How simple can you get? Don Burgess, ASC lensed nearly half of the footage for Cast Away on a small and deserted tropical island with one actor, no motivation for artificial light except for occasional fires and one interior, a cramped cave. The film marked his third outing with director Robert Zemeckis. They previously collaborated on Contact, which incorporated some 500 digital effects shots, and Forrest Gump.

To be accurate, Cast Away is also the fourth film Burgess finished with Zemeckis. There was a year-long hiatus in the Cast Away production schedule while lead actor Tom Hanks shed some 50 pounds he gained to portray Chuck Noland, a trouble-shooter for Federal Express in the early part of Cast Away. During the lull Burgess collaborated with Zemeckis on What Lies Beneath, which was released last summer.

Cast Away opens with Noland in Moscow, where he’s been sent to solve a problem. He’s depicted as a hyper-energetic, over-stuffed executive, who walks and talks fast without really listening. The story transitions to Memphis, Tennessee, where Noland is at a family Christmas dinner with his fiancée Kelly who is played by Helen Hunt.

Don’t blink, because before you can say “Merry Christmas” that tranquil scene is interrupted by an emergency in Malasia. Noland rushes to the airport. This is where the fabric of his old life begins unraveling. There’s a breathtaking crash during a storm, which sends the plane pummeling into the Pacific Ocean. Noland is the sole survivor. He literally catches a ride on a raft that deposits him on an isolated tropical island.

“The coloring is lush green,” says Burgess. “There’s a beach with palm trees and a wonderful steep mountain face. At first look it seems like paradise, but in reality, the island is his jail. It’s surrounded by waves and reefs with no apparent way off.”

There are no natives and no man Friday. In fact, there are no other living things, not even a bird or a monkey he can relate with. Noland must depend on himself for survival. He learns to spear fish, crack open coconuts and build fires.

Noland eventually realizes no one is coming to rescue him. How does he cope? That’s the story Burgess had to tell by getting beneath the surface of Hank’s performance and revealing Noland’s soul to the audience. There are no crowd scenes, not even a two-shot; no architecture and a limited color palette. Movement is restricted to how fast Noland walks with no place to go, and the only sound is his voice.

Burgess notes that there aren’t a lot of actors like Hanks with the talent to keep the audience engaged in a solo performance like this or directors like Zemeckis, who could keep it interesting. You could say the same about Burgess and cinematography.

Burgess is a native of Los Angeles. He studied filmmaking at the Art Center in Pasadena, and launched his career shooting industrial films, documentaries and commercials. He also worked as a camera operator and was soon tabbed as a go-to guy when you needed a second unit cameraman who could shoot while skiing backwards.

By the mid-1980s, Burgess was lensing a steady diet of telefilms and rejecting most second unit assignments. However he bent that rule on Back to the Future II and III and Death Becomes Her, which were directed by Zemeckis. That led to a chance to shoot an episode of Tales From the Crypt and then Forrest Gump with Zemeckis. Following are excerpts of a conversation about the making of Cast Away:

QUESTION: Is Cast Away based on a novel or is it an original idea?

BURGESS: It’s an original story scripted by William Broyles, Jr.

QUESTION: Did you actually shoot on a remote island?

BURGESS: It's a very remote island called Monuriki in Fiji.

QUESTION: So, there's virtually no dialog in those scenes?

BURGESS: Sometimes packages carrying useless things, like ice skates, wash up on the shore. One day, he finds volleyball. He names it Wilson, and occasionally he has one-way conversations with it. Wilson is his alter ego. Basically, this is a movie about a guy finding out what's important in his life. He has a steady girlfriend (played by Helen Hunt), and they are at the point where they have to commit to one way. She's not sure she wants to marry a guy who is going to leave her every time his beeper goes off.

QUESTION: Did you actually shoot in Moscow?

BURGESS: Yes, it opens in Moscow and the pace is fast and furious. It's cold and he's in his glory doing what he does best. His life is all about getting packages delivered on time. The camera is full of energy and moving all over the place, like the character.

QUESTION:  How did you prepare for this film?

BURGESS: It was difficult because we had to scout in Moscow and searching for the perfect island in Fiji. We traveled to both ends of the world; however we were able to draw on scouting we did looking for an island for Contact.

QUESTION: What were you looking for?

BURGESS: Bob (Zemeckis), myself and the production designer Rick Carter spent a lot of time trying to sort out how the picture was going to shift gears. Bob wanted his life on the island to be as simplistic as possible. We literally put the camera on sticks and the shots were almost locked off…. and as you know that's not the way he shoots movies. The camera is barely panning and tilting. There’s all this energy in the beginning, and this terrifying crash, and bam, everything comes to a screeching halt.

