Black and White and Red All Over

Robert Rodriguez and crew create a digital noir setting for Sin City
By John Pavlus

It’s been about fifty years since hard-boiled film noir could be called any kind of cinematic staple. But the new film Sin City—based on luridly titled tales like The Babe Wore Red and The Big Fat Kill, peopled with characters with nicknames like “Violent Marv” and “That Yellow Bastard”—aims to change all that. Adapted from a set of Eisner-Award-winning graphic novels by Frank Miller, Sin City updates the genre in both content and form: director and cinematographer Robert Rodriguez shot the entire film with Sony F950 HD cameras on a greenscreen soundstage, adding hyper-stylized lighting and background elements in digital postproduction. The result is an uncannily faithful transliteration of unique comic-book graphics into cinematic live action—and another leap forward in filmmaking technique for the director and his collaborators.

ICG spoke with Rodriguez, camera operator Jimmy Lindsey, and first assistant cameraman Sebastian Vega about their work on the film.

ICG: Robert, as someone who almost always writes his own films, what attracted you about adapting Sin City?

RODRIGUEZ: I’ve been talking about doing a film noir in black and white for years. I came close to adapting Kiss Me Deadly with Michael Mann back in ‘97, ‘98. I was just afraid a film noir would feel too nostalgic. Not the case with Frank Miller’s Sin City! His stories are cutting edge, strange and modern. Film noirs were savage for their time, so Sin City is right in line with that feel, updating these savage tales for our time. And I loved how Frank’s books were as bold and audacious visually as they were in their storytelling. I realized now was the time to bring these images to screaming, bloody life.
I had also learned so much new technology while making Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Spy Kids 3D that I wanted to follow them up with a movie that would take full advantage of all that I had learned in lighting, visual effects, production design, writing, editing and scoring those movies. Sin City was the challenge I was looking for. I had been collecting them as graphic novels since they started coming out in 1992, but only now did I pick them up and see them as something that could be made using these new technologies.

ICG: The “demo reel” you created for Frank Miller was instrumental in getting this project off the ground. How did that come together?

RODRIGUEZ: I’d heard Frank was wary of Hollywood after some bad experiences, but I was confident that the situation I have in Austin was different enough that he’d go for it if I could show him—and myself actually—some kind of proof of concept. So I called my friend from college and longtime assistant cameraman Jimmy Lindsey and said, “Meet me at Troublemaker Studios; we’re about to get ourselves in more trouble.” I had the books in front of me and had chosen a few complicated shots to test with. I used my bag of tricks and tried some new ones to get the look of the book. Then I met Frank Miller in a bar in New York with my laptop and showed him the test. We became fast friends that day, and saw a kinship in our working styles and ideas. But I knew he’d still need more convincing to hand over his baby.

So the next step was to shoot a second test of the opening scene, with Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton, that very next month in Texas. If Frank liked what he saw, we’d make a deal and start casting and keep shooting. If he didn’t like it, he could keep the opening as a short film to show his friends. Frank dug that unorthodox thinking. We shot the entire opening sequence, set on a rooftop in rain high above Sin City, all on green screen, in under ten hours.

LINDSEY: The sequence involved some very cool shots, including a 540° camera rotation. In order to pull this off on green screen, we had to combine a 90° crane move with a moving platform for the actors and lights to get the other 450°. We built a green platform for the actors to stand on with a pipe holding a stationary light on them. If the light always stays consistent, you can move the whole setup and it’ll look like a camera move. We started the camera straight down on them, and as we boomed up, we arced away camera right, and rotated the actors camera left. So when the CG background was added, it looks like the camera is going completely around them in ever-widening circular motions. As this is happening we pull upwards, and you begin to see the city buildings from above, which then converge and spell out the words Sin City.

ICG: Sin City was produced entirely on a greenscreen “digital backlot.” What made you decide to make the film this way?

RODRIGUEZ: I’ve been shooting this way since Spy Kids 2, and with each movie the percentage of CG backgrounds grows. 85% of Spy Kids 3D was done on a green screen, without any real props. Sin City is 99% digital backlot. The reason for this is that the more I studied Franks’ books, the more I realized I wanted to translate them directly to the screen as is. I felt the abstract nature of Frank’s visuals should work as well on screen as they do on the page, and I wanted to go for the stark black and white look presented in the book that takes on a very graphic quality. The problem with black and white movies in general is that they are really grey and white. There are so many midtones introduced in a frame that the picture lacks the punch and starkness that Frank’s books have, where he uses no midtones at all. That’s very bold stuff in a comic, but even more so in a movie.

With the amount of edge light we would need to create that look, we couldn’t have walls of any kind blocking light or receiving too much spill, washing out details. The actors also needed to be isolated from their backgrounds, and sometimes from each other, so they could be treated uniquely. I also had some detailed ideas of the production design that I didn’t even want to attempt practically, because it would be severely limiting to the look of the movie, not to mention time-consuming and impossible to budget. So in light of all this, it became clear that we would have to shoot the movie entirely on greenscreen.

