Obviously there has been a lot of talk about the very complex effects work for Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci. How did that work impact the picture editing?

We could not do the de-aging until we got very close to a fine cut. It was a process that [visual effects supervisor] Pablo Helman at ILM developed very slowly after working with us on “Silence” (2016).

Pablo knew that Marty wanted to make this movie without casting younger actors to play the younger versions of De Niro, Pesci, and Pacino. Marty didn’t think that was going to work.

Pablo developed this system and convinced us with many tests that he did long before shooting started. The big difference was not having a person wear a helmet with two small cameras attached to them by their chin that is all over their faces. There is no way these actors—who are some of the great improvisers in the world—would work that way.

What was great was that Pablo had two 3D infrared lenses on either side of Marty’s lens and those are tracking the actors’ movement. From that point on, Pablo would send us every week a bunch of shots, and we would look at them and ask him to make changes here and there.

Sometimes we found we were losing the performance if too much had been taken out of an actor’s face and we put some of it back in. All in all, it was an excellent process and freed up the actors to just behave the way they normally would.

Sometimes they were wearing a few dots on their face or metal clips on their clothes to track their movements. Actually we screened the film quite a bit with them not de-aged and nobody minded, which was really astounding. I think they were so gripped by the performances. The actors were wearing no makeup at all in the shots they were being de-aged because that would make it too difficult.

Were there some instances with the visual effects, where you had to make editing choices to lessen or downplay the importance of that technology, so it didn’t overwhelm the emotional content of a scene?