Bird on a Wire: Romantic Adventure
by Robin Brunet

Contrary to local hype, British Columbia is no longer an economical place in which to base a U.S. production: federal taxation plus rising crew rates have seen to that.

Nonetheless, John Badham’s experience directing Stakeout in Vancouver three years ago with local crews was so enjoyable he decided to take the $20 million Badham/Cohen Group production of Bird on a Wire up north anyway and rehire key Stakeout personnel, including special effects man John Thomas and co-producer Fitch Cady.

The action of Bird on a Wire, which sees Rick Jarmin (Mel Gibson) and his ex-flame lawyer Marianne (Goldie Hawn) on the run from mobsters (including David Carradine and Bill Duke), supposedly takes place in New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Racine, Wisconsin. Vancouver and its environs, Badham figured, could double for all these locations — and producer Rob Cohen later proved it by nailing down 50 percent of the locations during the first three days of scouting.

Bird on a Wire excited this seasoned location town in a number of ways: it was stretching the visual potential of Vancouver like no other feature had done before; “Magnificent Mel” caused droves of secretaries and other female admirers to gaze for hours through office windows during city shooting, and production designer Philip Harrison had built a titanic indoor zoo set in Burnaby’s The Bridge studios for Bird’s hair-raising climax (the set was too big for any Hollywood facility to house).

It was somewhat of a puzzle to crewmembers, then, that Badham kept referring to this action-packed spectacular as “A Room With A View meets North by Northwest.” Only when the dailies were screened did the disparate marriage begin to make sense.

“Director of Photography Bob Primes and I met when I directed thirtysomething. I was struck by the way he lit faces, especially those of women, whom he loves glamorizing,” explains Cohen. “When John and Bob and I discussed the ‘look’ of Bird on a Wire, we quickly agreed we wanted a very soft, beautiful style of photography — after all, we had two glamorous stars, and the script was a sophisticated romantic adventure. It would have been a cheat to treat it like a standard genre piece.”

Bird on a Wire, therefore, was a plum assignment for Primes, and his first crack at a feature film.

“The look decided upon was unique in its own right, but it also helped avoid the cliches inherent in filming explosions, fights, and helicopter stunts,” says Primes. “This is a substantially filtered picture. We used Tiffen nets. Tiffen 1/8 regular fogs and ProMists. Goldie looked especially good through all three of these filters combined, but since the entire picture has a subtle aura to it, the filtration doesn’t stand out.”

Primes admits it took about a week to adjust to the demands of a fast-paced (65 day) John Badham schedule. “To be perfectly honest, it was quite a jump coming from thirtysomething to this. I worked during the first week very painstakingly, only to discover it had set us behind schedule. On this film we had multiple cameras going all the time from multiple angles; on a lot of the action scenes we were either looking straight up or straight down. These kinds of things test one’s experience in lighting and camera placement, and I had to adjust my pace accordingly. Fortunately, John Badham has very clear ideas on where the camera should be, and I had two superb camera operators, Cyrus Block and John Clothier, who allowed me to put more concentration into the lighting. It worked out in the end.”

An example of the lighting effects that impressed crewmembers during the dailies was Gibson’s gas station, which appears as a bright oasis of illumination in an otherwise dark neighborhood.

“The station’s neon sign was red and green, but when we lit the station with a red spot and a green spot it didn’t look like it was coming from the sign,” says Primes. “So we used a lot of lights from the top of the sign, and cross lights from the street, and put in gels that were half-red, half-green. Every light had this weird red/green light, and you could make it more of one color for any actor in the station simply by putting a Charlie bar in front of the light. I wasn’t sure whether the effect would work when I conceived it, but it worked beautifully.”

A particularly striking film effect occurs when Gibson recalls the incident which culminated in the termination of his ‘old life’: a flashback sequence with a visual twist, courtesy of Rob Cohen.

“Most of the film was shot on 5296, 5295 and 5247 stock, but there was a lot of talk about making the flashback sequences grainy, shooting them on 16, and degrading the negative,” says Cohen. “Then I thought about my own traumatic memories, and realized they were more vivid than others. So Bob and I hit on the idea of using 5245 ultra-fine grain. You could see the difference in the dailies. The surface is so slick I could walk up to the screen and still see no grain. And it gave you a focus of two feet to two and a half miles.”

When the 2.35 wide screen ratio Bird on a Wire eventually finds its way into video stores, viewers won’t have to suffer through a clumsy “pan and scan” version of the movie. It won’t be letterboxed, and the Badham/Primes team didn’t shortchange the wide screen potential by composing in the middle of the frame. What they did do, however, was take unusual advantage of Kodak’s ultra-fine grain film stock.

“Usually with 2.35 you use anamorphic lenses to squeeze the image into the square 35mm frame that’ll be unsqueezed during projection, but we couldn’t do that because we needed fast lenses and lots of them. For both units we once had a total of ten cameras running,” says Primes. “An idea that came out of pre-production was to re-center the lens turret directly over the film instead of the Academy aperture. With Zeiss lenses and ultra-fine grain stock, we got a super sharp image going clear across the film. Of course we used very little of the top and bottom of the frame, since this would eventually become a 2.35 dimension.

