Stephen Burum Focuses on the
Return of Icon: Mission Impossible
By Bob Fisher

This article originally appeared in 1996 in
International Photographer

If you are 30 years old or under, you probably missed the original Mission Impossible unless you saw old episodes in syndication. If you are older than 30, chances are pretty good you invited Peter Graves, Greg Morris and the other actors in the enduring series into your living room. The program was on the CBS Television schedule for around a dozen years. It always ranked in or near the top 10. The theme was classic good versus evil. There was a happy ending every week, because the bad guys always lost.

Every week agents were offered daunting assignments to thwart exotic villains. They received their tasks in terse audio messages on a tape cassette that immediately self-destructed. There was no violence. The good guys always won the battle of wits, usually aided by clever high-tech gadgets. The agents were Graves, Morris, Peter Lupus, Leonard Nimoy (surprise! there was life after Spock) Lesley Ann Warren, Lynda Day George and Sam Elliot. The series ended in 1975 when Barbara Bain and Martin Landau got into an unresolvable contract dispute with the network.

It has taken 20 years, but Mission Impossible is finally back. This time it’s on the big screen courtesy of Paramount Pictures and director Brian DePalma, who teams up for the sixth time with cinematographer Stephen Burum, ASC. DePalma and Burum first collaborated in 1984 on Body Double, followed by The Untouchables, Casualties of War, Raising Cain and Carlito’s Way. The year Mission Impossible ended its long run on CBS, DePalma, a Columbia University graduate, directed Carrie. Prior to that he was a screenwriter, cinematographer (once), editor and director of unnoticed films.

Burum was a college student when Mission Impossible was winning the TV ratings wars. “I don't recall seeing an entire episode,” he admits, “though I do remember the tape recorder self-destructing. It was one of the first spy programs featuring a lot of gadgetry. There wasn’t a lot of bloodletting. It was like Sherlock Holmes fighting the Cold War.”

Burum was raised in the rural community of Dinuba in central California. Burum’s hobby as a youngster was building and flying model airplanes. He started taking still photos to record memories of his model planes. One summer, he saved $20 doing odd jobs, and used the money to purchase an 8mm camera to record moving images of his models in flight. That’s how Burum locked into the dream of becoming a filmmaker.

Burum studied at the UCLA theater arts department when James Wong Howe, ASC, and Charlie Clarke, ASC, were teaching classes. They made an indelible impact on his psyche. After graduation, he became a cameraman for a Disney nature film series called My Family Is A Menagerie.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army and spent several years shooting training films in the service. Burum launched his narrative film career shooting low budget independent films during the late 1960s. He came to a crossroads in 1976, when he shot second unit camera for both The Black Stallion and Apocalypse Now. Vittorio Storaro, AIC, ASC earned an Oscar for Apocalypse Now. Caleb Deschanel, ASC, deserved at least an Oscar nomination for The Black Stallion.

A few years later, he shot The Escape Artist, directed by Deschanel. His credits include Rumblefish, The Outsiders, St. Elmo’s Fire and Body Double. Burum has earned three ASC Outstanding Achievement Award nominations for The Untouchables, The War of the Roses and Hoffa. He won for Hoffa, which also received an Oscar nomination.

DePalma first spoke to Burum about Mission Impossible about a year before they shot the first frames of film in London and Prague. The feature is faithful to the concept of the TV series, except that it runs a lot deeper in both story content and visual acuity. It’s an action-adventure film, spiced with humor, a puzzling mystery, a love story, male bonding, and some slick digital effects. In other words, everything the audience needs to have a good time is woven into the fabric of Mission Impossible, including the fluent visual story-telling movie aficionados now expect from the DePalma-Burum tandem.

The cast includes Tom Cruise, who is also producer along with Paula Wagner. Also starring are Emmanuelle Beart, Jon Voight, Emilio Estevez, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny and Vanessa Redgrave. The story revolves around teams of do-good guys and gals who tackle impossible missions. Most interior filming was done in London on sound stages at Pinewood. Prague provided a setting for telling a story with a romantic and exotic European flavor.

