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The
Future Ain’t What it Used to Be By
Bob Fisher The Time Machine is a faithful rendering of a classic H.G. Wells 1895 science fiction novel that explores a dark side of humanity. Alexander Hartdegen, played by Guy Pearce, is a scientist in Victorian England who invents a time machine intending to reverse a personal tragedy by visiting the past and altering history. His invention goes wrong and sends him soaring on a journey some 800,000 years into the future. It isn’t a happy journey. He discovers that an attempt to colonize the moon failed and resulted in meteor showers that devastated the surface of the Earth. The remnants of humanity have moved underground and evolved into a ruling class of Morlocks, and an exploited working class of Eloi who labor in factories in bitterly harsh conditions.
In 1960, director George Pal translated The Time Machine from words printed on paper into the language of film. The film earned an Oscar for visual effects, but Leonard Maltin felt that Pal had reduced a classic novel to the level of “an entertaining comic book.” Critic Pauline Kael wrote, “The film deteriorates into comic strip grotesqueries.” McAlpine notes those criticisms could at least in part be attributed to the limitations of visual effects technology at that point in history. The remake was produced by DreamWorks, SKG and directed by Simon Wells, the great grandson of the author of the novel. It was his first directing credit on a live-action film. Wells had previously focused on animation, including a co-directing credit for The Prince of Egypt. The Time Machine was produced on stages at Warner Bros. studios and at practical locations in upstate New York as well as Los Angeles, Riverside and Santa Clarita, California, during five weeks of preparation and a 25-week shooting schedule. “I had taken some time off after Moulin Rouge, which was one hell of a job, and thought it was time to get back to work,” McAlpine recalls. “I was reading scripts and had actually decided on one, but the producer hadn't contacted my agent to close the deal. My agent told me this other great script had just turned up. I could hardly remember reading the book, and didn’t recall seeing the original film. My agent arranged for DreamWorks to send me the script by e-mail with a satellite download.” McAlpine agreed to shoot The Time Machine within three hours of downloading the script. He was fascinated by the story, which called for distinct visual styles that augmented the environments and moods for three different time periods.
Experience had taught McAlpine that the wind was likely to play havoc with conventional silk frames used to maintain a consistent look by flagging sunlight. Instead, he suggested using a massive 60 by 40 silk on a 150 foot long crane arm which could be quickly and relatively easily moved to block the sun from any direction and angle. “I knew we could fix the color of the sky in digital post, so it was always the same even though we were shooting elements of the sequence at different times,” he says. “I have been using that technique since I worked on Predator (in 1987). I realized straight away that any cinematographer who doesn't get some pretty strong knowledge of computer graphics is going to be left way behind. Even the most mundane movie now has digital effects elements. I knew from working with PhotoShop and DV editing, what we could do to fix the sky and other elements in that scene.” Those are just a few examples of how McAlpine drew on his eclectic base of experience and unique aesthetic instincts to design and render the reality-based looks in the three different worlds that were envisioned by H.G. and Simon Wells. McAlpine was born and raised in a very small, rural community in the New South Wales region of Australia. He got interested in still photography at around the age of nine, and built a darkroom when he was 11. He first used a 16 mm camera to record the motions of swimmers who were preparing for the 1956 Olympic Games. “I built an underwater housing,” he recalls. “We’d shoot the film and then project it in slow motion so they could try to figure out how to improve their performances. Later, I bought a Bolex camera and worked on a few personal documentaries.” McAlpine was still in his early 20s and teaching at a rural high school when he visited a television station in Sydney during an excursion. He saw a door that led into the news supervisor’s office and walked in. McAlpine announced that he owned a 16 mm camera and offered to provide news footage from his end of the world. He was given four, 100 foot rolls of Kodak Plus X film and a sheet of instructions for how to shoot a news story. McAlpine’s first news story was about a changeover from steam to diesel engines at the local railroad station. After that he became a regular contributor, and he was content in that role until the headmaster at his school said he had to make a choice. Teach or shoot news film. It wasn’t an easy decision, because McAlpine enjoyed teaching, but looking down the road of life, he wondered whether he would feel the same in 40 years. The television station hired McAlpine and assigned him to work on current affairs and dramatized documentary programs recorded on 16 mm black and white film. He subsequently moved on to Film Australia, a government sponsored agency, which produced movies promoting tourism, business, and occasionally short documentaries for cinema screens. That gave him the opportunity to shoot 35 mm color film. McAlpine earned his first narrative credit in 1972 for The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. His body of work includes some 40 titles with an eclectic mix of genre, ranging from My Brilliant Career to ‘Breaker’ Morant, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Stanley & Iris, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Clear and Present Danger.
