|
Born
Again In Here Comes Mr. Jordan (photographed by Joseph Walker, ASC) boxer Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) is slated to contend for the heavyweight championship. But following an accident that he should have survived, an overzealous angel prematurely brings Pendleton to Heaven. After being dropped back to Earth, Pendleton is given a chance to fulfill his destiny in a new life as a millionaire playboy. Guiding him is Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains), a senior executive from the pearly gates. In the 1978 re-make photographed by William Fraker, ASC, quarterback Joe Pendleton (Warren Beatty) is headed to the Super Bowl when an errant angel accidentally ushers him to the Sweet Hereafter. Both Fraker and Walker earned Oscar nominations for their impressionist images.
In Fraker's rendition, Heaven is created with mist rising off dry ice with a white cyc background - it's as if the people are floating in fluffy clouds. The Weitz Brothers, however, envisioned a more stylized and edgy milieu - a 1950s nightclub. The set was dressed with white walls and measured 150 feet long by 75 feet wide with a 40-foot high ceiling. "White walls are not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a nightclub," notes Crudo, "but it was a practical location and we couldn't repaint the walls. After testing, I decided to make the background kind of bluish by using gels on the fixtures. The foreground is slightly warm using light and filters to get that effect." "We shot a lot of tests with the materials that Paul Peters [production designer] wanted to use and also some of the wardrobe [done by Debrae Little]. There were 300 extras on the set and a lot of action going on - it's a busy environment. I shot the entire movie with the [Kodak] Vision (5277) 320-speed film. For Heaven only, I had a number one Tiffen White ProMist filter on the lens that softened the texture enough to separate it from the scenes on Earth. It's not jarring, but it's enough for the audience to sense a difference." To maintain consistency, Crudo decided to use only one negative; after shooting a series of tests with the Sun directly overhead on a clear day with snow and foliage in the background, and some buildings casting very deep dark shadows, he chose Vision 320T (5277). The dailies accurately matched what had been seen by eye, especially in regard to details in the darkest shadows and brightest highlights. "You can make 5277 look almost any way you want it to, depending on how you expose and light it. It's virtually grain-free and the blacks are very potent." The co-directors insisted on film dailies with the total support of Paramount Pictures and the producers. "They were cutting on an Avid [as edited by Priscilla Nedd-Friendly] but wanted to see dailies projected on a big screen every evening to help them keep their idea of the scope and scale of the movie fresh in their minds. The Panavision camera package consisted of two Panaflex GII bodies with a matching set of ultra-speed and super-speed Panavision lenses which Crudo assembed for use on previous pictures. He opted for the 25-year-old optics because "they have a different quality than the Primos that's hard to describe. It's a sort of roundness that records images that are pleasing to my eye. It's a mistake to assume that newer lenses are better for everything." He did switch the standard eyepiece on the Gold IIs for one lifted from the Panastar camera because "it's just a bit truer and brighter."
For the few digital shots, Crudo exposed the effects elements on the same stock with his regular crew using Gold 2 cameras. During a gig at the historic 1,500-seat Apollo Theater, only 800 seats were filled at any given moment. He had one of the Gold 2 cameras on a motion-control rig, and the footage was then digitized with the crowd being replicated to create the effect of the theatre being jammed to the rafters. A few greenscreen shots aided the illusion of infinity in the Heaven set's background. Rock and the other actors sat in the foreground on both wide and tighter shots with dialogue; in the case of doing greenscreen photography, Crudo's main challenge is keeping the foreground lighting consistent and the greenscreen background free of any spill. The negative was then converted to digital format and composited with a CG background. "We had talked early on about shooting in anamorphic format but decided to frame the story in 1.85-to-1 - we felt it was more intimate," continues Crudo. "Chris Rock has acted in a lot of films, but he's never carried one like this before. He's in the center of the action in almost every scene. In order to give him as much time as he needed, we wanted to be as light on our feet and as quick and easy in our setups as possible. There's a lot of Chris Rock in Lance Barton. He comes across as likeable and accessible, and he's got an open and endearing manner. We want the audience to relate with him. Regina King is his love interest and she had to look great." During testing, Crudo found that King looked best with soft key light coming off of camera left. In situations calling for single or over-the-shoulder coverage, he often did a sort of "reverse blocking"- plotting the light to serve the actress' close-up and then working the rest from there. As the love story evolves, while Rock and King are in two-shots, Crudo applied just enough backlight to create a hint of an aura suggesting a magical or heavenly feeling about their relationship. "At first, she doesn't really like him very much and there's a lot of resistance. As they get to know each other, their relationship warms up until it starts to glow. The use of the backlight evolves. It was a big challenge for the actors to modulate those shifts in the relationship. Otherwise