by Bob Fisher
from American Cinematographer, November 1993
In an untested working relationship between a director and a cinematographer, participants hope to feel an elusive "click". According to Allen Daviau, ASC, "you simply know it." "Peter and I had never had a conversation before this film," says Daviau of his most recent collaborator, director Peter Weir. "But I knew him like an old friend through his films. When I heard he wanted to talk about a script, I didn't ask what it was about. I just said I wanted to shoot it."
Daviau has worked with some of the industry's top visual stylists, including Steven Spielberg, Barry Levinson, John Schlesinger and George Miller. In 1982, for E.T. - The Extraterrestrial, Daviau earned his first Oscar nomination, and has since been nominated for Avalon, The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun and Bugsy. In addition, Daviau became the first cinematographer to win the ASC Outstanding Achievement Award for features twice (for Empire of the Sun and Bugsy). Empire also earned Daviau a BAFTA Award. With Fearless, Daviau adds to the list Peter Weir, another director with a reputation for creating memorable images.
Weir's credits include The Year of Living Dangerously, Gallipoli, Witness, The Mosquito Coast and Dead Poets Society. Like his other films, these pictures all strive to examine the human condition via graphic and unforgettable visuals. Fearless fits the same mold. The movie is based on a book authored by Rafael Yglesias, who also wrote the script.
Set in contemporary times, the tale begins at the site of a plane crash, where Max (Jeff Bridges) and Carla (Rosie Perez) are among the handful of survivors. Max is an upscale architect with a beautiful wife (Isabella Rossellini) and an 11 year-old son. Carla and her handy-man husband, meanwhile, live on the outer fringes of the lower middle class. Despite these differences in social strata, Max and Carla find their lives becoming inextricably intertwined in the days and weeks after the crash.
Daviau says that one of his joys in preparing for Fearless was exploring Weir's body of work. Images from many of Weir's films were buried in the recesses of his visual memory, but he watched them again, seeking insights into the director's unique way of thinking. Daviau was particularly intrigued by Weir's '70s output, including The Last Wave and Picnic at Hanging Rock; he marvelled at how well the characters suited the landscapes.
Daviau and Weir screened a number of other films together, including Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. "I wanted Peter to see it on a big screen, because we talked a lot about placing actors in proper environments," Daviau says. "This is a very good example of a film that builds its strength with an accumulation of details over a period of time. Antonioni put his main characters into a remarkable variety of backgrounds, which helps the audience understand the deterioration of their relationships."
Like every film Daviau has photographed since E.T., Fearless is composed in the Academy standard 1:85:1 aspect ratio, with a hard matte used to protect the image for the 1.66:1 format typically used in Europe.
"We discussed my preference for shooting this way, and Peter agreed," Daviau says. "I know there are excellent cinematographers who don't feel the same way, and I concede that you can record crisp pictures with today's anamorphic lenses. But I still have serious doubts about the sharpness of the projected anamorphic images in many theaters."
In simple terms, he wants the audience to see the movie the way it is captured on film. Daviau and Weir even discussed the pros and cons of shooting certain sequences seen through Max's eyes on 65mm film, but eventually rejected the idea after a series of tests indicated that because of the optical steps involved in reducing to 35mm, there wasn't enough difference in image quality to justify the cost and trouble. Nonetheless, Daviau was pleased with Weir's willingness to experiment. He instead managed to set the scenes apart by "lighting objects to give them more texture, shooting in more extreme crosslight so that image contrast heightened the impact."
The director and cinematographer had their first discussions about the script during the spring of 1992. "We agreed that image clarity was the critical issue," Daviau says. "I like images that are open and that speak very clearly photographically. This film is often a study of faces and eyes. Peter is very respectful of the power of close-ups. He speaks about that topic very eloquently, stating that even painters can't equal the power of the motion picture close-up. We often came in a lot tighter than you normally see on close-ups, often using Jeff's eyes to pull the audience into scenes."
Daviau is quick to note that the clarity of which he speaks is not the same as mere image sharpness: "By clarity, I mean that the audience can read the pictures immediately; we draw their eyes to exactly where we want them to look. The longer I shoot, the more I understand the range of subtleties you can build into close-ups. There are so many techniques; you can make the actors attractive or compelling. By putting an eye highlight in a certain spot, you pull the audience right to that spot on the screen.
"I borrowed something from every film I ever shot on this project," he adds. "I used a lot of hard light on Bugsy, particularly for shading parts of faces. For the most part, we worked with softer sources on this film, but my gaffer, Larry Wallace, and my key grip Michael Kenner, controlled light in ways that allowed us to do some very subtle shadowing on faces."