“I believe you get around 40 percent more information,” he says. “Also, with the wider screen you are telling the audience that this is a cinema experience and not a made for TV movie. Almost every film I’ve shot during the past 15 years has been anamorphic. I find it is aesthetically more pleasing maybe 80 to 90 percent of the time, though there is no perfect format. Every format offers advantages and disadvantages.” Visual effects producer and supervisor, Kimberly Nelson and Jamie Price, respectively, opted to shoot effects elements in VistaVision format. The effects were scanned into digital format for composing and recorded back onto film. The camera package from Panavision included Primo prime lenses. He was planning to light for exposure at stops T-2.8 to 4, shooting off of dollies tracking with the actors and with a Steadicam. McAlpine also carried a 3:1 (270 to 800 mm) zoom, which was mainly reserved for close-ups, when he wanted to distance the audience a bit from a character. As the story evolves and Hartdegen is hurled into the distant future with scenes involving the Morlocks and Eloi, he made frequent use of handheld cameras for a more energetic feeling that matched the changing mood and look of the story. “The Steadicam glides beautifully, but you can't move it as quickly, and you can't shake it,” he explains. “With a handheld camera we could move instantly from one place to another. We used the older Panavision C series lenses for the handheld shots, partially for the rougher look, but mainly because it's lighter weight.” McAlpine likened the choice of film stock by a cinematographer to a musician selecting an instrument. The more you use it, the more you learn about manipulating the nuances in how it records colors, textures and shades of contrast. His palette included Kodak Vision 5279 500-speed film for all interiors and night exteriors. For blue and green screen elements, McAlpine chose the special purpose Kodak SFX 200T Color Negative Film, which is designed to record fine grain images with clean separations of characters in the foreground from background screens. McAlpine also used Kodak Vision 5246, a 250-speed film balanced for exposure in daylight sequences. The story opens in London during the 1890s. Those scenes were filmed during the winter in Albany, New York, simulating Bleaker Street in Central Park in Manhattan. “The architecture (at those locations) has an 1890s London look,” he says. “We shot in the winter, when it was darker and colder to match the mood in the opening scenes. As we move into the future, the light is cleaner, everything becomes a bit brighter and with stronger colors. That’s something we want the audience to be feeling instead of noticing. We did it with production design, lighting and during timing.”
“We are asking the audience to make a leap of faith by believing that somebody can move through time,” he says. “That’s why it has to look realistic. The early scenes are motivated by practical light from that period, including candles, lanterns and streetlamps. Even as our character travels into the future, we tried to keep it from looking like a fantasy. Much of the story occurs at the same locations at different times in history.” There is a scene where Hartdegen drops into New York City some 30 to 40 years in the future. The moon is disintegrating and showering the Earth with its debris. “There are flaring lights and dialogue is overlapping,” he says. “As we move deeper into the future, the Morlocks and Eloi live and work underground. It’s a much more frantic look and a down-and-dirty setting. We used SoftSun from Lightning Strikes, which produce an incredible amount of light. They are daylight-balanced so we were using red gels to imply that most of the light came from fires in big furnaces.” McAlpine observes that Pearce is in almost every scene with Yancey Arias, Jeremy Irons, Philip Bosco, Phyllida Law, Mark Addy, Samantha Mumba and Sienna Guillory among the actors cast in supporting roles. Pearce watched every foot of dailies with McAlpine. “Some directors won't have actors at dailies,” McAlpine observes. “As a general principle, I don't like them there either, because it restricts your ability to talk with the director, but Guy was never a problem. He’s a fine actor, but he acted like one of the crew. He rarely spent time in his trailer and never said a word about how he looked.” McAlpine also had good things to say about the studio. “DreamWorks certainly lived up to its name,” he says. “Their support was amazing. There were no compromises. I got everything I needed. It’s my job to translate directors' and writers' ideas into images, and no two people do that exactly the same way. I drew on everything I’ve learned, including my early experiences shooting documentaries. If a million people look at just one painting, chances are they’ll come away with a million different ideas; and a lot of them will be very similar but radically different. It’s the same thing making a movie.” When McAlpine is asked if he ever wonders how his life would have turned out if gave in to the headmaster who wanted him to concentrate on teaching? His reply is that he never gave up teaching. In between projects, McAlpine occasionally teaches at the Film and TV School in Sydney. “I tell them I've been in this business for almost 40 years, and from day one, people have been telling me that everything is going to change,” he says. “They said film would be out of style in two years. I tell my students to be open to all ideas because everything they learn will be useful no matter how images are recorded or shown to audiences in the future. I don’t think good visual storytelling will go out of style.” |
Wells’
novel was an allegory commenting on life in England at a time when the
aristocracy was living off the labor of the working class. Don McAlpine,
ASC, ACS observes that Wells wrote the novel at a time when the concept
of science unlocking the mystery of time travel probably seemed possible
and maybe even likely. 
“The
fundamental story and ethic is the same as the book,” he says. “It is
a story from the point of view of somebody who lived in the 1890s. That’s
what makes it believable. Within a week of reading the script, I was
at meetings with Simon (Wells) and (production designer) Oliver (Scholl)
discussing how we were going to approach solving some of the big visual
challenges. For example, a very important chase scene, involving the
Morlocks and Eloi, takes place at sunset. It was scripted to last for
about seven minutes. They were planning to shoot this scene in a huge
valley. I realized that we had to figure out a way to create a consistent
look so all of the elements cut together.”
At
his first preproduction meeting, McAlpine championed the concept of
producing The Time Machine in 35 mm anamorphic format (2.4:1
aspect ratio), partially because he felt that the scope of the wider
screen images was right for the story, and also to take advantage of
the larger picture area to create higher quality images. 
McAlpine
lauds his gaffer, Steve Mathis, and both the first and second unit camera
crews. The first unit crew included operators, David Diano, SOC, and
Ray De La Motte, SOC, assistants Patrick McArdle, Jan Ruona, Mary Funsten
and Chuck Whelan, Steadicam operator Chuck Brown and loader April Kelley.
The second unit was led by Hiro Narita, ASC. They were mainly recording
background elements for digital composite shots and close-ups of the
Morlocks. Narita’s crew included operators Vern Nobles, Jr. and Don
Thorin, Jr., assistants Wayne Baker, Jennifer Bell, Bruce De Aragon
and Rigney Sackley. Thorin also handled the Steadicam.