Blues for a Red Planet

Stephen Burum, ASC highlights humanity’s first Mission to Mars

Why is mankind so fascinated by the neighboring planet Mars? Late pop culture scientist Carl Sagan attempted to answer that question in his 1997 bestseller Billions and Billions. "The planet Mars is today a bone dry frozen desert," he wrote. "But all over the planet there are clearly preserved ancient river valleys. There are also signs of ancient lakes and perhaps even oceans. . .we can make a rough estimate of when Mars was warmer and wetter. . .the answer is about four billion years ago, around the time life was stirring on Earth. Is it possible that there were two nearby planets with very similar environments, and life arose on one, but not the other? Or, did life arise early on Mars, only to be wiped out when the climate mysteriously changed?" If one follows Sagan's logic, Mars may hold the key to humanity's past and its future.

Set in the year 2020, Mission to Mars chronicles the adventures of a crew of NASA astronauts as it establishes a habitat on the mysterious crimson globe. An unexplained catastrophe obliterates the crew, leaving only Mars One Mission survivor - Commander Luke Graham (Don Cheadle). A rescue mission is hastily dispatched, but due to the hard-science realities of interplanetary travel, the recovery team - lead by Commander Woody Blake (Tim Robbins) and Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise) - will take six months to reach its destination. Can Commander Graham survive that long of a lonesome limbo?

Mission to Mars is the eighth movie collaboration between director Brian De Palma and cinematographer Stephen H. Burum, ASC, following Snake Eyes, Mission: Impossible (see ICG Magazine, May '97), Carlito's Way, Raising Cain, Body Double, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. Other credits for this director of photography include Hoffa, The Shadow, The War of the Roses, St. Elmo's Fire, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Rumble Fish and The Escape Artist.

De Palma entered production of Touchstone Pictures' science-fiction thriller rather late in the game. Decisions regarding locations, sets and casting had already been set into motion by another director, so De Palma had to hit the ground running and figure out how to bring in Mission to Mars on time without compromising the narrative's integrity. Bringing Burum on board was one of the director's first decisions. ICG Magazine recently sat down with Burum to discuss his photographic philosophy behind a motion picture that strove for a sense of scientific realism.

ICG Magazine: What does Mars feel like in this picture?

STEPHEN BURUM, ASC: It feels lonely because it is empty. There are no distant coyotes howling. We wanted it to look dangerous because you don’t know what’s around the next corner. We also wanted it to feel familiar in some indistinct way.

How did you go about making it feel ‘dangerous’?

BURUM: With camera movement, lenses and composition. We read from left to right. We don’t expect the camera to pan from right to left, because that’s counter to the way your eye scans. Remember that famous scene in Great Expectations where the kid is running up the side of the hill and the bad guy comes in from the right side? The movement was counter to what we expect, and surprise implies danger.

Obviously, the picture must have had a very limited color palette.

BURUM: There is a big opening scene at a barbecue in Texas that is colorful, but once you go into space everything becomes neutral. When they land on Mars, the background is a very rusty red. We kept neutral colors in the interior of the habitat, so when the astronauts are outside, the rusty red background hits people hard. Your eye adjusts to colors, so coming from a placid, neutral setting onto that red surface knocks your socks off. That [contrast] reminds the audience that the habitat is the safe place.

How much preproduction time did you have on Mission to Mars?

BURUM: We had six to eight weeks of preparation, and we inherited a lot of problems that had to be factored into our solutions. The biggest problem was that we were slated to shoot the exterior of Mars in Vancouver [at the Fraser Sand Dunes], where there isn’t a lot of sunny weather. The stages were already reserved. Brian’s first idea was to shoot scenes of the surface of Mars on a stage. When the production designer [Ed Verreaux, who also designed Contact] scaled it out, it would have required a huge stage, something 300 to 700 feet long and 145 feet high. I checked out the stage we had reserved and the ceilings were about 24 feet tall. There was about 200-by-300 feet of depth, but it had posts down the middle. We talked about finding a bigger stage, but decided that the cost of lighting it would be astronomical. Then the question was where were we going to shoot those exterior scenes? It was pretty chancy having to do it in Vancouver, but it was summertime and we gambled that the weather would hold. We found a place by the river and pumped in sand and some marshy material to create some 45 acres of an artificial Mars’ surface. We used 15,000 gallons of red paint and a bunch of red volcanic rock to create a convincing Martian landscape.