Daviau notes that Weir is the first feature film director he has worked with who likes using the zoom lens. "He sees it as a legitimate tool," says Daviau. "Sometimes we disguised it. At other times it was blatant, depending on what felt right. Maybe we'd do a little subtle movement with dolly grip Jim Shelton, and then we would blend a zoom into it at the end. I noticed that Peter used that technique on The Last Wave and other films. But I was never conscious of it until we did it ourselves."
Daviau points out that there was a period in film history when zooms were used commonly and very effectively, citing John Alcott's work on Barry Lyndon. "But it was often overused in television, and people backed off," he says. "If a zoom is used tastefully, it can be a powerful emotional tool."
Fearless didn't start shooting until September 1992, and completed production in early December. Initially, New York was going to be the venue, but Weir decided the settings weren't right and shifted production to San Francisco.
"I scouted locations with [production designer] John Stoddart, Rafeal (Yglesias), Peter and Wendy (Weir's wife, who served as a visual consultant)," Daviau says. "Peter made it clear that he wanted to avoid visual cliches typical of 'postcard photography' of the city. There aren't any cable cars or scenes shot from the bottoms of steep hills. He wanted to shoot in the highest parts of the city, looking down. The landscape is obviously San Francisco, but we showed it in a different way. Peter wanted the aura of a Mediterranean seaside community."
The crew shot in San Francisco for six weeks, almost entirely at practical locations, including restaurants, office buildings, and a ferry. Despite the emphasis on close-ups, Daviau points out that the use of environments to help establish characters is a patented visual signature for Weir.
The basic imaging tools used by Daviau were non-exotic. He did most of his filming with a Panaflex Platinum camera, often with the new 11:124-275mm Primo zoom lens. He added a Tiffen ProMist filter and an occasional net to soften the image. Almost all exteriors were recorded on the EXR 250T film 5293, and interiors were shot with the 500T 5296. He filmed the crash site with 5248 to set it apart visually.
As is his normal practice, Daviau shot a series of film tests. His preference for using the EXR 5293 for most exteriors had more to do with the rich saturation of colors than with relative speed (compared to the 100-speed 5248 film). "I felt it was right for the San Francisco exterior look, and after viewing the tests, Peter agreed," he comments.
Conversely, he opted for the 5296 film for interiors, mainly because he wanted a little less saturation - in addition to the extra stop - in those scenes. Occasionally, he used the 93 stock on interiors and pushed a little more light into the scene, especially when he wanted certain colors to stand out.
Basically, the look in San Francisco was more saturated than the crash scene, filmed in Bakersfield, or sequences shot in Los Angeles. "Actually, there wasn't much exterior Los Angeles footage," he says, "and that included some night exteriors which were actually set in San Francisco."
Of their approach to camera movement, Daviau says, "Our operator, Paul Babin, worked carefully to keep camera movement organic with that of the cast, whether he was working with dollies, cranes or the remote head. He was a constant source of ideas that kept the images fresh and compelling."
The visual inspiration for the film's post-crash scenario came from the stark TV news coverage of a real-life plane crash in an Iowa cornfield several years ago. The movie appropriates the cornfield setting for its dreamlike first shots, which track a group of people wandering through the maze of stalks.
"It's a magnificent location around an actual farm," says Daviau. "John Stoddart, the designer, had a greensman plant and raise the corn, so it was exactly what he envisioned. He also decorated the site with actual sections of wrecked planes. With the smoke, dust, debris and sirens, we all felt as though we were present at an actual crash."
The audience views the scene through the eyes of a dispassionate spectator wandering effortlessly through the cornfield. The camera comes upon a highway, where a jagged and twisted piece of the airplane's tail blocks the road. We see Max, carrying an infant, wandering out of the wreckage as a dazed young boy follows in his wake. After leaving the boy with a rescue team, Max searches for the child's mother. Carla is first seen being carried out of the ruins, screaming for her missing baby. A violent explosion interrupts her cries, and the plane section is quickly consumed by flames. Larry McConkey's Steadicam captures telling details of inanimate objects hurled from the wreckage.
Cut back to Max, who still appears neat and surrealistically untouched. Max eventually locates the baby's mother; unexpectedly, it is not Carla . Afterwards, he taxis to a hotel, where he showers and dresses as if it's an ordinary day. As he peers into the bathroom mirror, however, it is clear that Max is beginning to ask why he survived.