The biggest advantage to the look of this movie was that if we ran out of money, all we had to do was put black backgrounds up with a slash of white, and that would be in keeping with the book’s style! Fortunately we got to trick things out a lot of the time and come up with visuals that go beyond the book’s simplicity, but that simplicity of design was always key in my mind. I wanted to unclutter the shots in ways you just can’t do on a practical set. We did have one set, and after shooting on that set, the crew was begging to return to green screen!

LINDSEY: It’s not just a matter of flexibility; it’s about knowing how to take full advantage of green screen’s ability to let you cheat. There’s a shot where Marv, played by Mickey Rourke, is crawling along the side of a building. We wanted to light him with a hard edge, which would be impossible if you were actually shooting someone on the side of a building. How do you backlight someone whose back is up against a brick wall? But in the comic book, Frank Miller put an edge on him. So to recreate that, we put a green two-by-four at waist level behind Mickey Rourke’s back so he could scoot against it, and then we just pounded him with backlight, because there’s no real wall there. But when they paint in that wall in post, he’ll have this amazing-looking edge light while standing up against a brick wall.

I think good filmmaking is all about cheating, and that’s the fun part of working with Robert. It makes greenscreen very exciting because we are always bending the limits of what can be accomplished in “reality,” but without calling attention to it. If you don’t remind an audience that it’s actually impossible to backlight someone against a brick wall, then no one will think twice about it.

VEGA: Green screen also allows you to do marking tricks that you wouldn’t be able to do in normal moviemaking. You can actually have visible marks in the scene as long as they’re invisible to the chroma key. They’re not exactly the same color of green, but they’re pretty close, and that’s good enough. Interestingly, when we mark the actors, typically we’ll give them normal colored marks because if you give them green marks, it’s hard to see them and they have to put extra effort into hitting them. So Robert has us mark them with standard colors and then they get rotoscoped out by hand in post.

ICG: How did shooting in HD, as well as greenscreen, affect your ability to create extremely stylized, film noir lighting? Did it make it easier or more difficult?

RODRIGUEZ: The stark lighting is so much easier to create on green screen, since you’re not worried about washing out backgrounds or other objects, or even other actors. Everything can be isolated and lights can be placed anywhere you want, even in frame. And this took us all of a few hours to shoot. All the angles. Because when you’re on greenscreen, you just rotate the set.

One of my favorite scenes to figure out was this early one we did with Mickey Rourke’s character, Marv. He’s in a tiled bathroom, mostly in shadow, yet you see the white bandages on his face very clearly. The background is also very stark. When you draw in black and white and want to show a light hitting the wall tile, you draw the grout black and the tile white. But in the shadows, it reverses, with the tiles going black, and the grout going white. That is, of course, not a natural occurrence in real life and real lighting—but it sure as hell looks cool, and along with Marv’s bandages, it gives the scene its balance of blacks and whites with almost no middle tones. I always loved this scene in the books and it had me salivating wanting to figure out how to pull it off with cinema. So to do this, I placed fluorescent orange bandages on Marv and placed a black light near him. Even in shadow, his bandages would be illuminated brightly enough for my effects guys to pull a matte and make them white. Lighting it this way meant that we didn’t have to add any fill to his shadow side, and ruin the contrast.

The best thing about shooting this in Hi Def was that we could watch our monitors while shooting, and have two settings for each monitor. I could see the plain green screen version that was being laid down to tape, and then hit a button and switch to a high-contrast black and white look I had dialed in. This way I could really see where I was losing details in people’s eyes, or other shadow areas, and I could add just the right amount of light to that area to bring it up, without destroying the look I was going for. It was a great way to work at that contrast level and be sure nothing important was getting crushed out of existence. It was also very helpful for the actors, to see for themselves how they would look in the final renderings right there as we were shooting.

LINDSEY: We also added the latest 4:4:4 color space and SR compression technology into our HD camera system. Previously the format was recorded in HDCAM, which received more compression, resulting in lower resolution. In addition to that, HDCAM had a 4:2:2 color space, in which the green channel was 4 bits and the red and blue were both 2 bits. This always made shooting greenscreen in HD the only real option because the luminance in the green channel was so much stronger, and the blue channel was always very noisy. But the new SR technology allows us to use a 4:4:4 color space, so all three channels are of equal strength. This improves green screen shooting, because every color doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The green screen we use tends toward a little bit of a redder green. So the 4:4:4 color space allows us to perfectly isolate the shade of green we’re using, and makes pulling mattes twice as easy. And that’s huge when every shot in a movie involves pulling a matte.

ICG: How long was your prep period, and what challenges did you encounter?

LINDSEY: Camera prep took about a month. As always with Robert, the challenge is that he wants the coolest toys available, and that’s great for me, because I get to have my hands on the latest gear before anybody. The downside is that when something goes wrong, there’s nobody to call. When there’s a problem with a piece of gear, it requires a lot of skill on our part to stay afloat. Robert owns almost all of his own camera gear, so we have our sources of guys out there who are our underground techs, but for the most part, when we have a problem, we have to call someone who is in touch with the man in Japan who designed the system.

