I loved working on the film. It was as simple, in a certain sense, as it can possibly be. It was just me and Mark [Levinson] in a single room. He was the director of the film, but he was also my assistant editor. And we both had Final Cut workstations. And I would be working away. And we would screen the film. We did many, many screenings of the film, which – for audience – which I think was an invaluable part of, certainly, this film, because in a film about physics, we also had to explain some of the physics. Why do these people care about any of this stuff? Why are they spending $10 billion on this machine?
So a certain amount of the physics had to be incorporated into the film, but it was clear that we had to be very careful about how much physics we dosed out, and when we did it, and there's a limit to people's attention on that stuff; they very quickly get their cup runneth over very quickly if they're not physicists. So audience screenings for a film like this were very important.
And it was very clear, when we showed the film at any one screening, 'Okay, this... in this screening, we've run away from the audience. They... we lost them.' And once you lose an audience in a film about mathematics or physics, you never get them back. They just... even though subsequent scenes may be perfectly understandable, they feel – correctly or not, but that's how they feel – 'I didn't understand that, therefore, I won't understand anything else.' And so we had to be very careful about how we... that was the principal challenge of the film.
