Send in the Clones

Mauro Fiore, ASC creates a look for
two different worlds in The Island

By Pauline Rogers

“Are you fast?” That was the first question director Michael Bay asked cinematographer Mauro Fiore, ASC (Tears of the Sun, Training Day). “My response was, ‘That’s up to you,’” says Fiore, candidly. “It really is up to the director. If a cinematographer is going to slow down the director’s creative energy then he (or she) isn’t right for the job. I knew going in that to keep up with Michael, my solutions had to be quick.”

Fiore’s answer to Bay’s question was obviously the correct one, for Bay handed him a treatment and they were off on a brief four-week prep and 84-day shoot for The Island. “I was fascinated by the story,” Fiore continues. “The treatment depicted this distant future in a Utopian underground world called Centerville. People live for the day when they might be chosen by lottery to go to the perfect world they see outside their window.”

However, one clone named Lincoln Six-Echo (Ewan McGregor) finds out that going to The Island means that someone’s time is up. Lincoln and his romantic interest Jordan Two-Delta (Scarlett Johansson) plot their escape when they discover that they are really clones nurtured for harvesting parts.

“In the treatment most of the story takes place in this underground,” says Fiore, ”but as the script began to develop, changes began to happen. The story became rooted in the not too distant future. And, the morality play about cloning became a very contemporary issue, which meant we had to change our visual approach and make the images more real.

“Conceptually, we had images in mind that didn’t really change, just the amount of time we spend in the different worlds,” he explains. “We thought of Centerville (the underground Utopia) as monochromatic, sterile and white. The lack of color was important. Then, once Lincoln and Jordan escape and discover the real world for the first time, it’s all about hyper-reality. Colors had to be saturated. We had to relate to the first time that they see the sun or sky, feel the wind or the elements. Our images had to relay the extreme innocence of birth and the dangerous nitty-gritty of life.”

“Not only did Mauro envision these changes through lighting (heavily lit underground to natural lighting in the real world), he also supported it through our camerawork,” adds A-camera operator David Emmerichs. The story starts in a very calm and controlled world. Everything about life as a clone is rigidly structured and organized, and the camerawork in the beginning of the film is suited to that sensibility. Formal compositions and slow grand camera moves predominated, but the shots were designed to show that there is an undercurrent of something going wrong, which was punctuated with the occasional quirky “close wide-angle” or shots that were just disturbingly ‘off.’ When the action really takes off and the clones escape, everything starts to come apart and the camerawork becomes much more frenetic.

“Everything sort of happens at once on Michael’s movies,” Emmerichs adds. “Phil Carr-Forster (B-camera) and I were always zipping around on various wheeled contraptions and running with the new Arriflex 235, rigged for handheld running shots using different grips and posts so we could get the camera anywhere. Michael loved this camera because it is so small and light. We could move much faster than we could with the larger sound cameras.”

Over the course of the film, Fiore and crew used every Technocrane—from the fifteen to the 50 footer. “For us, the trick was to cover the action, see the fantastic sets and give Mauro somewhere to light them from,” Emmerichs adds. “There were rarely lights on the floor and the rigging jobs were incredible. We had the flexibility to look almost anywhere at any time because Mauro and the grip and electric teams had really done their homework.”

Ironically, the biggest sets and the biggest challenges were shot with smooth and structured camera moves which take place within the first ten pages of the story—Centerville and The Foundation rooms of this underground world. “For these massive sets, we chose the warehouse in Downey where Lemony Snicket’s was shot,” recalls Fiore. “When we arrived, all we saw was an empty stage, which was an empty canvas that had to be filled. We literally had to fill the space with lights just to see anything. It was an intense challenge for key grip Les Tomita and gaffer Michael Bauman.”

“There were a lot of issues to confront,” admits Tomita. “Unlike a normal studio with catwalks and perms rigged to the building, this was a retired aerospace facility with LAM Beam perms built above. One of the first problems was that, once the beams were built in, they literally stressed out the weight limitations of the building itself. This reduced the amount of weight we could ‘hang’ per square foot.”

Tomita’s solution was to build everything free standing, incorporating the vertical posts into the set design so that they could be seen in the shots. It was a grip intensive process. “Thanks to ShowRigs, rigging key Rick Harris and Donny Selser (who was rigging key on Lemony Snicket’s), we came up with a plan. We were able to create a functional catwalk system into the transit walls, allowing Mauro access and flexibility.”

The plan was trusses and motors that bypassed the LAM beams. This allowed Tomita and crew to support gaffer Michael Bauman’s extensive lighting and give Bay whatever he wanted within a 360-degree radius with the touch of a button.”