How did this approach influence lighting the exteriors on ‘Mars’?

BURUM: I treated it just like we were shooting on a studio backlot. I used a GPS [global positioning system] to calculate where the sun would be at different times of day. I also accounted for the hills on the horizon, so we would always be in direct sunlight for daylight exteriors. We did all of our lighting with reflectors because that worked best. Michael Lonzo shot the second unit, and Steve Poster [ASC] went to Jordan and shot some additional backgrounds of really wide-angle point-of-views of a rover vehicle going across the desert.

What was Brian De Palma’s plan of attack for shooting this alien environment?

BURUM: The most important factor to remember about doing a picture for him is that he wants to know what the geography is — where things are in relationship to other things — because that’s part of the drama. If somebody was following somebody else, you want to show it from that person’s point-of-view. He is very precise about subjective angles. Sometimes, it may not be aesthetically attractive to shoot the exact person’s point-of-view, but he knows what he’s doing.

Did he block out scenes with storyboards?

BURUM: He used a lot of storyboards, but mainly to make sure he had all the dramatic beats. It’s not about camera position — it’s about making sure that you have all the material you need to tell the story.

Did De Palma use a video monitor or remain with the camera?

BURUM: We had a video monitor next to the camera. He can look over the top of the camera at the actors or down at the monitor. He prefers to see the actors perform. You can’t see the subtleties on a monitor. It is only good for judging position and framing. You can’t even judge focus.

How did you deal with the various shadings of the Martian sky?

BURUM: Basically, the colors are the same as Los Angeles on a smoggy day. The sunlight is white and, because they don’t have the same atmosphere, shadows are a rusty or reddish brown. The art department came up with sky colors that we felt were realistic, and three different facilities — Dream Quest Images, Phil Tippett and ILM — did sky replacements on maybe 80 percent of our Mars exteriors.

Was interacting with three effects houses at all problematic?

BURUM: It’s a lot more time consuming than dealing with one because each had different methods. One wanted to use greenscreens and another bluescreens, and they wanted the screens lit differently. I ran some tests and gave each of them what they wanted. The hardest part is continuity and matching shots done by the different houses. At this stage, it is very important for the cinematographer to stay as involved as possible.

How did you collaborate with the effects artists?

BURUM: They had someone with us on the set. When we saw dailies, I indicated the looks we liked and provided that information to the effects houses handling sky replacement and other compositing. Brian had me ride hard on the three effects houses, so the look was right and matches from shot to shot and scene to scene.

It seems that a high percentage of Mission to Mars had to be digitized.

BURUM: Most of it. On all of the composite shots, we were encoding data which recorded information about camera angles, tilts, pans and rolls. The encoding made it much quicker and easier for the effects houses to match elements they were compositing.

Did you shoot in a widescreen or Academy standard aspect ratio?

BURUM: We shot in anamorphic [2.4:1] format with a Panaflex Millennium camera and C-series lenses. Brian felt we needed that feeling of scope. However, if a visual effect required wire removal or sky replacement, we used a VistaVision camera. This gave the effects house a larger image area to work with, without the anamorphic squeeze distortion to compensate for.

Why did you select the C-series lenses instead of Primos?

BURUM: I always try to use the same C-series lenses because they are smaller and focus closer. The second unit also had a complete set of matching anamorphic and VistaVision lenses.

How did you go about matching the VistaVision format with anamorphic lenses?

BURUM: The VistaVision lenses were a little bluer, but they were very good. Remember that the film was going to be digitized, so on all of these shots we could fix anything that didn’t match. The main problem with the VistaVision cameras is that the choice of lenses is limited, and they don’t have the range of accessories that we are used to.

Although Mars has a thinner atmosphere, does dust still blow in the air? And if so, how did that factor into your cinematography?