The technology of high-tech spying permeates the story. In that way, too, Mission Impossible emulates the TV series. Everyone seems to be outfitted with remarkable gear, special phones and glasses that see the unseeable, futuristic computers and devices of all types to aid the craft of spying. And don’t forget special kinds of weapons.

“With the Cold War over, people think there isn't any danger left in the world,” says Burum. “The reality is that this is probably one of the most dangerous times in history. It's like the period when the British and Russians were fighting over India while the world was supposed to be at peace. There is a lot of re-positioning going on. It is probably more dangerous now than any time during the Cold War. There are a lot of independent operators wanting to sell their weapons and skills to the highest bidder.”

If you agree with that, you can buy the Mission Impossible premise. The bad guys aren’t known entities like Khadafi or a renegade county. They are ex-Cold War spies and operatives who have become independent contractors causing large scale mayhem and mischief. Mission Impossible is in the nether land between fantasy and reality. It isn’t based on fact, but it could be true.

“It's a yarn about people whose work is fighting evil,” Burum says. “It isn’t based on reality, but I am sure there are real people who will recognize the scenario as things that have happened to people who play the spy game. The film is part spectator sport and part participatory. Sometimes there is a subjective point of view that allows the audience to see and feel what it is like to be a character in the story. Other times, they are voyeuristic spectators watching the story unfold.”

DePalma was specific with Burum in defining objective and subjective shots. In his mind’s eye, the director knew exactly how the images would lure the audience into the heart of the film and then invite them to sit back and watch the action. If there was going to be some subjective story-telling Burum would show the audience a character, and then film all or part of the scene from their exact point of view. The camera became the character, and the audience was participating in the film through his or her eyes.

“That's really the only thing that he was very insistent on,” says Burum. “Brian is exacting about visual points of view. If a character is laying on the floor, the camera is laying on the floor. If the character is hanging upside down, the camera is upside down.”

The Pinewood stages are about the same dimensions as those in Hollywood, though there were variances in the availability of hardware and customs of the crew compared to Hollywood. Burum dealt with this situation like a veteran surfer riding the tide

“You have to see what's available, and figure out how to get the best results,” he says matter-of-factly. “You can’t be narrow-minded and insist on a 16 horse team if there are only four in the stable. You decide the best way to make the journey with four horses.”

The only crew members who traveled to Europe with Burum were Steadicam operator Larry McConkey and assistant Larry Huston. However, this was Burum’s fourth project in Europe, going back to the 1970s, when he filmed a TV special with Raquel Welch, and most recently a 1984 feature called The Bride. A lot of the places and faces are different, but Burum knew the rules of the game. He brought his English crew to Prague, and augmented them with some of the local talent in the Czech Republic. They shot in Prague for some 30 to 35 days out of a 109 day shooting schedule.

“I love working with Brian,” Burum says. “I think he’s one of the best directors around. He knows how to do his job. He can manipulate the story, inspire his actors, and he knows how to communicate his thoughts visually. He is always going to do the right thing for the show, and he’ll give you the opportunities you need to do the best job you can. He’s a very positive force who is constantly cheering you on. You always feel like he’s in control and that’s reassuring for everyone.”

DePalma didn’t have to send Burum a message saying. “If you choose to accept this assignment...” He knew the answer would be yes. If he liked the story, so would Burum.

Burum started his own preparation by reading the script. Afterwards, DePalma gave him a one line capsulization of his visual concept. Burum doesn’t recall those exact words because the idea was still malleable. At that point, he was assimilating the logistics, where he was going to be shooting, in what circumstances, and who was cast in what roles? He was pre-visualizing how he was going to shoot the film -- up to a point.

“You really have to see the physical locations,” he says. “It's more important to respond to what the physical locations are than it is to have detailed preconceived notions. Things are never exactly the way you think they are going to be. You always have to make adjustments after you realize there are stairs off to the right or left, or there is no way to use a crane at a certain location. Those ideas begin to take shape while you are scouting. The basic ideas don’t change, but you have to figure out how to execute them.”

DePalma communicated by showing Burum computer animated storyboards as his ideas started taking shape. He has been using this tactic for years. Prior to that, he made sketches and took still photos on locations to create a visual reference for relationships between physical structures, the positions of actors and the camera. There was no talk about composition, according to Burum. It was more of an outline for telling the story. Burum observed that DePalma’s films are generally characterized by montages of intercut visual impressions, a close-up of somebody looking in one direction, a tight shot of a hand holding a gun, a long shot from a specific point of view, and so on.

