By Iain Blair

Heart of the Beast, a new film from David Ayer, is an adventure drama that reunites the director with his Fury star Brad Pitt. Set in Alaska, it tells the survival story of retired Special Forces officer James Belmont (Pitt) and his combat dog, Odin (Uber), who find themselves stranded after Belmont suffers a heart attack and his small plane crashes deep in the wilderness. Together, they are forced into a fight for survival against the elements, bears and wolves.

We talked to Ayer — whose credits include such films as Training Day, Fury, Sabotage, Harsh Times, End of Watch, S.W.A.T.  and Suicide Squad — about making the film and his love of editing and post.

What were the main tech challenges of pulling this together? Was everything shot on location?
It was incredibly challenging because we shot nearly all of it on location in New Zealand, which doubled for Alaska. The government was very gracious and allowed us to film in some very remote areas where no film crew had been before. So there were situations where we had to bring in equipment by helicopter and times when grip and electric had to pack equipment on their backs. We had to create our own roads, figure out how to get generators and lights in, shoot, and then pack up all the gear and get everything out, leaving no evidence we were ever there. So it was a case of walking softly and shooting very specifically.

The film has big set pieces, such as the plane crash and the wolf fight. What did prep involve? Did you do a lot of previz?
Absolutely. It’s interesting because it was a combination of both shooting in an almost documentary style, just getting in there with the cameras and getting the scenes, but also dealing with a lot of technical issues. The plane crash, the river crossing on the log and the wolf fight were incredibly technical scenes to stage and shoot, so we did a lot of storyboarding and previz. And then I’d do the storyboards again and do stunt-viz and rehearsal. I think the real testament to what we all did is the fact that you can’t see all the technical stuff that makes those scenes work.

How early on did you have to start integrating all the visual effects and post in general?
Not that early. For the wolf fight, we actually created fake wolves and wolf puppets for the shoot and dressed up stunt people to represent the animals, which we then later recreated with VFX. It can be a little difficult to work like that on the day, but Brad did an amazing job of just reacting to the puppets on-set and being in the reality of the movie. But with anything like that, it then takes a very long time and a lot of work in post with VFX and all the other elements to make it really look amazing.

You’re known for your immersive style of filmmaking, but even by your standards, the shoot must have been incredibly hard.
It was very difficult. We spent a lot of time in helicopters doing a lot of scouting. Sometimes we helicoptered into a remote location, kicked the equipment out, and the helicopter went away, and you just hoped it would come back later. We also had to deal with a lot of water and underwater photography, especially for the plane crash sequence, which we staged in a tank. I like to operate the camera, so I was running up and down hills with a camera on my shoulder, trying to keep up with Brad and keep him in frame. It was all a real challenge. On top of that, we had to deal with the elements, as we had lightning, rain, storms and then some stunning, beautiful weather. So we really made the environment — and the sheer difficulty of the shoot — all part of what you’re seeing onscreen.

I know from talking to you in the past that you love to shoot a lot of film. Did you also shoot a lot on this?
Yes, a lot. The challenge was that we didn’t have a lot of time left after getting to the remote locations, loading in all the gear and then setting up the camera. Despite all that, I think we had about 70 setups a day, but I didn’t have a lot of takes. After two or three takes, I had to move on, and it became all about shooting very precisely and then knowing when I had the shot.

Where did you do the post?
At Paramount’s post facility on the lot, and we had a very extensive post process – it all took over a year in the end. I love post, and the editing was really interesting because there’s nowhere to cut away to. It’s such a simple story. It’s Brad, his dog and the environment. The land became another character, so it took a lot of work to make that simplicity really satisfying, complex and enduring.

Talk about working with editor Dody Dorn, who’s cut several of your films, including Fury and Sabotage. Did she come to New Zealand?
She didn’t come to New Zealand, but she’d get dailies and start doing an assembly. She’s someone I adore working with. She has an ability to just get into the dailies and constantly find surprises. She’s incredibly methodical. I think any great editor is obviously very organized, and she’s one of the most organized people I know. She comes from a sound editing background, which is interesting because she’ll build the scene out almost from a sound perspective first and then find the images that support that story. It’s really fascinating to watch how she works.

What were the main editing challenges?
A lot of it was dealing with the dog’s eyelines, and it was a very quick shoot, and I was running multiple cameras. With any given setup, there are three cameras, and I operate and consider my camera the emotional camera, while A and B cameras are more objective cameras. In the edit, you’re dealing with a lot of footage and then all the blocking and movement, and you’re looking for that connection in a scene between Brad and the dog and then finding Brad’s performance.