QUESTION:  Did Tom Hanks have his own ideas about how he wanted to be represented in that second part of the film?

BURGESS: He had a lot of input into the character. It’s not just his physical appearance. His personality changes a lot. The big question is what keeps a person alive in this situation? That’s what this film is about. It’s about his inner search. People have been stranded in lifeboats. Why do some of them live while others perish?

QUESTION: I was wondering about the format you chose and why?   

BURGESS: We talked abut 2.35:1, but after scouting locations and looking at the island and how it needed to be photographed, we decided on 1.85, mainly because of its shape. Its kind of vertical and it comes to a sharp peak. We all fell in love with the shape of the island. It’s a big part of the story in that it's his jail in a sense. He’s surrounded by reefs and by waves. There’s no easy way off. There’s a classic beach with palm trees and it has a wonderful steep mountain face that rises right up. It pretty much says, “I'm on a remote island in the South Pacific.”

QUESTION: Does he build a house or live in a cave?

BURGESS: He builds kind of a camp, but he also has a cave that he goes to when tropical storms roll through the island and the rain pounds down. We created storms, and we worked in real storms. During the first week of principal photography, there was a storm almost the entire time. We had huge floods. We had boats lost at sea trying to get to the island. But, it worked great for the movie because the weather played into the story. It became a battle against tides. The most difficult thing about shooting on the beach is the extreme tides that you have to deal with. You try to get a camera set up to shoot something a certain way, and it changes so drastically fast that you have to prepare to shoot at exactly the right time when the tide is going to be in a certain place.

QUESTION: Is that all predictable?

BURGESS: You have to schedule around tide tables and know where the sun is going to be, so you can work with it instead of against it. You want the sun at a certain angle. You combine that with where the tide is going to be at a given hour. Usually, we had one good hour of shooting before the tide changed.

QUESTION: You are famous for using the GPS (global positioning satellite).

BURGESS: I used it to pinpoint the position of the sun relative to the tide charts and tables, and also for figuring out how long it was going to take to get from one place to another. In that remote environment it really helped.

QUESTION: What about shooting in Russia?

BURGESS: It was the smoothest part of the shoot. The weather cooperated. We got a snowstorm just before we shot. It gave us that wonderful look. The people we hired were all good and they worked hard. The equipment is a lot older and they have their own ways of doing things, so we allowed more time in the setup process. We were there for two weeks. We brought the operator, Robert Presley, and the first assistant, Tony Rivetti. The gaffer came from England, and the key grip and electricians were local. We shot right in Red Square. The day after we finished, they had 200,000 people in Red Square. If we would have gone a day over—which could happen easily with the weather—we’d have been stuck.

QUESTION: Was any of this film shot on stages?                    

BURGESS: Yes. There's a whole sequence that takes place under water with the plane sinking; and the interior of the cave and the house in Memphis were all on stages.

QUESTION: What did you actually film in Moscow?

BURGESS: We filmed the interior of a FedEx facility and a scene where a truck breaks down in Red Square. We were just establishing his character as a troubleshooter who makes the system work. When we were shooting in Red Square, you could see St. Basil's Cathedral and the Kremlin as recognizable icons. The camera never stopped. We had one crane move. It was a portable crane that was similar to a Chapman Lenny arm. But, mainly we used the Steadicam to create that feeling of frenetic energy.

QUESTION: What did you do with the film in Moscow?

BURGESS: I would shoot about 100 feet of film a day and run it through a local lab to make sure the camera was functioning properly. We flew the rest of the exposed negative to Deluxe (Labs) in Los Angeles.

QUESTION: What happened after Moscow?

BURGESS: He goes back to Memphis, where he lives and you meet his love interest and the family. There's a Christmas dinner, and that night he goes to the airport. They exchange gifts in the car. He says, ‘I'll be right back’ and then is gone for four years.       

QUESTION: The house interior was on a stage?

BURGESS: Yes. We shot with two Steadicams to record the kinetic energy during the dinner scene with a lot of people talking at the same time. The camera was literally going from the person talking and panning to the next person talking. You catch parts of lines. It was like a dance.

QUESTION: Camera movement slows down on the island. What else changes? 

BURGESS: As time goes by, we used longer lenses that tend to isolate the character away from the environment. Earlier in the film, the lenses are wider which incorporates him into the environment.