it just becomes kind of a one note. "Chris has really interesting cheekbones, and his eyes just pick up light. No matter where we put a light on Chris exposure was never a problem because his skin is very reflective. We used a fair amount of bounce light, mixed occasionally with direct light through diffusion, depending primarily on the motivating sources - but it's mainly a soft light movie. The trick here was to make the actors look good and let the romance play out as a key element in the story." Production on Down to Earth occurred over 45 days, including 20 days spent in New York City. The script calls for a spring setting with blossoms and greenery on trees in Central Park and other exteriors on the metropolitan streets. When shooting in Central Park during April, technical travails ensued due to the constantly fluctuating weather - the Sun would be bright in the morning while sleet fell in the afternoon. "We only had a week-and-a-half of shooting in Central Park, so we tried not to stop for anything," the cinematographer remarks. "We shot with two to three cameras from different angles, but continuity was always a challenge. We'd start a shot in a clearing in sunlight, and a few minutes later there was cloud cover and then it was raining. By avoiding backlight and dark backgrounds, we tried to compose so the rain didn't read. Chris and Paul are reasonable guys and they generally listened to my advice on issues like that. There were some unavoidable mismatches, but as always, you hope the strength of the story will carry the audience through." "Camera and lighting were almost solely motivated by the actors' performances," offers Crudo. "There's some very nice Steadicam work by Larry McConkey when we were on the streets of New York and in Central Park that captures the energy in those scenes. Mainly, what I tried to do was somewhat follow the template established by Bill Fraker in Heaven Can Wait - if only to help me exceed myself. Though I am satisfied with our efforts, I'm not embarrassed to say that I didn't even come close to what he achieved." ICG Magazine recently sat
down with cinematographers Fraker and Crudo as they compared notes during
the postproduction phase of Down to Earth. ICG Magazine: Bill, did you find yourself in the same sort of position? You were remaking Here Comes Mr. Jordan, photographed by a legend, Joe Walker, ASC.
We built Heaven on an elevated stage, so that we could put the dry ice underneath. I believe it was in Stage 29 at Columbia in the old Gower Street lot. We hit it with some oxygen and created a very pure, white smoke. It was non-toxic but it sucked all the oxygen out of the air. You could go for about 10 minutes and then you had to run outside and breathe air. Warren would shoot a 1000-foot magazine at a time. After every roll, we'd would open the doors, rush out and suck oxygen back into our lungs. CRUDO: The first thing Chris and Paul Weitz talked about was doing Heaven differently than in your version, but the basic template is almost the same. ICG Magazine: Why did the directors want a different take on Heaven for Down to Earth? CRUDO: Chris and Paul saw Heaven as having a low-key nightclub feeling with kind of a 1950s touch. I guess that's how a character like Lance Barton would envision Heaven. We decided to keep the background very cool with the foreground warm where the characters are in more normal light. The production designer [Paul Peters, who did The Phantom and American Pie] gave us bouquets around the perimeter of the walls, and we used them to hide fluorescents with blue gels. It's a very soft blue. All the accents are blue. The cocktail tables are covered with a blue silk cloth on Plexiglas. We used China balls under the tables to get a nice glow. In the foreground, the lighting is kind of a normal warm. I think it's a nice contrast. I also had a number one White ProMist filter on the camera lens. FRAKER: We created all of our own effects in camera. There really weren't that many. In the last scene, the two of them [Warren Beatty accompanied by James Mason as Mr. Jordan] are walking across the football field at the Los Angeles Coliseum. We wanted the lights at the Coliseum to go dark as they were walking away from the camera. We did that by working with the Coliseum people and timing turning off the lights as they walked by. We shot the football sequences at halftime during a pre-season game between the Rams and the Chargers. The Coliseum was filled with 80,000 people, which meant that everything we did had to be absolutely precise. During scouting, I decided we could get a shot on the 50-yard line with the camera right on the ground in the grass. Because of the curvature of the field, when we put the camera down, we only saw the actors from about the waist up. It was a very interesting effect that we discovered by doing it. The night we filmed the football scenes was unbelievable. We had five cameras. Our two teams came on the field at half-time and executed about six plays. Every one of them was perfect. Warren threw a 40-yard pass that was caught. We were on and off the field in 20 minutes. The crowd was standing and cheering, screaming and hollering. I've done a lot of movies with special effects but you can never create those emotions that are real. It was magic. CRUDO: Did you have any problems matching or correcting the stadium lights? FRAKER: No. We used
a very soft color correction filter and Technicolor did the rest during
timing. It's great to have these new tools today but I think we did
okay. CRUDO: We met the week before I left town. I don't think Bill took me seriously, but I asked for his blessings. I felt I was remaking a classic film. ICG Magazine: You didn't have any particular questions, Richard? CRUDO: I was in awe.