BURUM: The answer is yes. We created dust while shooting [with multiple 350-horsepower wind machines], and sometimes also added layers of digital dust in postproduction. It depended on the shot. We filmed a bunch of plates that were thin dust for the foreground, a little thicker in the air in the background. They digitized and sometimes layered it into a shot or scene.

I imagine that if you were on the surface of Mars, the horizon would seem to go on forever with extraordinary depth-of-field. Is that an accurate perception?

BURUM: That’s true, but we were shooting most daylight exteriors with a 200-speed film [Kodak Vision SFX] at [a T-stop of] 11, so we had very good depth.

What is your impression of the Vision SFX film?

BURUM: It’s a great-looking stock and the color tracks perfectly even in the shadows and highlights. I generally overexposed the sky a little and tried to bleed out some of the blues to help the matting later. We got very clean separations for green and bluescreen shots. We also used the Kodak Vision 5279 film [rated at 500 ASA in 3200° Kelvin light] for some of the interiors.

How did you treat the contrast in quality of light between Earth and Mars? Did you utilize different film stocks, filters, fixtures or a combination of all those elements?

BURUM: When you shoot something on Earth, what tells you that it’s on Earth is that shadows turn blue because of blue fill light in the sky. But the shadows on Mars are a rusty red. You always want to solve a problem like that in the simplest way you can because there is less to go wrong. We shot a test where we had a guy in a white spacesuit, and using a red space blanket on one side we tried to fill in the shadows by bouncing red light in. It was very satisfactory, except that you had to be within two feet of the actor. Around that time, I was watching a home improvement show on PBS. I saw them install a copper roof and noticed that its reflections on people looked like the right color. I went to an arts-and-crafts store and bought some copper foil. I had my key grip put it on foamcore and shot a test. It worked like a charm.

How did you apply lighting to this copper foil material?

BURUM: We did all exterior lighting with eight reflectors and covered the reflective surface with copper foil. We also had two 12K HMI Par lights. The use of reflectors was the most interesting and important decision we made. They served our purpose perfectly because we had a big surface that had to look untouched. All we had was a guy with a reflector on a tripod. If you want to change a light, it’s very simple. The guy picks up a reflector and moves it. It’s a lot faster than having four people roll out a light with a cable behind it. There is so much hype today about new technology, but that isn’t always the answer. They used reflectors during the earliest days of movies. In fact, some of the greatest Renaissance artists used reflected light to create moods and looks in the exterior scenes they were painting.

Did you alter your working method at all when shooting night exteriors?

BURUM: Because the moons [Phobos and Deimos] are the size of ‘peas,’ it’s very dark, so effectively there is no light. We didn’t plan for any night exteriors and that made perfect sense. In reality, they probably wouldn’t be wandering around the surface at night.

How did the fact that the astronauts wore helmets impact your photography?

BURUM: The biggest problem I anticipated was reflections on the space helmets. The standard NASA helmets are like big bubbles that reflect everything, including the blue sky and there’s no blue sky on Mars. You can try to tent around that, but you can only go so far. We shot some tests and decided it would take too much time to tent the entire area every time we shot exteriors, so we re-designed the space helmet. We had the art department sculpt a model, and we figured out the angle to tilt the helmet at [up or down] so it didn’t reflect the ground or the sky. It looks like a welding mask tilted slightly down. It was cut back far enough so we could get a profile shot of a person in it. Because it was a cylinder, we could put a light straight in and it would just reflect out to the sides. The only time you saw a reflection was if a light was at a 90-degree angle.

Do the astronauts wear the helmets just on the planet surface or inside the habitat as well?

BURUM: They wore spacesuits and helmets most of the time, and a lot of those shots were daylight exteriors with a pretty high level of light. That meant we needed some pretty bright lights inside those helmets. We also had to convert 3200 degree light to daylight and vary the intensity. We used a fiber optic rigged into the top and bottom of the helmets, fed by MR16 globes. For daylight exteriors, we used 75-watt globes. Most of the time inside, we used 35-watt globes. We also had to account for body heat. If it got too hot, the faceplate fogged up and you couldn’t see people’s faces. We used a little pump that ran off a 12-volt battery with a little fan that blew on the faceplate.