QUESTION: Were you using Millennium or one of their older cameras?

BURGESS: In Moscow, we used the Panavision XL on the Steadicam and then the Platinum. On the island we used the (Panaflex) Gold, because they tend to be hardier, and we had serious weather issues between the salt, rain and wind. We needed the camera to be really reliable. We used Primo spherical lenses. In the beginning, we used 17, 21 and 27 mm lenses, and longer lenses when we came back to the island a year later.

QUESTION: What about the house?

BURGESS: Bob had some really strong ideas about what that house should look and feel like. We worked with the density and luminance levels of colors. The art director, Jim Teegarden, and I discussed every color we used in the house, and then I had the same conversation with the set decorator on the fabrics on furniture. The luminance levels just aren't the same on film as they are to the eye. We also had to plan shades of colors on wall in relationship to skin tones.

QUESTION: What was the feeling you wanted?

BURGESS: We wanted the scenes in the house warm and cozy. It's winter outside but it’s a happy time inside, which was important in contrast to what's going to happen to this character. Here’s a family and a woman that loves him, yet he still thinks that running around getting packages delivered is the most important thing in his life.         

QUESTION: At this point in the movie are you doing things to establish empathy for him with the audience so they like him and care what happens?

BURGESS: We wanted him totally likable. You can see his strength of character. The audience doesn’t realize the mistakes he's making until later.

QUESTION: Are there things photographically that you did to help him connect with the audience, like the way he's lit and the angles that he's shot from?

BURGESS: The camera is in a comfortable position, not too high or too low. The lenses aren't too wide or too close, so there’s no distortion. The lighting, especially in the house, is pleasant. Everybody looks great.

QUESTION: How did you handle lighting for two Steadicams in the house?

BURGESS: In that scenario, it wasn't that difficult because we had soft light coming from above motivated by a chandelier. The trick is to get the lights down low enough so it complimentary the structures of faces. I'm a big fan of handheld lights traveling with cameras as a little feathered fill for close-ups.

QUESTION:  How did you bring the lights down?

BURGESS: We lit from wall sconces, but we had them a lot lower than you would at home. They were at eye level or just slightly above. We could also remove pieces of the ceiling and light from there.

QUESTION: What were you shooting with?

BURGESS: Kodak Vision 500T film.

QUESTION: What about shooting on the airplane?

BURGESS: That set was on a stage at Sony Studios. The cockpit and first section of the plane were on a gimbal. The crash was a combination of visual and mechanical and in-camera effects. When the plane hits the water, we filmed Tom in the tank on stage 30 where Esther Williams performed swimming scenes in musicals.

QUESTION: Let’s talk about what happens before the crash.

BURGESS: It’s a cargo plane, so he’s sitting in one of the jump seats behind the cockpit. We created a lot of vibrations on the set. You are seeing this from his point-of-view, and its extremely terrifying. We never cut-away to the outside. He sees the crash from inside. You can totally relate to the character's experience of being in this plane, not understanding what's going on and having all this terror take place. It begins with a few little bumps created with the gimbal and by shaking the camera. Once we’re in crash mode, we handheld the camera. We had an armature of an electric motor creating an off balance weight on one end of the camera. The shaking gets progressively worse. There was a rheostat we used to dial in the amount of shaking. We used wind cannons to blow dust through the set and the gimbal created movement for the actors to work off of.

QUESTION: What about the crash?

BURGESS: He's looking into the cockpit and sees the pilots go through their drama. There was a green screen on the pilot's window, and later they composited the approach to the ocean. You see the crash and the lightning and rain. You see the impact. We used dump tanks with snoots on them to focus the water into the front of the air, and water cannons and dump tanks to shove him back through the airplane.

QUESTION: How were you shooting in all of that water?

BURGESS: The camera was in a waterproof housing. It was bolted down. You get a sense of the plane going under the water. You see the ceiling of the fuselage split apart as he's sucked out of the plane and into the ocean. He grabs a life raft and inflates it. It pulls him up to the surface. We did a lot of testing to get this effect. You use a CO2 cartridge to inflate the raft. When that happens underwater it acts like a missile.           

QUESTION: How long does this scene take place in the water, in the tank?

BURGESS: Once he’s in the water it feels like a long time, but it's only a couple of minutes, and that’s a lot of pieces cut together to tell that story. We actually filmed Tom about 20 feet deep in the tank. It was pretty impressive. It's not easy acting under water. We did some under-cranking because being under water slows everything down. You can see things floating past him that help create the illusion that he's going down. We added bubbles at times to give us more of that effect. We used a 14 mm lens with a dome port that corrected some of the magnification.