I was interested in how he keyed Julie Christie [as love interest Betty
Logan], because I don't think she ever looked better. CRUDO: How did you actually light Julie Christie? Did you use a soft bounce source? FRAKER: Heavy diffusion from a hard source with just a little bounce. It was basically hard light with a lot less diffusion on Warren. We used a lot of Seniors and Juniors and very few Babies. It was a different style of lighting than today. We used a lot of different filters and diffusion to put a little bloom into the film to make it look a little bit more romantic. We needed 75 to 100 foot-candles to get an exposure of 2.5 or 2.8 with a 100-speed film. But the people before me who were shooting in Technicolor needed 10 times more foot-candles overall, with no shading, to get an exposure. ICG Magazine: Richard, how did you approach lighting the lead actress in Down to Earth? CRUDO: We did some
tests with Regina [King] and it was clear that she looked best with
soft light from off camera left. There were times when we had to do
some switching on the board, but it's pretty seamless. Sometimes on
day exteriors it was a little tricky, so we used a lot of negative fill,
bringing in some big Solids to take sunlight off her but not to the
point where it becomes noticeable. CRUDO: My favorite effects shot was done in the camera. Chris has come back to life in the body of a 60-year-old white, fat, baldheaded industrialist. He's in this guy's body, but he's still a stand-up comic at heart. That's the dream he's come back to complete. He decides to sharpen up his act in a Black comedy club. He's on stage doing his act and in the beginning the camera is seeing this from audience's perspective. He's doing his dialogue, which is very funny. The camera begins to dolly in towards him on an angle so we end up behind Chris with his head and shoulders in the foreground. We go directly behind him so Chris is now in the foreground and the audience is in the background. We wanted to see the back of the White guy's head on the body that Chris is occupying. We created a flare that seemed to come from house lights hitting the stage and blowing out the frame. We used that transition
to walk Chris off the stage and put the other guy in his place. We couldn't
do that with the lights on the set, so we had the grips build a metal
frame around the lens. We mounted a bunch of Inkies on dimmers. It was
attached to the head so it moved with the camera. Using the dimmers,
we had a controlled and repeatable amount of flare. When we whited-out
the frame, Chris stepped out and the other guy stepped in. It's totally
transparent. The biggest challenge was working out the timing, particularly
how long to keep the flare. We did 12 takes before it was exactly right.
It cost nothing compared to a digital morph and feels a lot more believable. CRUDO: I'm proud of what we did, but it's not close to being a better picture. FRAKER: Technology helps you get there but it doesn't help you make better films. Film is an art, and art is created by people. In this case, it's a collaborative art. You are never going to see people making better movies than She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, My Darling Clementine, Citizen Kane or Casablanca. They were made with slow films and lenses, with cumbersome cameras and lights and no digital effects. ICG Magazine: If you could have one wish granted by a higher power, what would you ask for? CRUDO: The greatest gift anyone could give me is the opportunity to shoot films the way they are supposed to be made. FRAKER: I'll second
that motion.
|
Down
to Earth marks the third iteration of Harry Segall's metaphysical
play. After an afterlife detour, struggling comic Lance Barton (Chris
Rock) returns to Earth as a rich White man named Wellington, whose wife
and her lover are conspiring to murder him. American Pie co-directors
Chris and Paul Weitz re-team with cinematographer Richard Crudo, ASC
on Down to Earth, which is co-produced by 3 Arts Entertainment
and Alphaville Films for distribution by Paramount Pictures. A crucial
part of Crudo's preparation included watching the DVD of Heaven Can
Wait and then conferring with Fraker himself. "It's always
been one of my favorite films," he says. "What Bill Fraker
did was positively masterful. Joe Walker's work in Here Comes Mr. Jordan
is classic black-and-white work. It's luminous and absolutely magical,
but Bill Fraker's version is still contemporary. It is masterful use
of hard light. I felt like he was looking over my shoulder on every
setup and that I had an imposing standard to meet."
Earthbound
moments are motivated mainly by light coming from visible sources like
windows and lamps. Crudo's overall lighting approach is just slightly
brighter than might be considered his normal taste, but there are times
when it's a little subdued, like scenes set in the wings and backstage
of New York's Apollo Theater. "When Lance was performing on stage,
we replaced the house lights with our own fixtures," the cinematographer
reveals. "The overall level of light had to be sufficient enough
to get an exposure. Plus, I wanted to add a little bit of back and rim
light here and there for some contrast. The light needed to fall off
somewhere here, but creating the effect of darkness doesn't necessarily
mean that you shoot without light. You have to light something to make
it seem dark and we wanted to read some details on faces because the
audience's reactions are important."