“In order to make the headroom on this ‘super 35mm’ format similar to that of 2.35, we off-set the image just a bit. We composed in the 2.35 format, and that’s what you’ll enjoy in theaters. But on the square TV screen you’ll see the entire image of the 35mm frame plus whatever’s on the bottom of the frame, which wasn’t used in theaters. At worst, a set of dolly tracks might be glimpsed, but we’ll blow up the film at certain points to get rid of these glitches.”

Shrink the Grand Canyon down to about 250 feet long, 75 feet wide and 50 feet high; add catwalks, a waterfall and neon railings; buttress it with a 175 foot wide cyclorama; throw in a native village in a savannah and an assortment of wild animals, and you have production designer Philip Harrison’s indoor zoo set. Located in Burnaby’s The Bridge studios the set could have easily made its $1.3 million cost several times over as a local tourist attraction.

Each facet of the zoo set was fascinating in its own right. The waterfall, for example, was powered by a 600 volt generator that pumped water into a giant sluice box that emptied at a rate of 6,000 gallons per minute.

But nothing was more fascinating than the zoo’s lighting arrangement: multi-colored par lighting was Bob Primes’ pre-production solution to covering such a large shooting area. To have enough power to run the lights, an electrical substation had to be built. It had a 12,000 volt capacity, which was dropped to an output of 600. Three transformers dropped the 600 volts to 208 in order to run the dimmers.

Next came the installation of the par lights. Gaffer Colin Gray remembers the four hectic weeks it took to rig the indoor zoo in a stylized, theatrical manner. “We hung 658 par lights and 358 dimmers from ceiling trusses,” he says. “One hundred lights lined the top of the cove, and 250 1K lights lined the cyclorama. Built into the handrails and stairs were 753 fluorescent tubes wrapped in gels, with 13 kilometers of re-moting wire. Two dozen floater par lights were positioned beneath trees, and pod lights were built into the jaguar dens.”

Originally Primes toyed with the idea of using area lighting for the set and diffusing one or two colors, but 10-12 colors in small areas, cross-focused to eliminate multi-shadows, proved more effective. By routing all the lights into stations, which in turn were routed into a relay system, Gray and his co-workers could control lighting setups as if they were coordinating a music show.

“I used to tour with rock bands, but this beat everything,” says Gray. “Every lighting set-up was recorded on a computer disc, and we went through four boxes of discs very fast. It proved invaluable when shooting out of sequence”.

The massive set boasted distinct, individual colors: steel for the grotto; pale gold for the native village and savannah; apricot, green, amber and red elsewhere. Two 4K xenon beam projectors were hidden behind foliage to produce a ripple effect on trees and rocks near the waterfall. Five cloud projectors positioned above the savannah animated the massive cyclorama.

“For the amount of action that takes place on the set, it would have been inconceivable to have 1,000 10Ks hanging from the rafters and operators up there re-positioning them for each scene,” says Primes. “We borrowed from stage lighting instead. It worked especially well with the animals, many of which were shot in multi-camera setups.”

Disneyland of the North: the indoor zoo ranks with the best gargantuan Ken Adams designs, but Primes and his crew made it magical and menacing at the same time.

Bird on a Wire has a gas station explosion, a motorcycle chase, a car/train impact, rooftop pursuits, a helicopter/plane dogfight, and a climax in the indoor zoo with bad guys, piranhas, tigers, baboons, and jaguars.

During filming last summer in Vancouver, Bird filmmakers saw Mel Gibson’s Lethal Weapon 2 gross over $150 million at the box office; they also noted that License to Kill, which had enough stunts and special effects for three movies, fizzled by comparison. Action and adventure, it seems, does not necessarily mean big profits.

So how to make one’s collection of chase scenes compelling? It was a task well executed by Badham, Cohen (who also doubled as second unit director) and Vancouver-based special effects man John Thomas. Not without a great deal of planning and difficulty, though.

For the first major gag in Bird, the gas station explosion, Badham instructed Thomas to “have fun with it, give me something different.” Thomas and his crew designed a fireball that would rise 300 feet into the night sky; three cameras in protective Ned Kellys were placed inside the station for closeups of the flames and rushing inversion layers of smoke.

But the explosion was scheduled to take place in downtown Vancouver, surrounded by very real office buildings and warehouses. “Not only that, we had a 25 KVA conduit that supplied power to one third of Vancouver just six feet away from where the detonation would occur,” says Thomas. “We also had a natural gas line running down the center of the street, plus high tension lines nearby. Once we showed them we knew what we were doing, the City of Vancouver and B.C. Hydro couldn’t have been more cooperative in allowing us to perform the gag.”

Thomas’ crew, after researching the location and conducting numerous dress rehearsals, used as much non-concussive explosives as possible for the fireball; detonation occurred one spring night without a hitch. Thanks to Primes’ cameras, Badham and company were once again treated, according to Thomas, “to the most amazing dailies I’ve ever seen.”