QUESTION: Did you need any special filtration underwater?

BURGESS: We were working close enough to the surface so there weren’t a whole lot of filtration issues. We used some submersible Pars to enhance the lighting effect. The sequence takes place at night so once he gets to the surface there's a huge storm taking place on the surface. We created illumination from lightning.

QUESTION: Was that the only visible source of light?

BURGESS: It's the only visible source of light. We really wanted it scary so you have a lot of black moments on the screen. We used an old technique, scissor arcs, more than the newer version, Lightening Strikes, because I felt it looked more realistic and more interesting; but we actually combined the two. I could control the lightening strikes, so if I needed a hit of light to give a pop to a particular story point, I could hit that button. We had the four units controlled by the gaffer, Steve McGee, who kept the scissor arcs going in kind of an out of rhythm motion. I used Lightening Strikes at moments when the camera was making a move that we definitely had to see. We were also creating giant waves with pieces of the fuselage floating in the tank, and later they added some CG wreckage to the background.

QUESTION: What was the point of view at that point?

BURGESS: He was on the life raft, so we had the camera as close to the water as possible, so it’s his point-of-view. The camera was actually on a remote head on a Lenny arm with a 30-foot reach. We were using the (Panaflex) XL camera in a water bag with a spinner mount on the front of it. The fans were blowing 100 miles an hour and we were using water cannons and dump tanks to create movement. The camera was getting pounded, and, of course, so was Tom (Hanks). It got to be a joke during production saying that the title should be how many ways can we torture Tom Hanks?

QUESTION: Were you shooting all of this with a single camera?

BURGESS: Most of the time, but occasionally we had another camera in the water in a housing, and a few times a third camera was used when there was a particular effect taking place, where we wanted different perspectives.

QUESTION: Were you still using the 500-speed Kodak Vision film?

BURGESS: We used it most of the time, except for daylight exteriors and for some blue or green screen shots, where we used the (Kodak) SFX 200T (color negative) film.

QUESTION: Now, he's in the raft. What happens next?

BURGESS: It storms throughout the night. We created a camera rig that was like a giant piston coming down from the rafters. He's sitting in a raft on a gimbal with a blue screen behind him. The gimbal is creating a rotating movement. We hit him with waves and the camera pushes within six inches of him. Then, we pull back and up. It creates the illusion that there are these giant waves which carry him up and drop him back down into the trough. We created that illusion with camera movement. The raft bumps into something. He grabs onto this rock and he pulls himself up. You see the island for the first time at night when a lighting bolt goes off and then it goes black. He wakes up on the shore, crawls out of the raft and flops on the beach.

QUESTION:    Who handled visual effects?

BURGESS: Sony Image Works. Ken Ralston was the visual effects supervisor.

QUESTION: How much time on the island before the hiatus?

BURGESS: We were with him for like the first month. The idea was to how he's out of his element. He can’t catch fish, and he's incapable of stabbing these crabs. He picks coconuts, but can't get them open. Eventually, he figures out how to build a fire.

QUESTION: So, there's no other source of light on the island?

BURGESS: Just the sun. We really pushed the envelope on the night exposures. Until he gets a fire going, we shot day for night to get a higher contrast look. We shot tests on a beach in California using harsh sunlight to create a contrasty look. Then, the film was scanned and enhanced by the visual effects people.

QUESTION: How did you deal with the environment, the humidity and salt?

BURGESS: We had a Panavision technician with us. The saltwater and rain was rough on the equipment. Everything corrodes so fast. Every night, he cleaned the cameras and lenses. We kept the film cool in ice chests and also with fans. Everyday, a boat picked up our negative and carried it 25 miles to an airport. The negative was flown to a lab in New Zealand by a commercial airliner. I was getting lab reports two days later.

QUESTION: Were you using the Kodak Vision 500-speed film motivated by firelight at night?

BURGESS: He always had a fire going at night once he learned how to build it. We were under-exposing the film sometimes by three- to four-stops under. You can just barely see the background. I think it was pretty close to what the eye would see.

QUESTION: What about daylight scenes on the island?

BURGESS: Before the hiatus, we used the two Kodak daylight films, (Eastman EXR 50D0 5245 and Kodak Vision 250D. Early in the film, I also used a very light ProMist filter on the lenses. We didn’t use any filtration on the island.

QUESTION: It’s four years later when you return. What’s changed?    

