Justin Lin Works 16 Hours a Day on STAR TREK BEYOND

Last week, entertainment writer Logan Hill spoke to the Sitting Around Talking Movies podcast about his recent visit into the STAR TREK BEYOND editing offices, where he met with director Justin Lin and saw some of the work the editing team is doing on the upcoming film.

One of the more interesting points is how much time Lin is pouring into the next Trek film, spending most of every weekday on the project. (One clarification: “Turning projects around quickly,” in the context of the interview, refers to the compressed production timeline.)

Justin Lin works really fast. He’s got a reputation in the business [as a director] who can turn massive projects around very, very quickly. He works from nine in the morning to two AM in the [editing] office, five days a week. Dude doesn’t sleep.

I’ve talked to actors who’ve been on set with him and they said that he would show up on set, he’d film all day – and at nine o’clock everybody’d go out to dinner, [but Lin] would go into the editing bay and sleep. He’s one of these guys that does REM cycle sleep, so he either sleeps an hour and a half or three hours a night, never more when he’s on set.

He’d be editing [that day’s] sequences every night to make sure he got what he needed… He would stay up all night editing because if you don’t get [any needed] stuff the next day – with a cast like that that’s so big and has so many missing parts – you miss it.

Hill also had a peek at some of the still-in-progress visual effects process, which are often being massaged up to just a few weeks before films hit theaters.

[Lin] likes to have a lot of things going on, so he splits his team up and have [editors] in three or four different rooms working on different scene visually; three or four rooms working on the sound… they had a rough cut set.

He is such a meticulous guy that he is getting in there, looking at the thrusters on the back of the Enterprise and saying, “The housing on that thruster looks too old-fashioned, it’s too rigid, can we smooth it out?”

I also saw some stuff that was in the early stages of designing ships and things. Like, when you’d see those big scenes of a city, they design every single ship, saying things like, “Oh, that’s not going to contrast great, that grey ship isn’t going to [show] against the grey background. Let’s change the color.”

You know, any time you go to a set like this, obviously they’re trying to show their best stuff, since you’re only there for a day, so I’m not seeing the messiest [unfinished effects].

I saw some stuff that was nearly finished, that looked spectacular.

The full interview with Hill, which also contains spoilers for 10 Cloverfield Lane, Midnight Special, and American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ Simpson, can be found here.