John Schwartzman, ASC: Making Armageddon Look and Feel Real

By Bob Fisher

This article originally appeared in Film & Video Magazine in 1998.

John Schwartzman, ASC, has treasured boyhood memories of visiting movie sets ranging from London to Nanchez, Mississippi, with his father Jack Schwartzman, an entertainment industry lawyer and producer (Never Say Never Again). He was around 16 when his younger sister introduced him to one of her friends, a 12-year-old named Michael Bay. After completing the USC cinema school graduate program in 1985, Schwartzman launched his career shooting horror flicks on 18-day schedules. He and Bay began their collaboration later during the ‘80s shooting music videos and TV commercials. Schwartzman’s narrative credits include Benny & Joon, Airheads, Conspiracy Theory and Bay’s first feature, The Rock. Their collaboration continues with Armageddon. Excerpts of a conversation follow:

QUESTION: How did your experiences shooting music videos and commercials with Michael Bay influence your collaboration as narrative filmmakers?

SCHWARTZMAN: We did a lot of unconventional things on videos. We shot one video through the base side of the film, over-exposing it by three stops just to see what happened. There is a visual shorthand that comes from working together the way we have. When he is speaking about a shot I can finish his sentences.

QUESTION: How did you prepare to shoot this movie?

SCHWARTZMAN: We did a lot of research. We talked to people at NASA and also a photographer at an Orlando newspaper who shot every launch. One of the movies we watched was The Abyss. We wanted to understand how they got people in the audience to feel like they were individually in that tight space.

QUESTION: Was there any discussion about selecting a format?

SCHWARTZMAN: There was an unspoken agreement that this movie would be filmed in 2.4:1 aspect ratio. The main reason for choosing anamorphic over Super 35 was that we wanted the sharpest images possible with rich saturation and contrast and little or no grain. We wanted images that jump off the screen. I used the old Panavision C and E type lenses because they reminded me of the epic films of my childhood. They are also more compact than Primo lenses and we had a lot of Steadicam and handheld shots.

QUESTION: How much of the look or visual style for Armageddon was planned?

SCHWARTZMAN: The broad strokes were planned by Michael, Michael White (production designer) and myself, but the subtleties were accidents that we embraced. We’d have some sparks in a shot and when we saw the effect, we decided to light the whole scene that way. We used a handheld Eyemo camera for extra coverage, and decided to make it our main camera in one scene. That’s the way you catch lightning in a bottle.

QUESTION: How about the scene where they launch the shuttles?

SCHWARTZMAN: We shot that at the Cape in Florida. There was a daylight run-through of a shuttle launch that we filmed with 15 cameras. We also filmed the actual launch at night. There is no second take, so NASA scientists helped me calculate our exposures. They said that when the rocket is 1,000 feet beyond the tower at night, we’d be reading 18,000 footcandles at 9,000 degrees Kelvin. I figured out that we should shoot at stop T-8 with [Eastman] EXR 5293 film for the look that we wanted.

QUESTION: Why did you use a 200-speed film on a shot like that?

SCHWARTZMAN: I spent weeks at Panavision finding the sweet spot on every lens we used in the movie. I used the [Eastman EXR] 5248 and 5293 (200-speed tungsten) films and Kodak Vision 500-speed films depending on the lighting in the scene and the look we wanted. For example, I knew I was going to get cleaner and sharper images if I shoot with the 500-speed film at stop T-4.5 than I would by exposing the 5293 film at stop T-2.8 with the same anamorphic Type C 50 mm lens. We weren’t looking for beautiful images. We wanted images that captured the mood of the story and made it feel real.  

QUESTION: What were some of the other broad strokes?

SCHWARTZMAN: When they are on the space shuttles on the way to the asteroid and landing on it, Michael wanted to drag the audience out of their seats and put them in the movie. The space shuttle was on a gimbal and we built a head for the tripod out of Teflon springs. We were shaking both the gimbal and camera to create a sense of motion and energy. We also used lighting to create illusions, which help the audience feel the danger of floating in the blackness and coldness of space, and detached from the warmth of Earth. We also wanted them to feel exhausted.

QUESTION: How about the asteroid?

SCHWARTZMAN: The asteroid is like the shark in Jaws. The less you see, the more frightening it is. That’s why Michael wanted a lot of atmosphere. We had steaming geysers, dust in the air and 100-mile-per-hour windstorms with flying pieces of rock breaking off the surface. We lit seven miles of the South Dakota Bad Lands to shoot establishing scenes at night. The ground is a white alkaline that reflects light. Our lighting package included two Muscos, 40 18Ks, 24 6K bars and seven-and-a-half miles of cable. The vehicle was around 28 feet long, but it looked tiny and helpless in wide shots.

QUESTION: How much of the scenes on the shuttles and asteroid were effects?

SCHWARTZMAN: We shot everything possible live on one of the biggest stages in Los Angeles, including geysers, atmosphere and flying rocks which were mainly chucks of ice and cornflakes. One advantage was that if we didn’t like what we saw in dailies, we did it again the next day. We also felt we’d get more realistic reactions from the actors with real flying debris and atmosphere. There still was a fair amount of CGI and digital composites. I shot as many of the elements as I could myself, because the most important thing is the consistency of the look and lighting. We’ve been shooting our own effects shots for years with videos and commercials.

QUESTION: There is a sense or feeling of dimensionality.

SCHWARTZMAN: That comes from contrast and lighting. It was mainly side or crosslight and a little top light. There are dark foregrounds with strong edge lights and silhouettes in the foreground. We were mainly using two cameras and sometimes three, and they were almost always moving on a Steadicam, handheld or dollying. Our lighting was controlled on a dimmer board. That gave us a lot of flexibility. We could do cross-fades and make a 360-degree movie with a Steadicam around an actor and bring the lights up and down as needed. We were also able to move from one setup to the next a lot quicker. When you are shooting some 3,200 setups that makes a big difference.