“With Les’s trusses in place, we were able to give Mauro the lighting that he wanted,” adds Bauman. “In Centerville, we had about three feet from the top of the set to the ceiling (the rest of the 400-foot tower would be stitched together at ILM by Eric Brevig and his digital wizards). Mauro wanted to simulate a large soft ambience in this windowless world, yet still have some shape to the light.

“The end result was creating 24 of these large ten-by-twenty foot soft boxes. Each contained eight toplights, which are a six-light PAR 64 bulb fixture that is lightweight and relatively inexpensive. We experimented with a few other types of lights to put in the soft boxes, but ultimately settled on the toplights, as they were the most cost effective given the amount of foot-candles they put out. We then outlined each wall of the set with six-light PAR bars with narrow spot globes to be able to light the walls separately from the open areas of the set. There was also a huge amount of Kino Flo tubes that worked in a lot of the sets as decoration and art direction.”

“The Foundation Room, also built at Downey, was another interesting challenge for us,” adds Fiore. “It is a large space filled with 80 laboratory tables made out of shiny steel pipe. It is the room where the clones are harvested, so we had to create an image of these tables, each with their own light source. When it was finished it looked like a sculpture with a repetition of lines.”

“Mauro needed to be able to shoot in any direction at any time in this space,” adds Bauman. “We also had to find a way to allow the actors to run around in the rain without being hampered. The lighting for the 80 tables and 80 bodies lying on them consisted of two Daylight HydroFlo tubes per table, one five-degree Source Four for top light on each body, and one Color Kinetics ColorBlast 12 to create a TV effect on each face.

“We also used 22 High End Systems Studio Beams, which created a strobe effect. Our board operator programmed the ColorBlast for a TV flicker and also programmed the strobes to flash at certain increments. Everything had to have GFI protection on it, due to the rain. With the smoke and rain, the end result were these shafts of light coming down from the ceiling, which looked great!”

For Bauman, another interesting lighting challenge in this underground world was the incubation silo, where the “creators” grow human clones in pods. “Each pod was backlit with two four-foot Daylight HydroFlo tubes built into the pod. We then added a bunch of MR-16 HydroPar heads to put spots on certain pods. The rotating arm had specialty built high intensity one-watt LEDs that were custom built by LitePanels for that set. It was a pretty cool space!”

When Lincoln and Jordan burst into the real world, it is naturally lit. Fiore and crew had the good fortune of blue skies with clouds that allowed him to enhance the hyper-reality. “We now had the expanse of the desert to show man vs. the whole world,” Fiore explains. “Unlike the underground world, where we could control all the light, nature took over—we just helped her with a polarizer to bring out skies and color.”
Not that everything in the real world was natural light. There was a series of very interesting challenges in the not too distant future. There was an abandoned building in Detroit, the Los Angeles train station and a modern house made up of four very different locations.

“The LA train station chase sequence was a challenge more because of the restrictions on equipment,” says Fiore. “We couldn’t bring cranes onto the sidewalk and literally had to fight for space.”

“Lighting through the windows became almost prohibitive,” adds Bauman. “We were able to sneak some 4K Xenons in on stands and then use a bunch of 12K PARs on lifts to work shafts through the windows.”

For everyone, the modernistic house where Lincoln’s “creator” lives was one of the most interesting locations. “It was made up of four different pieces and four different locations,” Fiore explains. “The exterior was a loading dock in San Pedro. The interior was a combination of Glendale and the house on stage. And the exterior entrance was on a set built in San Pedro. The lighting and camera angle logistics were a nightmare for matching shots. Seeing it in bits and pieces was a little disconcerting. We were always asking ourselves where the light would come from and how we could make it match!”

“Mauro was always able to make anything work,” says Emmerichs, enthusiastically. “His ingenuity in doing what Michael wanted showed everywhere. In this set, for example, Michael said he was looking for something different in a shot of Ewan McGregor in this very modern house.

“Mauro shot a PAR into the floor and started looking for anything to break up the bounce and give it some life. He went into the kitchen and came out with stainless steel dog dishes, an aluminum serving tray and a selection of other shiny objects. Everything but the kitchen sink. He scattered them around artfully and quickly in the beam of light that created a series of kicks and highlights that Michael loved. I think we carried those dog dishes around for the rest of the movie.”

For the team, another striking locations was an abandoned building in Detroit. It is here where Lincoln fights his clone after a chase. “The building had great broken windows with a renaissance-like space,” Fiore recalls. “We had golden light pouring in from the windows and a sculpture of a fallen angel in the foreground. The fight, by the way, is real. Michael isn’t into CGI and tries hard not to use it. When he does, it has to intercut with reality.”

“It was a challenge,” B-camera operator Phil Carr-Forster admits. “It was a miserable place made worse by the approach of winter and perpetual rain. The company added debris to what once must have been a magnificent building with huge arched windows, now with most of the glass missing. Mauro lit it almost exclusively from the outside using a series of 30 Dino lights. Because of the scale of the gutted interior of the building, we were able to shoot beautiful shots that had great depth, making full use of the dilapidated structure. This size of the place permitted us to use both the Strada crane and the 50-foot Technocrane at the same time.