BURGESS: We see that he has developed survival techniques, but his energy for life is sapped. It’s a very monotone existence. His life is basically being sucked out of him. He finds a volleyball that washed up on the beach and names it Wilson. He’s paints a face on it, and answers questions that you don't hear.

QUESTION: Is the look any different when you come back to the island?

BURGESS: I started using the older (Eastman EXR 100T) 5248 film in daylight. It’s a little sharper and harsher. We also made more use of longer lenses, 75 and 100 mm, which isolated him from the background. That emphasizes his loneliness.

QUESTION: How do you sustain interest with one character and no background?

BURGESS: I think that you need a Tom Hanks caliber actor to make something like that work. He makes it interesting with his performance. Survival is not an uninteresting topic. You're not sure what he's going to do. I give all of the credit to Tom Hanks and Bob. Bob has always had the ability to keep an audience informed and entertained. I think it’s totally believable. It doesn't look like acting.

QUESTION: How did you create storms on the island?

BURGESS: We had wind machines and rain towers, and we also had real storms.

QUESTION: Does he spend a lot of time in the cave?

BURGESS: Yeah, he does. The cave was actually a set at Sony Studios. Sometimes flashes of lightning come in through the mouth of the cave, and we created firelight effects at night.        

QUESTION: How does he get off the island?

BURGESS: He builds a raft. We did a lot of the shooting of him on the raft actually out at sea. We shot those scenes a couple of different ways. We worked off a barge with a remote head and a crane arm, and off a small little raft with the camera head mounted on the front under the raft. It had a built-in stabilizer, so it could handle the pitch and yaw of the waves. We were actually shooting near one of the great surfing spots in the world. He tried twice to get through the surf twice. We brought in Don King from Hawaii. He's one of the great surfing cinematographers. On the first run, there were huge waves, and Noland doesn't make it. He gets washed back to shore. The second time later in the film he builds this raft and makes a successful attempt at getting through these waves. We used handheld cameras in water bags, underwater cameras and cameras mounted on these water jet boats that we designed from scratch.

QUESTION: What happens when he's out in the raft?

BURGESS: He spends a month at sea.

QUESTION: You actually did all of this shooting at sea?

BURGESS: Except for one night storm sequence that we shot on a sound stage.

QUESTION: How did you keep on schedule?

BURGESS: We basically had two crews working. We’d be out shooting one scene, while the second crew was prepping the next one. Sometimes we only had an hour of shooting before the tide was either too high or too low. We planned to finish a shot by 9:30, move at 10 and could start shooting at 10:30.There was no leeway.

QUESTION: What about the weather?

BURGESS: It was totally unpredictable. We always had a contingency plan for rain. Certain scenes were more conducive to being shot in the rain, and there were no interiors to fall back on.

QUESTION: You never dollied or used a Steadicam on the island?

BURGESS: We built scaffolding along the beach at low tide with the camera on a crane arm. We just had to be ready to go when the tide comes up and the water is in the right place. You have jump in and get the shot and finish on time.

QUESTION; How else did you use the GPS?

BURGESS: I used it to keep track of where the sun was going, so we could plan if if we wanted to shoot in the sun or shade, and work around the tides.

QUESTION: Are you going to tell us if it ends with Noland being rescued?

BURGESS: He’s discovered by a freighter, and by then he's completely delirious. There's this big reunion when FedEx brings him back to Memphis after four years.

QUESTION: The big question is has he learned anything?

BURGESS: Let me back up and explain that there is a package that was washed up on the island that he never opened. There are angel wings drawn on it. He brings that package with him. It's a thread that runs through the film, because there was a package in Moscow with those same angel wings. It plays a role in the ending.

QUESTION: I get the idea that you aren’t going to say what it is. Let me ask another question. How involved were you with postproduction?

BURGESS: I stayed in touch with Ken Ralston right through the end. I tried to look at every composite, and was especially interested in the day for night look. I think that sets the tone for a shift in mood. When you do something like that, you don’t want it to be noticeable. That’s the kiss of death. You want the audience to feel it. That's the essence of what we're after with the lighting in the movie. It’s our version of reality, designed to help make the character more believable.

QUESTION: Do you think the audience will be rooting for him to survive?

BURGESS: I think so. I also think they are going to be totally baffled about where this film is going. I don’t think the end is predictable. It can turn a lot of ways. Hopefully, it's interesting enough to compel them to want to follow this guy’s story and see where it leads them. It’s not an easy picture to define.