“He constructs his stories in linear fashion,” Burum says. “The storyboards are like a road map. It tells us what we will need. It may not be cut together in exactly that order, but every major beat and moment in the film is represented on the storyboards. All the pieces are there and everything has a specific meaning. Sometimes when you see the location, you might decide it is better to do a top shot, because of the way the geography is laid out, or maybe it is better to come in from the side.”

Burum doesn’t recall a formal discussion about the decision to tell the story in wide-screen, anamorphic (2.35:1) format. He says it was his general assumption that this was a big story which required a wide screen image. Burum remembers casually confirming that DePalma wanted to shoot in anamorphic format.

“I asked and he said, ‘You bet!’ That was the sum of the discussion,” Burum says. “We have photographed other films with spherical lenses. Brian likes to tell stories with interesting, dynamic images that have a tactile feeling. We photographed Raising Cain in 1.85:1 format using 10, 17 and 24 millimeter lenses most of the time.

Knowing this story, and how Brian thinks, it was obvious that he would want to shoot the script in anamorphic format. It has a different feeling. It’s hard to generalize the differences in composing. One of the things I try to do when I’m working in anamorphic format is let everything leak out of the sides of the frame. If there’s a two-shoot, for example, I let the edge of the frame cut into the actors’ shoulder. It makes you feel as though the image goes on forever.”

Burum had about eight weeks to prepare. He needed every minute to resolve complex and difficult logistical challenges. The cast and crew were covering a lot of territory. There were a large number of sets, and almost all of them have some very specific action sequences.

“When I say action, I don't necessarily mean running and gunning scenes,” Burum explains. “I’d guess the norm for a film is that one half to two-thirds is dialogue and the rest are non-verbal sequences. In Mission Impossible, about two-thirds of the scenes are purely visual. We are speaking with pictures rather than with words. There’s not a lot of talking. Ideally, you want the audience to see the potential danger, not talk it to death.”

“We hope there’s a built-in audience of people who remember the TV series,” he says, “but there is no relationship between a 54 minute TV show interrupted by commercials, and a movie made for the cinema. When I was a student at UCLA, an editor showed us a TV episode he cut without commercials. People didn't get the relationship between one scene and another. He explained that was because we didn’t have those one minute or two minutes while the commercials were running to fill in the spaces. There is a psychological thing that tells you the story is continuing while the commercials are airing. The logic of TV film is different than a movie. A television show is non-linear and a movie is a linear experience. The logic (for a feature) has to flow precisely because your attention is riveted on the picture the whole time.”

Burum notes that DePalma’s films typically have a chain of logic: Something happens and you don't understand why. There is an aspect of Rashomon. The audience sees a version of what happened which they accept as truth. Then, something happens which makes them doubt that version. DePalma always withholds something important from the audience and reveals it later.

Burum notes that in DePalma films, characters are always multi-dimensional. No one is totally good or evil. It’s never black and white. There are always shades of gray that can be infinitely subtle. Even the bad guys have the ability to wink.

“Every picture I've worked on with Brian has an important moral principle,” Burum says. “If you do something not morally correct and violate one of the 10 commandments, terrible things can happen and somebody always points it out. There is a foundation for this type of story-telling in the classic Greek tragedies. You can redeem yourself by resolving the problem. There is a situation like that in Mission Impossible. It’s a puzzle that I don't want to give away. You have to see the film.”

One interesting visual idea is that many scenes are staged in long tubular settings, labyrinths of hallways at embassies and other offices, elevator shafts, trains, air conditioning ducts, airplanes and the like. Those settings add to the feelings of tension they are designed to evoke. “When you are trapped in a long hallway, there aren’t many obvious ways to escape,” Burum says. “People feel isolated, trapped and exposed.”

How do those long narrow settings lend themselves to the anamorphic format, which seems more appropriate for horizontal dimensionality? Burum agrees that the choice of the wide-frame format seems unconventional, but he and DePalma used the space around the long, narrow settings to visually exaggerate the feelings of people feeling trapped inside the tubes. The audience can literally see they have no place to go.