The moment is a point of departure for a journey into the souls of Max and Carla and the nexus of the story. Through a series of events, it becomes evident that their previous lives have become a kind of nether world, where their former values have no meaning. Both of them see the world differently, and the only way to understand their feelings would be to get inside their skins.
Weir and Daviau achieved the effect through the inclusion of vivid flashbacks. In a recreation of the moments leading up to the crash, for example, the plane suddenly begins making a fearsome rattling noise. Max leaves his business partner to comfort the boy who later follows him off the plane, perhaps saving himself in the process. Editor William Anderson pieced together a montage of images of Max comforting the boy and getting him positioned to survive the crash. Those images are blended with visions of the plane crumpling, burning and falling apart on impact.
To shoot that scene, the airplane set was on special effects supervisor Ken Pepio's gimballed rig 20 feet above the stage floor. "The crash happens between 10 and 11 a.m„ when the sun is high in the sky," Daviau recounts. "I checked it out on flights between Los Angeles and San Francisco at that time of day. Purist that I am, I wanted virtually all of the light to come through small windows. Banks of nine lights above, below, and straight into the windows gave us that realistic look. Also, subtle use of streams of liquid nitrogen propelled past the windows by air movers mottled the light source, adding to the feeling of movement.
The main camera was placed on a Chapman Lenny arm or key grip Michael Kenner's overhead dolly rig, which allowed the floor to be kept clear. Babin also shot a great deal of handheld P.O.V. footage, using camera movement to provide the impression of additional vibration in the falling plane.
A key to the success of the sequence was anticipating how Anderson was going to piece all of the footage together. In addition to the master shot in the narrow set, there were the many cutaways made with the handheld camera. Daviau made some use of the Introvision projection process for these P.O.V. shots looking out of the windows. As the plane comes down, the camera captures the cornfield flying by, with glimpses of smoke and flames here and there. Daviau also used a painted backing, and in some cases just showed the audience the burned- out sky through the windows, depending upon the angle of the plane. All of this serves to create an illusion of movement; the plane seems to be diving, even though it is on a stationary rig.
The Introvision process, supervised by Bill Mesa, was used for several other shots that were elements of the crash, and also for a remarkable scene where Max appears to be walking around the ledge of a 12-story building. "In this case, Introvision cost less than blue screen, and Bill could show us what we were shooting through the viewfinder," Daviau says. "Bill Mesa makes special effects magic seem so simple."
There is also a brief "digital cinematography" sequence. During a scene in which Max is dreaming, we see the rapid eye movements behind his clenched lids, and the shot ends with an incredibly tight composition isolated on just one ear. The move is choreographed with sounds of the plane struggling to survive, allowing the audience to enter Max's dream. Examining the shot later, Daviau noted that Bridges' ear was noticeably more orange than the skin tones in the rest of the scene.
In the past, this defect would have been in the finished film. "It would have been a nightmare to fix that optically," he says.
"But it was quick and easy to fix digitally, because you can be selective in correcting just part of the image without affecting other colors in the same frame."
The cinematographer employed a digital postproduction technique originally intended to serve the needs of visual effects practitioners. The specific frames where the ear was discernibly orange were scanned and converted to digital picture files at the Cinesite digital film center, in Burbank. A Cineon scanner was used to transfer the analog images on film to digital picture files; each frame translated into 40 megabytes of binary information. The digital pictures were displayed on high-resolution color monitors which are balanced to match the eventual screening room result accurately. The processed digital pictures were recorded on Eastman EXR color intermediate film 5244 and intercut with the live-action footage of the rest of the scene.
"When you create a digital film with this system, it's not like doing it optically," Daviau explains. "There is no increase in grain and no build-up of contrast. You can fix the subtlest, or the most severe, image problems, and when you cut it with the original film, there are no apparent differences. There is nothing to jar the audience, even subliminally, to draw their attention to the shot."
Many times, Daviau introduced close-ups with a wide shot with a large source back and off to the side to establish the light source before closing in.
"When you come in tighter with the camera, the light source can be brought in closer to the face," he says. "You use cutters and flags to create shadows which emphasize certain planes of the face, usually the eyes and the mouth.
"There is a lot more flexibility with soft light. You can even float a flag by hand on close-ups, and give the actor a little more freedom to move around. You have to be flexible enough to adapt to the actors' performances. Sometimes it's just a matter of a position changing. Other times, an actor will take a scene further than you anticipated in terms of its intensity, and this will affect the way you light for mood as well as exposure. You have to be flexible enough to make quick changes between takes, and that's asking a lot of your crew.