Brad was a real lighthouse in post. He really understood his character, James, better than any of us. He knew every take, every eyeline, everything he did. It’s kind of amazing. Then you’d go into the dailies and, sure enough, what he was asking for on the set was there. He was an incredible help in finding James and his relationship and bond with the dog.

What was the most difficult scene to edit and why?
I would say the wolf fight. We were on a stage for that; we recreated the location forest with seamless artwork, and then we had a lot of telemetry for the VFX work. Again, the New Zealand crews are absolutely incredible at dealing with so much blocking, so much action and so much choreography in a scene like this. Brad had learned all of this fight choreography and he didn’t want to be doubled. I think there are only a couple of shots in the whole sequence that use a stunt double. I know he was pretty beat up from our work out in the woods and in the mountains, so creating and editing something like that to match all the location footage was a meticulous and precise process that took quite a while.

Talk about working on the sound design and the mix.
We mixed at Warner’s Post, where I usually do it. Our supervising sound editor/sound designer, Laurent Kossayan, and his team did an incredible job. We went with a nontraditional sound mix, and every sound in the film, every sound effect, was specifically curated, right down to finding the right sounds for the trees and leaves, the right wind sound, the right footfall sound. Even for the Foley, we kept going back again and again and having them re-record stuff.

I’m incredibly proud of the soundscape. It’s incredibly scripted, incredibly specific and laid out. The power of the mix to create cinema never ceases to amaze me. It’s that final element where everything comes alive.

What about the visual effects? What were the big sequences?
The dramatic sequence where they cross the tree bridge over the river gorge was very tricky. There’s a gorgeous river in New Zealand, the Arahura, that was the perfect location for the scene because it has sheer rock cliffs and white waterfalls. But it was far too dangerous to use, so we had a very large gorge and river set built at Auckland Film Studios and then built the tree bridge.

We had cranes for safety cables, rocks and moss below, and then we did set extensions. We were fortunate enough to be allowed to take a drone down and record the real river. The methodology we used was to take the actual river photography and use the real landscape along with CG set extensions to create comps for the shots. It was wildly technical, and the fact that it’s seamless and invisible to most people is a testament to the post crew we had.

VFX supervisor François Dumoulin, who did Barbie and Dune, also did a great job with all the animals they encounter, including a grizzly bear, a moose and a pack of wolves, which were all VFX. We had a lot of vendors [including Framestore, Rodeo FX, Crafty Apes, Bot VFX, Soho VFX, Day For Nite and Rebels].

Framestore was our primary vendor for the wolf fight, which was another huge VFX sequence. It took endless attention to create all the details, lighting, focal playing, fur modeling and movement, and then each wolf was its own character. They had names, and we knew all their choreography. We were taking a stage environment and CG animals and then reverse-engineering it, constantly asking ourselves how to put the audience in the middle of a primally terrifying wolf fight and make it real and truthful. I’m very proud of how that came out.

Then the scene with the aurora borealis was all VFX, and again, everything you see took a lot of development. The movie is so simple and primal and honest and locked into the natural environment, and it was incredibly difficult to create imagery that didn’t break that aesthetic. That was a big part of why we had such a long post process, as every frame was so fine-tuned.

I know you love the color grading process. What was involved?
We shot on a lot of different cameras, including 16mm, HD and then VHS for the flashback war scenes. But the main camera was the ARRI 35, which right now is my favorite digital camera because it has 14 stops of dynamic range, so it really approximates film. I like a well-exposed negative. There’s a trend now where everybody just underexposes, and then you don’t have any data on the bottom shoulder. I like to see into the shadows. I don’t like these sorts of holes in the negative. I want to feel everything.

My DP, Mauro Fiore, who’s just incredibly gifted and has a long history of shooting on film — he shot Training Day for me, and he was the gaffer on Schindler’s List — has a very nuanced understanding of light. He would do these amazing things on-set, such as using a special light-green bounce card because you’re in the forest, and so the light coming off the trees is going to have that green cast. Dealing with all of that is a lot more difficult visually than I think people understand… because of the natural environment, the greens, the browns, the warm sunlight and the polychromatic lighting scheme. It was a lot to handle.

We did it at Company 3 with colorist Jill Bogdanowicz. Getting all the visual effects shots and everything into the same LUT and the same color space took an immense amount of work. But we didn’t spend a lot of time with Power Windows, as you can often do when you’re chasing a look and trying to fix something that’s broken, and you have 20 Power Windows going. Mauro was very meticulous with every camera, every shot and every setup, making sure exposures and apertures were all set correctly. Then on-set, we had a lot of references and really tried to get things dialed in as much as possible in the photography so that after all that, it was just a lot of fine-tuning in the DI.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.