“It’s definitely claustrophobic, and there are also opportunities to surprise and titillate the audience,” he says. “If people are pursuing you, or you are trying to hide, where do you go to escape on a train? Do you climb out a window and hang off the side, or hide underneath a seat? The minute you put a character in that situation, the audience is asking itself, what would I do?”

The use of those types of enclosed spaces also raises some interesting questions about lighting. How do you light a moving train? Burum points out that there isn’t a single answer. It depends on where the train is. Is it day or night? Where is the sun in the sky? Maybe there is a scene where the train moves around a curve and the sun suddenly flashes through the windows and temporary blinds a character at a crucial time. Is the train traveling through the Chunnel (which links England and France)?

A lot of those questions were resolved during preparation when Burum and the production designer, Norman Reynolds, agreed to build a lot of fluorescent tubes into the train sets. There are horizontal and vertical tubes. The most interesting lighting solution started with a need to solve a problem at the classic Art Nouveau hotel, the Europa in Prague. The old building had a central air shaft with a big skylight over the top. It was three or four stories high.

“I wanted to light it in the most natural way,” Burum says, “which meant I needed to use light motivated by the skylight. There weren’t many places to hide lights.”

“When I go to a foreign country,” Burum explains, “I always collect all the equipment catalogs, talk to as many people as I can, and visit all of the equipment houses. There was a catalog from a French lighting equipment company in Lyon, which has the LTM franchise in that part of the world. They developed a helium balloon. It is one meter in diameter, and it carries four 1K quartz light bulbs that are switchable to 2K. I thought that’s a very good idea. I can just float one of these balloons in the middle of this air shaft and simulate natural light. We had a gentleman from that company visit us at Pinewood and float one of their balloons on a stage. We asked the usual balloon questions. Is the balloon going to get too hot and explode? How much weight can it lift?”

The gentleman from the lighting company explained that the helium keeps the globes cool enough to be safe. However, when they turned the lights on, it wasn’t bright enough to do the job he had in mind. Burum asked if they could build a bigger balloon. He wanted four balloons two meters in diameter.

“They wouldn’t or couldn’t do it,” Burum says, “so I asked Lee Electric, in England, and they built four balloons which were capable of lifting four 1K or eight 1K quartz bulbs. That gave us the amount of light we needed. The balloons are able to float 15 meters, or about 45 feet off the ground. I couldn’t visualize a need to float them that high.”

Burum used the balloons for both interior and night exteriors in Prague, and in the Liverpool Street train station in London which has a big glass dome.

“You just put them up and tie them off,” he says. “The cable is very small, about the size of my little finger, because voltage is 220 volts over there. It gave a source of wonderful soft light. We put a panel around one side to make it directional, and a panel on the top to direct the light straight down like it was coming from the skylight or the dome.”

Burum found other locations where it was easier to light with the balloons, but the biggest kick came from resolving the initial frustrating problem.

When he wasn’t using the balloons, Burum just parked them on a corner of the stage. Lee Electric has built 12 balloons, but the problem is that they aren’t available anywhere else. They don’t even have a name. It’s that thing Burum used.

“That’s the problem” Burum laments. “I think this is an important tool, which can make my life easier and my pictures look better. But I have to work in London to use it. The cinematographers who visited our set always wanted to see how the balloons worked, and you could see a light bulb going on in their head when they recognized the potential. It’s the same principal as the space light. You can use skirts and silks to control the direction and quality of light. You can save time. It’s much easier to float a balloon than it is to rig lights. It is much more versatile and you don't need to rig a lot of cable.”

Burum points out that helium is inexpensive and accessible, and the best kind for floating balloons is the type they use for welding. You can get it anywhere in the world. All you have to carry are the balloons, some cable and a small control box with four switches. Each balloon is the size of a milk crate, and it weighs around 10 pounds.

Ask Burum to describe Prague as a location for filming, and he has a one word reply: beautiful. He describes the warm, yellowish colors of buildings. Even in the cold, blue light of winter in Prague, it looks and feels like a warm city.