VEGA: One of the real challenges in working with HD is refining the camera’s ergonomics for cinema. The stock Sony camera shell has remained pretty much the same as the ENG style, and we heavily modified ours to get it cine-ready. We put a different baseplate on and a rod system that’s compatible with Arriflex 16mm rod dimensions, so we can use all the standard cinema accessories. For focus pulling I used an on-board HD-VF 750 flatscreen monitor made by Sony. It uses the viewfinder signal instead of using the “video out” signal, so you get all your frame lines, your power lights, your user data. Its peaking feature is also extremely sharp. That’s an electronic sharpening signal that makes things really pop out when they’re correctly in focus, which is very helpful for a camera assistant, and which many other monitors don’t provide.

We began by testing a number of lenses from Fujinon: the C series glass, and the older ENG-style glass that was used on Once Upon A Time In Mexico. We were blown away by the improvement that the C series showed. Then, Chuck Lee at Fujinon brought the even newer E series to our attention and provided us with a couple of zoom lenses, and these made the C series look terrible in comparison. They were that much better, so we ended up shooting with the E series lenses.

What’s also great about the Fujinon E series is that they’re designed like cine lenses. One of the real weaknesses with most HD lenses from a focus puller’s perspective is that they’re not built for focus pulling. They tend to be small and lightweight, and they don’t have enough barrel rotation. The difference between 7’ and 12’ is a micro-turn of the barrel, whereas we’re more interested in the difference between 7’6” and 7’10”. We need that fine level of control. The E series are much larger and substantially heavier than most HD lenses, and they’re marked up like a Panavision lens or any other standard of cinematography. But an ENG guy would hate them, because they have no handgrips and they weigh a ton.

ICG: Did shooting in this “digital backlot” style have an impact on the production workflow? In other words, did the amount of greenscreen work necessitate more delegation of technical positions?

RODRIGUEZ: I found it to be completely the opposite. Because of our budget, I knew we’d have to shoot lightning fast, and when it comes to a movie that is as technically complex as this, it saves a lot of time to wear as many hats as possible. When I’m up against a technically challenging movie and extreme deadlines, my solution is very simple. Less people, less money. It’s like running a race: If you’re faced with an impossible marathon, you don’t want to gain 100 pounds before you start—you want to drop 50. As soon as you have to create a shot in the real outdoors, or practical set, well, “here comes the army.” But with the digital backlot you maintain a small core group of collaborators that wear many hats themselves. I’ve found that the actors prefer this as well, for their concentration and potency of performance. It feels much more like theatre.

LINDSEY: Even on a project like this, Robert’s style of filmmaking is still “run and gun.” We’re always doing new things, but in a down and dirty, film-school kind of way. Robert’s main criterion is, “make it cool”—but he doesn’t want to take three hours to do a cool shot. If we can’t get it in 30 minutes, he doesn’t need it. We operated all the shots on fluid heads and avoided motion control completely. Many other directors would have gone the other way, and some comics, like Superman, have a very smooth feel. But the world of Frank Miller is definitely a gritty place: very rough, brutal, and sometimes horrific. And by not using motion control or anything too polished, we stayed true to that. Even when Robert makes a big comic book movie, it still feels like El Mariachi.

VEGA: One of the things that is interesting about working with Robert as a cinematographer is that he is such an editor at the same time. He knows that three takes ago he got this line from that character, so he’ll go in and grab a close-up of his face, or a cutaway on his hand, or a close-up of an actor in the background. When we’re working on a wide shot, I get all my marks for close-ups ready, because chances are, you’ll end up in a tight shot somewhere.

LINDSEY: But because he’s the DP and he’s often busy doing something else, sometimes he’ll say “Put the camera on the crane and show me something cool.” One particularly challenging sequence involved placing Wendy, played by Jaimie King, in a classic Porsche Spider and suspending them on a rotating platform. The camera craned down and arced over 45 degrees as we dived down toward the spinning car into a close-up, where Jaimie fired several shots directly at camera.

VEGA: What that looked like, once they put in the CG background, is that the car is doing a 360 on the pavement while a “camera car” is pacing it and keeping it all perfectly framed. It looks like the most complicated Technocrane craziness, but because of the greenscreen, it was, at least physically speaking, relatively simple to create on set. It was a boom down and dolly in on the camera, during a lazy-susan rotation of the vehicle. The shot had its focus challenges, but the digital backlot method simplified a lot of things from my perspective. The actress knows where the camera is going to end up every time, the effects guys rotate the car to the same mark every time, the camera is on a dolly track—it’s much more controlled for everyone involved than it could ever be on pavement.

LINDSEY: When the background was laid into that shot, it looked incredible. I’ve been in the camera department for thirteen years, and even I’m blown away by what Robert gets on the other end after the post process is done. More than anybody I’ve ever worked with, he’s got such a grasp of how action works.