Cue the Dinosaurs: Editing Via Satellite

While “Schindler’s List” is quite an involving movie for Steven Spielberg, he has also been adding final touches to “Jurassic Park” during his stay in Poland--thanks to satellite technology.

“About three times a week, I come home from making ‘Schindler’s List’ and suddenly I’m approving dinosaur shots and listening to the (“Jurassic”) score,” he said, a little ruefully.

“I’m still working on special effects. I have a huge satellite dish in the front yard of this small hotel I’m in, which bounces from Poland to D.C. to San Francisco.”

Post-production work on the special effects is being done at George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic in San Rafael, just outside San Francisco.

“The satellite transmission is scrambled on both ends,” Spielberg explained, “so nobody can pick up on the feed, and I go right to Industrial Light and Magic.

“I see a picture of all my friends there. They all wave, say hi, then run the film to go over with them and make changes. An hour later, John Williams calls and sends me his scoring over the DAT (digital audio tape) dish. We’ve got the music fitted on large speakers here, so it’s like I’m at the scoring session. This is when it’s evening in Poland and daytime in America.”

Spielberg is also flying from Poland to Paris over three straight weekends to work on post-production of “Jurassic Park.” He says he has never worked so hard--and given the wildly differing nature of the two films, finds the experience “culturally dislocating.

“It was because I didn’t want to miss winter in Poland,” he said. “We got snow when we started shooting ‘Schindler’s List,’ and we don’t finish till early June, so we get the changing of the seasons. That meant doing post-production work on “Jurassic Park” here, or waiting a year.”

“My cut of ‘Jurassic Park’ is locked and finished but a lot of other work--scoring, correcting color, approval of special effects and mixing of tracks--has to be done over the satellite, or by me in Paris in a dubbing room.”

He characterized his workload as “an unusual set of circumstances, and all my own doing. I don’t regret it, but I spend two hours on ‘Jurassic Park,’ and it takes a while to get back into ‘Schindler’s List.’ A good night’s sleep helps. I’m lucky I have my family with me (wife Kate Capshaw and their children). If they weren’t here, I probably wouldn’t have done it.”