Artistic success in the making of any narrative film like Mission Impossible requires the

talent and craftsmanship for resolving big challenges. In the master shot for a pivotal night scene, Burum lit a bridge which stretches 700 feet across a river, and both banks to simulate moonlight. The task required 11 generators and 24 6K HMI Pars and a potpourri of smaller units. It’s on the screen for seconds rather than minutes, but it firmly establishes a sense of time and place that transports the audience to a different world.

Yet Burum speaks with the same loving care about lighting a single character’s face, who starts the picture as a kind of innocent soul and ends up a world weary hero. How does the cinematographer help an actor make that transition and stay invisible to the audience? How about a beautiful woman who everybody is in love with? She gets in trouble, and you have to take her down a notch or two so she doesn't look so glamorous.

On lighting: “I really worked on Tom's (Cruise) character,” Burum says. “You start out with someone who is basically very handsome. I'm not lighting Tom Cruise. I'm lighting the character. He has to be a chameleon and become the character he’s playing. I didn’t use overly cosmetic lighting except in the scenes where he is seen from the perspective of someone in love with him. Then you have to idealize the way the other person sees him. It’s like portrait photography.”

Burum was shooting with a video tap on the camera. DePalma typically had the video monitor looking in the same direction as the camera. He would stand or sit behind it, so he could simultaneously glance at the screen, and look over the top of the monitor at the actors. He is never isolated from the actors or removed from the stage.

Burum used a Panaflex camera, mainly with Type C anamorphic lenses, because they are more compact and lightweight than the PRIMO anamorphic lenses. That was important because the camera was on a Steadicam image stabilizer most of the time. He also carried a Panavision anamorphic 11:1 zoom lens. He used it for point of view shots, and also “buried” a few zooms inside of moving shots.

“It’s a wonderful lens,” he says, “but, it meant we were locked into a stop of T-5.6. That meant even with the (500-speed) Eastman EXR 5298 film, we needed 80 foot candles. I realize that would have been a luxury a short while ago. When Bill Fraker (ASC) shot Rosemary's Baby with a zoom lens at 5.6, he needed 400 foot-candles. But we are working in the age of high-speed fine grain film. You expect to work at a low light level. But there are scenes where I was pulling a deep stop at T-8.

Burum explains, “We were outside, and Brian wanted crisp images in the deepest part of the background. Keep in mind, in Northern Europe during the winter, the sky is always overcast. The light is soft, it surrounds the actors. If you read your meter, you would be somewhere between 30 and 100 foot-candles. All I can say is that if you are in Northern Europe, shooting in anamorphic format with a zoom lens on the camera, you had better have the fastest film you can find on your camera, and remember your shooting day begins at 9:00 a.m. and ends around 3:30 p.m.”

Most of the time, there are groups of people on the screen. It’s a team, and there are a lot of interactions between explaining and discussing the mission. One of the tasks for DePalma and Burum is to draw the audience into relationships with each of the characters. They have to know enough about them to empathize, but still leave some unturned pages.

We asked Burum how the fact that he has now done six films with DePalma influences the way they work together. Is there more of an aura of trust than there was in the beginning? Does DePalma give him more latitude and room to experiment?

“If I see something I feel should be done, I basically do it,” Burum says. “Either he accepts it or he doesn’t. There are only two responses. Yes and no. Then, he’ll explain why he doesn't like it, and I will fix it. On The Untouchables, we were doing the scene where Sean Connery and the police chief are in the alley and they are going to have this confrontation. I thought it would be good if it was lit in red light. I set it up, and Brian says, are you sure you want that lit in red light? I said, yeah. I've got the motivation from an emergency exit sign in the scene, and I really think it should stand out as a key moment. “

DePalma shrugged and he stared at Burum. He said, “Your name is just as big on the screen as mine.” That meant he wasn't sure I was right but he was giving me freedom to go for it. If I was proven wrong in dailies, I knew we were going to reshoot it.”

Burum estimates that as much as a third of the film incorporates some digital compositing or other visual effects. Primarily because of the heavy load, the digital work was divided between ILM and Cinesite London. Richard Yuricich, ASC, performed the role of visual effects supervisor for the work not done at ILM. But that’s another story.