How does one overcome the cliche of a motorcycle chase? Rob Cohen moved production to Victoria’s Chinatown on Vancouver Island, where there exists a particularly ominous-looking alleyway only three and a half feet wide.

“The idea was that Mel and Goldie, on a dirt bike, would race down this alley. For me it was the hairiest stunt of all because the width of the alley was just enough clearance for the bike’s handlebars,” says Cohen. “Mick Rogers doubled for Mel, and Tommy Glass was the pursuer on a Harley. We used the Pogocam for POV shots, for coverage, the cops’ pursuit, everything.”

In two days of shooting the chase in a three-block radius, 52 setups were achieved. Gibson and Hawn were towed along a track in the alley for closeups, and the Pogocam’s lightness allowed Ricky Waugh (son of Pogocam creator/stuntman Fred Waugh) to operate the camera with a minimum of rest.

“I love the Pogocam,” says Cohen. “We couldn’t have done the POV’s of the alley chase without it. It’s a cross between a Steadicam and a regular camera, and it really imparts a sense of high speed.”

By contrast, the scene in which Blu Mankuma’s automobile is hit by a 40-ton train proved to be all in a day’s work for John Thomas’s crew. “Our biggest concern, once the safety factors had been taken care of, was to make sure a $30,000 signal box didn’t get wiped out as the train pushed the car along the track,” says Thomas. “So we built a roll cage over the box.”

For POV impact shots, an Eyemo camera was placed in the back of a reinforced 4X4 jeep. A rig that mounted the picture car to the train allowed for travelling shots of the stunned Mankuma kicking the windshield out of the car and crawling onto the hood. Finally, spikes mounted in front of the train literally speared the car and pushed it down the tracks for wide angle shots.

Thomas has gained a reputation in the industry for creating hair-raising stunts with meticulous behind-the-scenes care given to safety. When Gibson and Hawn crawl across a construction beam suspended 200 feet off the ground between two buildings, it may have been a genuine location shot; but a cantilevered safety deck was positioned immediately below the beam, and the actors wore harnesses beneath their clothes. The harnesses were attached to safety wires fixed on a ball-bearing track under the lip of the beam so the rig could follow the actors’ forward progress.

Similarly, the high point of the aerial dogfight, in which the landing gear of Gibson’s biplane is pulverized by the helicopter’s main rotor, was a (relatively) safe gag. “A rigged helicopter sat on the ground with its rotor spinning, and we had the plane with styrofoam and plastic landing gear hanging from a crane that just swung by on cue,” says Thomas. The coda of the chase, which sees the earthbound actors flee from the exploding helicopter, was orchestrated by Cohen, Thomas, and effects man Darryl Pritchette. “The actors look like they’re in the midst of the explosion, but they were actually a good 50 feet away; we just shot the gag with a 200mm lens,” explains Cohen.

The film’s climax, set in the indoor zoo, took three weeks to film. The daily blend of floor effects, wild animals (under the strict supervision of trainer Monty Cox) and stuntmen went surprisingly well. The animals, of course, captured everybody’s attention — and necessitated plenty of “gonzo” filming techniques.

“John (Clothier) had a camera mounted on a three foot by three foot ledge to shoot a POV of the tiger charging up to him,” recalls Bob Primes. “There was no room for a camera assistant, only John. He rolled the film, the tiger leaped, and just in the nick of time John grabbed a vine and shimmied down the cliff face as the tiger completed its leap. You just didn’t get that in thirtysomething.”

Dawn Stoffer Rupp, Hawn’s stunt double, was chased by five baboons; this particular pursuit ended with Rupp jumping off a cliff face into a mattress as five other trainers next to her brandished canes in case the monkeys followed suit (they never did).

The 65-day shoot had gone without a hitch; the crew came closest to experiencing animal difficulty during one of the last nights of shooting, when three jaguars were supposed to chase actor Bill Duke through the zoo’s catacombs. While Monty Cox used every trick in the book to coax the jaguars into action and get them to cross the appropriate pools of light, Cohen could be seen huddled in a corner, glumly studying the proceedings on a video monitor. In another part of the set Mick Rogers could be glimpsed performing Gibson’s climactic leap off the waterfall.

Endless packages of meat were thrown to the jaguars in an attempt to get them to hit their marks. Cohen, who up until then had been relating anticipation of a steak dinner to his crew, paused to offer a few final thoughts about Bird on a Wire.

“This is my fifteenth feature and by far the most enjoyable, thanks to the B.C. crew,” he says. “L.A. people have to re-learn that moviemaking is an art, a business, and above all a privilege. People here are in love with the idea of making movies. And out of all the location shooting we did, I can’t think of one person passing by who honked his horn to ruin the sound.”

By 11 p.m. the jaguars were up to a passable speed, but hugging the catacomb walls too tightly for Cohen’s taste. “My last words on Bird on a Wire? I hope those damn jaguars run properly so we can finish this shot and the movie!” They did.