“I’ve worked with Michael Bay before,” Carr-Forster adds. “He likes to use two cameras at all times. As B-camera operator, I have a lot of freedom to come up with shots. Mauro was very encouraging in this aspect of the work, which made the job fun. The person who had the real challenge, however, was B-camera focus puller Brad Peterman. We did a lot of work with the 3-1 zoom and the 360mm and 180mm primes, as Michael likes to shoot rehearsals. Brad did a consistently amazing job keeping the tight shots sharp with very little time for getting marks. Because of him and B-camera dolly grip Jack Glenn, we were able to achieve many useful last minute shots.”

As with all of his movies, Michael Bay did not want to play it safe in any of the shots—he wanted in on the action. To do this, the camera team employed many useful tools, including a piece of equipment Les Tomita dubs the “BayBuster.” “It is a vehicle that was originally designed on Bad Boys 2,” Tomita explains. “It is a pick up truck that has a wedge shaped front end. Since Michael doesn’t like to do anything in post, he loves to be in the middle of the action to get the shot then and there.”

“The new modified BayBuster with three fixed cameras and a Sparrow Head, which I operated remotely, allowed us to get all the angles we needed,” adds Carr-Forster. “We could do opposing moves with a car coming toward us at 60 miles an hour, and the camera going at 60 miles an hour from the opposite direction. Essentially, we captured a 120mph collision as a car flipped in front of us.”

The high-speed chase cars were provided by Allan Padelford (Days of Thunder), and allowed Bay and Fiore to capture much of the excitement very quickly. “One of the cars we used was the Porsche Cayenne,” adds Tomita. “It is the new high speed chase car that not only gives you the maneuverability and horse power, but keeps all the operators inside the vehicle. This is extremely important in our safety conscious world. In addition, we had John Sarvis with his shifter car—a little go-cart that can go up to 130mph. Instead of swerve, it shifts left to right. The small car has no roll cage, but can be driven by an expert into some wonderful positions.”

Tomita dubs The Island as a ShowBiz Expo promotion. Every tool available to man was used to capture the action—high speed inserts with the Technocrane, XR head, Libra Head, Sparrow Head, LitePanels, toplights—whatever. “It’s very grip intensive, but that’s a Michael Bay shoot,” says Tomita. “He loves his grips. Whenever he gets frustrated, he turns to a grip and says fix it. He’ll come to us, knowing that when he makes it clear what he wants, he can get it.”

“Michael’s movies always look slick and polished but the look is achieved in a surprisingly rough way,” adds Emmerichs. “One of the challenges of working with him is the need to learn what you can get away with visually. It’s all done with lighting, the right selection of camera lenses and positions, a good sense of timing and simply knowing what will look good in Michael’s quick cutting style. The entire shot doesn’t need to work all the time, but each cameraperson has to know what parts need to work. The timing of a flare with a line of dialogue or a wipe or whip-pan melding with an actor’s turn in slow motion is important. These are all details that Bay looks for. I think my job—our job—is to understand and find them. If we could work out a camera move that makes Michael and Mauro happy, it left Mauro with more time to work on the lighting. On The Island, the one thing Mauro didn’t have was lots of time to light.”

“We also didn’t have time to look at dailies together on this picture, which was a crime,” adds Fiore. “Don’t get me wrong, I love to use all the newest technology because it helps make a picture better. However, that said, some of the new technology makes us distance ourselves from creativity as well. Now that we are doing DI, work print dailies are archaic and I don’t know why. Today, everyone gets a DVD or HD of the dailies that are projected in a little trailer. People look at them solo on different monitors that aren’t adjusted. Making aesthetic choices based on these versions can be wrong, or at least difficult.

“I miss working with a lab,” continues Fiore. “I would rely on John Bickford and Mike Czacarya to talk about how the negative looked—about light and exposure. Now, digital printers make whatever they have look ‘best’ and we don’t know about the exposure or the state of the negative. This makes it difficult to gauge or take a risk. You can’t push the photography to interesting places, because you don’t really know what you have. One of the things that I don’t enjoy is playing it safe. And, sometimes, when you are looking at digital dailies that’s all you can do.

“Fortunately, Michael Bay’s creativity didn’t allow us to play it safe on the set. As I looked at the digital dailies by myself, I could see that. The trailer isn’t ‘safe’ and ‘pretty’—it says something about what could possibly happen in the near future. I think that despite the restrictions in time, tools, and toys we really did something special with The Island. I hope that the audience not only enjoys the ride, but starts to think about what could be, should we let the world as we know it get away from us.”