Daryn Okada On Paparazzi: This story was written for Production Update. The golden glow of Hollywood glamour is subtly weaved into the visual fabric of the opening scene in Paparazzi. A breakaway hit film is propelling Bo Laramie to stardom. The excitement is electric when the film premieres at the Pantages Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. In the wake of his new celebrity status, Bo, his wife and their young son move into an elegant house in Malibu Canyon. The story takes a darker turn when a band of rouge paparazzi begin stalking the actor’s family.
Paparazzi was produced by Icon Entertainment International on an ambitious 38-day schedule, mainly at practical locations in and around Los Angeles. Cole Hauser plays Bo, Robin Tunney portrays his wife Abby, and Tim Sizemore is Rex, a rogue photographer.
“Initially, there was a feeling that it would be cheaper to film Paparazzi someplace else, but it soon became apparent to everyone that we could produce a better picture on time and on budget in Los Angeles,” says cinematographer Daryn Okada, ASC.
That sounds almost counter-culture today, but Okada is speaking from experience. The cinematographer has compiled some 35 credits, including Black Sheep, Texas Rangers, Dr. Dolittle 2, and the recent hit Mean Girls. He explains that local landmarks are an important part of Paparazzi. The alternative was using background plates and visual effects composites to create that illusion, but Okada notes that is not cheap.
“We got more done every day because of the people and resources available in Los Angeles,” he says. “Sometimes we only needed a crane, a special light or insert car for a day or two. Specialized equipment is readily accessible at reasonable costs.”
The producers, Bruce Davey, Stephen McEveety and Mel Gibson, originally had Paparazzi on the docket about three years ago with a much larger budget. After one of the high-profile stars dropped out, the film got delayed.
“At our first meeting (director) Paul Abascal said he envisioned a slightly hypnotic, surrealistic look with very rich black tones and saturated colors,” Okada recalls.
Abascal and Okada wanted to frame Paparazzi in anamorphic format, but Okada had concerns about the variety of the zoom lenses available for existing light situations. He suggested the Super 35 format instead.
“Maybe in the beginning of a take from a moving car, we’d be in tight on the actors and we’d want to flow into a little wider angle,” he says. “I needed to be on zooms which let us make quick size changes in framing. Spherical zoom lenses gave us that flexibility. My other concern was that the Super 35 format hasn’t traditionally rendered the same print quality as anamorphic, mainly because it requires an extra optical step in the lab and less usable resolving area on the camera original negative. That concern was partially offset when Kodak introduced a 500-speed (Vision2 5218) film with an incredible fine grain structure and broad exposure latitude.”
He explains that would enable him to work with a fast film in low-key lighting without recording obtrusive grain. Okada also felt Paparazzi was a perfect candidate for a digital intermediate (DI) finish. He explains that the DI postproduction process skips the optical step required for “squeezing” the negative into a 2.4:1 aspect ratio. Instead, the timed digital files are recorded directly onto a film master in widescreen format.
Okada had about six weeks of prep time, when he scouted locations, making certain they worked for the story and were also logistically production friendly.
“The more time it takes to set up, the less time the director has to do his work,” he says. “We had a couple of challenging locations, including the house in Malibu Canyon. We couldn’t go through the front entrance, but the neighbors agreed to allow us to open a fence and bring our equipment in through a back road.”
Okada shot tests at locations using the proprietary 40 percent ACE silver retention process offered by Deluxe Labs, with prints made on Kodak Vision Premier stock.
“That gave us the combination of a high-contrast look with deep color saturation we wanted,” he says. “There was no guarantee that when the film was released we would be able to use that process on the prints, but we made dailies on Kodak Vision Premier stock everyday using set printing lights. That gave us the feedback we needed about how the look was working on both emotional and technical levels. I watched dailies with Paul every night.”
In early scenes, Bo looks glamorous and warm. Okada removed the warm gels and skimmed one side of the actor’s face with sidelight and let the other side fall into shadows when the angry actor begins slipping into vigilante mode.
“We establish the paparazzi as characters who don’t play by the rules,” Okada adds. “The first time the audience sees Rex, we filmed him in dappled sunlight sneaking around and grabbing shots of the son playing soccer in a park. You don’t see much of Tom (Sizemore). He is peaking out from behind a tree in shafts of sunlight. Some of it was real, but mostly we created those hot spots of light for extreme contrast. The audience doesn’t get a clear look at him until the following scene, but he feels menacing.”
The only set was a boat filmed in two days on a small stage in Culver City. They spent about 10 days filming scenes in the Malibu Canyon house, a day on the New York Street at 20 th Century Fox for a scene needing the ambience of a studio back lot, two days in two offices in the same building, and the rest of the time on streets and roads.
Okada estimates they were shooting scenes in moving cars about 20 percent of the time to establish the setting and as an homage to Los Angeles culture.
An ambitious night crash scene sets the tone for the story. Okada shot a test on the 5218 film to determine if he could cover five city blocks with minimal lighting at night. The alternative was lighting a block or two and shooting a series of shorter takes, which could be intercut, but would cut down on the scope of the scene because the schedule only allowed for two nights. The test indicated they could stage a massive five-block chase.