Can you see their faces through the helmets?

BURUM: Absolutely. In fact, our astronaut was blown away. He said he would have loved to see the other astronauts’ faces when they were fixing the Hubble telescope.

Shooting into the faceplates for close-ups of the astronauts must have been tricky.

BURUM: The Plexiglas faceplates are perfectly clear, so you can see details and even skin tones. There is just a bit of distortion, but that makes it seem more realistic and you can still see faces. Sometimes, I put reflections on the Plexiglas. There’s a sequence with an explosion that you see reflected on the faceplates. In some shots, we reflected the glow of Mars coming from underneath them.

How do you get a sense of Mars? Without any life — flowers, grass, birds or even insects — it seems like it would be a lonely place.

BURUM: We had an astronaut with us as technical advisor. Dr. Story Musgrave has spent nearly 1,300 hours in space. He’s one of the astronauts who repaired the Hubble telescope. He taught the actors how the body reacts when you are weightless. Just listening to him talk about the Earth and space helped us set the mood. The way he described it, you would never think of Mars as a lonely place, because even with the vast expanses there would be the constant excitement of the possibility of new discoveries. The astronauts are people who have spent their entire lives dreaming they would get a chance like this, and they are prepared for every possibility.

What else did you learn from Dr. Musgrave?

BURUM: I asked him if when people are weightless in space and are talking to each other, does it matter whether they are right side up or upside down? He said ‘No, but generally people would try and orient themselves right.’ Sometimes we had the camera at odd angles, so that the image was skewed and you didn’t know where the real horizon was. That gave the audience a glimpse of how the astronauts saw the world.

How did you handle issues of weightlessness onboard the spaceship?

BURUM: We had zero gravity in parts of the spaceship. That’s when we rigged the actors on wires. We also used teeter-totters. The shots were digitized, and the wires were removed. It’s like ‘Peter Pan’ — they can fly back and forth and up and down. Sometimes we filmed them in front of bluescreens, and other times it was green or blackscreens. Each effects house had its own preference.

How did you create a sense of low gravity when the astronauts walked along the surface of Mars?

BURUM: It is about one-third of Earth’s gravity, so we wanted to put ‘bounce’ into people’s steps. We overcranked a bit, shooting some scenes at 32 or 36 frames per second and others at 48. It depended on the action and how close we were to the actors. If it was a tight shot, 48 frames felt right. If the camera was further back, we shot at 32 or 36 frames. The basic rule is the closer you are the faster the frame rate.

What was your technique when filming onboard the spacecraft that brought the astronauts to Mars?

BURUM: That was all done on a set. We shot most of it with a Super Technocrane because you couldn’t build tracks in corridors. We’d remove a section of a wall or ceiling and we could go 30 feet deep into the set. All of our lighting was built into the sets. It was mainly fluorescents coming from instrument panels, and a few fixtures. Once or twice we created sunlight in the cockpit. We just positioned a light outside the cockpit window. If we were going to show Mars to the audience, we used a bluescreen outside the window and added it in postproduction. If it was black space, it was a blackscreen.

Were these scenes shot with one or multiple cameras?

BURUM: It was mainly one camera unless there was a big stunt. In one scene, we had a big dust storm with people being pelted with flying rocks and debris. We used the second camera just to cover it from different angles rather than shoot it again.

Does working with the same director on different projects make the job any easier?

BURUM: It doesn’t get easier. Because you feel challenged to do better than you did the last time, that pressure is always there. This was different than our other projects. It is a story that deserved to be told, but Brian had to quickly figure out whether it could be produced on schedule for the budget approved by the studio. He shrank the script without losing the heart of the story. Brian cut almost the entire prologue and concentrated on the mission. We had a short setup on Earth to establish the characters.

In your opinion, why is Brian De Palma such a successful director?

BURUM: He knows how to tell a story and understands what’s important dramatically and what isn’t. There is so much concentration on technology and techniques today, but the only important questions are ‘Do you know how to tell a compelling story?’ and ‘Are the people engaging?’ These are the attributes that make him a good director.

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