"My general thought process is to decide how much depth-of-field a scene requires, and to light accordingly," Daviau ex- plains, adding that on this film they were generally working between stops T-2.8 and 3.5. "Sometimes, you want the eyes to be extremely sharp, and less depth-of-field can help you emphasize that. Other times, you want more depth. If you are putting a lamp through a big grid cloth, you can build the light by using a more powerful lamp without having to move your flags or cutters."
Daviau points out that there is also a lot more flexibility in the use of diffusion materials today. He made extensive use of grid cloth, but also shot light through tracing paper on occasion. He also occasionally used a very thin material (Hampshire Frost), which barely took the lamp away from being a hard light.
"It's almost a net without the texture," he says. "We used dulling spray on portions of this material, to soften the light on parts of the set. Once you acquire the knack for placing the light where you want it for faces, these things don't take a lot of time. One of the more important factors in lighting close-ups is having very good stand-ins, so everything is set up right."
The smallest interior set used in the film was that of Carla's bedroom, to which she has withdrawn, emerging only to go to church. In contrast to Max's bright, white-walled, comfortable and spacious home, Carla and her family live in a small Mission district apartment crammed with other family members. The colors are more saturated, with most walls yellow, the bedroom pink, offering insight into Carla's personality before the crash.
Daviau recalls that "at one point, I noticed the sun was poking between two buildings, coming into the window at a high angle, and bouncing off the carpet. That was the look I wanted for lighting Max and Carla ." The problem that it was only lit that way naturally for around 15 minutes a day, so Daviau had an 18K HMI light rigged outside, pointing straight down through the bedroom window, hitting the carpet in exactly the right spot.
The scene opens in a darkened room where Carla is tossing and turning in bed having a nightmare. A little shrine holding a picture of her son, candles and religious objects, is lit by candlelight. Her husband opens the door and a beam of light from the hall hits her. Then he pulls the window shade up, letting the light in, and tells Carla it's time to get out of bed and face reality. She pleads for the isolation of darkness.
"The bounce off the carpet was the main source of light for their faces," says Daviau, "except for a little ambient fill, which we modified for close-ups, when we moved off the master shot. John Stoddart had the walls of her room painted pink. It seems like a strange choice for a dramatic scene like this, but it worked beautifully with the candlelit shrine. The 96 film pulled the details we wanted out of the shadows, and it gave us a wide range of tonality."
One of the largest interiors was a church, which Max and Carla visit while a wedding rehearsal is being held. "It gave Peter an opportunity to use the sounds of the rehearsal," Daviau says. "There were a lot of practicals in the church, but for dramatic purposes, I wanted them off. I wanted the feeling of sunlight coming from up high. Larry Wallace and his best boy, Kevin Arnold, mounted some 4K HMI Pars in the belfry, so our main key seemed to be coming from a skylight high above. The altar seemed to be lit by the sun, with the pews falling into shadows, forming a natural frame."
Paul Babin, the camera operator, had operated B camera on Bugsy. There were only a few two camera scenes, but Daviau credits the B camera operator, Tom Connole, with "some beautiful second unit work. These are mainly P.O.V. shots seen from Max's and Carla 's perspectives on a trip to Oakland, and establishing scenes in San Francisco which are sprinkled throughout the film."
While the focal point of the collaborative process is with the director, Daviau notes that rapport and good communications with the cast are nearly as important. "You have to understand their concerns and what they are up against," he says. "Basically, they are there by themselves. It's the loneliest job. They have to trust you to make them look good, especially with the large close-ups we used. You have to understand where the light has to hit them, and give them as much freedom as possible to move around and respond to the scene without nailing their shoes to the floor. You generally develop lighting motifs for each actor as you get to know them. Sometimes, that's the most important thing you can do. Other times, the mood of the scene is more important, but even then you have to make it work for the actors."
The lighting strategy for Bridges featured two decidedly different looks, based on the mood of the scene. When he's cheerful, the light is softer. When he's sad, the key light is placed a little higher, to emphasize the shadows under his eyes, and the lack of joy in his demeanor. Perez is always in near half-light with the key just barely reaching the eye on the other side of her face.
The film comes in just a touch under two hours, and there isn't a wasted
moment. "Having worked with him, I now understand why Peter's films have
such incredible energy," Daviau says. "He distills the essence of the story.
He creates a very open atmosphere where everyone is enthused about participating.
In the end, it all came down to helping Peter tell a very intense and emotional
story. I think it will leave the audience limp. With all the sadness, Carla
and Max do share with us their sense of joy at being alive."
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