Okada used a single Bebee Night Light in the background to outline the cars, and ambient sidelight motivated by street lamps, headlights and a few smaller units in cars emulating dashboards. The streets were wet down and glimmered with reflected light.
Okada notes that there was a discussion about wetting down the streets. One rationale was that if it rained they could continue shooting. It started raining when they got to the last shot on the last night about 20 minutes before sunrise. They were able to finish shooting in the rain because of the wet down.
There were two insert cars (“with terrific drivers,” Okada stresses) and five cars in the scene. Bo and his family are in one car and the paparazzi are in the others trying to box them in. Sometimes the cameras were on one insert car while the other one was towing the vehicle with Bo’s family. There were stunt drivers in the surrounding cars.
In an effort to get away from the paparazzi, Bo stops his car in the middle of an intersection, where it gets broadsided by an oncoming truck. There is a quick, suspenseful shot of Tunney (Abby) in the passenger seat, and a cut-away to her looking out the window watching the truck approaching. It’s actually a seamless visual effects shot.
The actress was filmed in front of a green screen and composited into the car just before the truck rams it. A background plate of the truck racing towards the car is composited into the window and seen from Abby’s perspective.
Okada only had one shot at filming the truck ramming into the car, because there were no backup vehicles. It was like choreographing a ballet. He had six cameras covering the shot from all perspectives, designed to provide the editor with ample coverage.
After the accident, Okada used gels on lights to create a slightly greenish ambience in hospital scenes. Bo’s wife and son are hospitalized and he goes home alone.
“The colors are less saturated and Bo’s warm, glamorous aura becomes darker as his thoughts become a sinister quest for revenge,” Okada explains. “We made those decisions with Paul in preproduction the same way writers chose the right words.”
Bo begins to get his revenge by framing the paparazzi for another crime. This results in an elaborate car chase with police cars in pursuit of one of the photographers.
“There was no second unit in the entire film,” Okada says. “We shot everything ourselves. The chase begins downtown in the afternoon and moves to Pacific Coast Highway at the end of the day. I was in a helicopter on a radio talking with the drivers and crew. It was a slow-speed chase choreographed for efficiency.”
Okada’s modest camera package included Panaflex Platinum and Panaflex Lightweight bodies and a mix of Primo zoom and prime lenses. He covered most scenes with two cameras to provide the director and editor with sufficient options in the cutting room with the short shooting schedule.
“We only used cranes for specific reasons, and never carried equipment we weren’t using that day,” he says. “I used a Pegasus crane in the crash, and a Technocrane in a sequence where a photography and Bo are hanging off the edge of a cliff in Malibu Canyon after an accident with Bo trying to help them. We found a spot where we could put the crane on a level pad with the telescoping arm reaching down for close-ups of the actors. It would have tripled the schedule to get all the angles we needed without the crane.”
The company had to turn out a print in time for a sales screening at the Cannes Film Festival before the final mix was completed. It was an answer print made directly from the conformed negative on Kodak Vision Premier stock.
“It was exactly the look we had envisioned with incredible sharpness, rich tones, very deep blacks, and a combination of contrast and saturated colors,” Okada says.
The problem was that the studio wouldn’t agree pay for wide distribution of Paparazzi using the silver retention process directly on the premium-priced print stock. Furthermore, the blow-up from the cropped Super 35 negative yielded varying results in quality. Okada suggested a DI process as an alternate way to preserve the look they wanted, along with more flexible options for fine-tuning shots during timing sessions.
“We had about a three-and-a-half week window, and I had to guarantee it wouldn’t take longer than traditional photo-chemical timing,” he says. “It was important to have an environment and a colorist as a collaborator, who understood the workflow and the need to keep on schedule without compromising the quality of the images.”
He recommended LaserPacific, a Kodak company, based in Hollywood. The colorist was Frank Roman, who timed both the film and home video releases.
The conformed negative was converted to digital files at 6K resolution with a Northlight scanner and down-rezzed to 2K for efficient, interactive timing.
“We over-sampled when we scanned the film in order to retain nuances in colors and contrast that are on the negative,” Okada explains. “The images are much more robust than if we had scanned at 2K even though we were filming out at 2K. The digital images were projected on a 35 foot wide screen in a cinema environment with a Texas Instruments 2K projector.”
Okada says it was a thoroughly interactive process. He asked Roman to make adjustments in colors, contrast and other characteristics of the images, and saw the results projected on the screen in near real-time. In one scene, Okada asked Roman to put a Window around a character’s face and make the environment colder without altering skin tones. Other times, Roman made the sky brighter or darker for continuity or to amplify a mood. They also integrated hundreds of dissolves and digital opticals into the story.
Okada says it took approximately six days to time the film in the digital suite. The digital files were “squeezed” and recorded onto color intermediate in widescreen format. He also timed and composed Paparazzi for release in HD, DVD and NTSC/PAL formats.
“We want the video versions to be as true as possible to our intentions, while accounting for differences in how television and digital projection display contrast, colors, light and darkness,” he says. “It is important for this to be done with a single set of eyes by the original cinematographer. I believe this is an natural extension of our role.”
Okada concludes that the DI process is the way of the future, but believes there is still much work to be done in refining the technology. 20 th Century Fox is distributing Paparazzi starting September 3.
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