His job is to make things look the way the director wants them to look, which on one occasion involved spending days slicing thousands of tiny rubber hairs off a set of Mercedes tires.
It turns out all tires come with these little hairs, “vent spews,” which ensure that all the air is expelled when the tire is formed. But new, perfect tires—the most perfect tires you could buy in real life—wouldn’t be ideal tires in HD, because they wouldn’t match what we think we see when we look at tires. What we think we see would have a completely sleek, smooth surface, even from very, very close up. Hence the hair-slicing.
