew director Boaz Yakin from years ago on Uptown Girls. “I was on vacation in Woodstock, Labor Day weekend,” Lyons recalls. He said, ‘I want my film in Sundance, can you start Tuesday?’”
Yakin was shooting in NY and when Lyons showed up day one there were hours of footage sitting in the production office that no one had seen. No assistant on the film. Lyons thought he’d start digitizing, but the sound recordist still had all the sound on his PD6. So Lyons started digitizing picture—there really was no time to wait.
He also went to work on some elements that Yakin needed to show on televisions in various scenes, including a porn movie that would have to look like porn but not be porn. Yakin had a tape in mind, so Lyons recut it to suit. Next Lyons started cutting the thing together based on what he thought were Yakin’s selects. I would get to points where we wouldn’t have the shot, I’d call him and he was shooting so he wouldn’t call me back.” Turns out the “selects” were just the script supervisors notes. Lyons was relieved that he didn’t have to cobble the film together without the takes he needed, but he had also pretty much wasted his time.
So now they really were under the gun. “My goal was to cut and complete 5 minutes of film a day,” Lyons says. Holed up in Yakin’s pool house/shed, they worked 7 days a week, 14 hours a day on the dark, difficult film. “Boaz’ sense of storytelling is brilliant, but there was a learning curve with him. I had to get used to how sharp some of the transitions needed to be. There were things in the script I couldn’t see how they could work, but then when I would see the dailies it made sense.
“This is a very hard story, and it has never been screened for an audience (it premieres tomorrow). “I have a feeling that’s a very powerful piece of material, but not everyone will respond to it positively because it’s so brutally honest about some things—especially about male depression—and I thin that will turn people off.” Lyons also knows that any audience for the film will have to survive the opening sequence that juxtaposes modern day sex scenes with recreations of Nazi human experiments. Lyons himself expected to have trouble with that, but says he was amazed to see it work.
“Cutting an entire feature in 7 weeks was hard,” he recalls. “The HDCAM-shot footage had a tape to tape DI at Duart and mastered to HD. That meant Lyons worked almost exclusively with raw, washed out, pre-colored footage. Duart in NY. Telecined the negative to HD files, then HD tape, HD tape conform, da Vinci tape to tape. “If it worked washed out and hideous it was going to work when it was finished,” he says simply
Death in Love premieres tomorrow (6:15) at the Eccles and screens Wednesday (11:30a) at the Library, Friday (9pm) at the Sundance resort and in SLC at the Broadway Centre Saturday (4:30p). Click here for theater info
