Blood Brothers
Jeffrey Kimball, ASC sheds light on uncommon comrades in Windtalkers
By Bob Fisher         Photos By Stephen Vaughan

Windtalkers is set in the Solomon Islands during the early days of World War II. The Japanese army invaded and occupied Saipan, Guadalcanal and other strategic locations during the opening days of the war. It put them within reach of oil and other natural resources they desperately needed to win the war. The United States Marines were dispatched to dislodge them. It was a brutal battle and the beginning of the end of the war in the Pacific. The film is an original story with a foundation in reality. It was written for the cinema by John Rice and Joe Batteer, and directed by John Woo.

Windtalkers chronicles combat on an epic scale with thousands of troops engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Cinematographer Jeffrey Kimball, ASC covered these big master scenes with as many as 15 cameras with some of them isolating the action on individual actors engaged in mortal combat. The "windtalkers" were Navajo Indians who gave the Marines an incalculable advantage. They wrote and decoded secret messages in their native language. The enemy didn't have a chance of breaking the code without a Navajo speaker. In the film, Marine Sgt. Joe Enders, portrayed by Nicholas Cage, is assigned to protect windtalker Ben Yahzee, played by Adam Beach. One of Enders' orders is to kill Yahzee if the Japanese are about to capture him.

The relationship between Ben Yahzee and Joe Enders begins with a growing sense of respect leading to friendship. That makes it all the more interesting when it seems likely that Enders has to decide whether to betray Yahzee.

"John Woo first mentioned that he would be directing a big outdoor movie with lots of explosions, action and horrific violence while we were working on Mission Impossible II," says Kimball. "He asked if I was interested."

That was like asking a fish if he was interested in swimming. Kimball observes, "John is the type of director that I would follow pretty much anywhere. He has a point of view, and allows me to participate in telling his stories. Most of the films I've worked on have been based on that sort of personal relationship. I'm also interested in all kinds of history, so this project had a lot of appeal for me from that perspective."

Woo brought Kimball onboard some two months before they started shooting in Hawaii. They began scouting locations where the epic battle scenes would be filmed along with production designer Holger Gross, and gaffer Dan Delgado, who has frequently collaborated with Kimball on feature films and commercials.

"We didn't appreciate the scale it was until we were scouting," says Kimball. "There was a lot of terrain. John (Woo) would stand on top of a hill and we'd watch him walk back and forth, looking around. He would describe what the scene we were going to shoot there was about, concentrating on the emotions. John left us a lot of room to interpret. He doesn't spend a lot of time talking to other people about his ideas, but they are well thought out. He also works off of inspiration."

Kimball recalls that his first impression of the script was that beneath the surface of the action, Windtalkers is kind of a dysfunctional buddy movie with an overlaying feeling of futility. There aren't any Japanese characters developed in the story, but a lot of Japanese soldiers and United States Marines are killed.

"The story has kind of a soulful feeling, but not the kind of beautiful lighting that gets attention," he says. "We had to light huge areas for coverage from 360 degree angles with 13 to 15 cameras. Some of the cameras were flying around on Super Technocranes, pulling the audience into the middle of scenes. Other cameras were static, and we also had a few Eyemos that were carried by operators wearing combat uniforms, who looked like characters. Sometimes we tracked along the edges of a scene with a Super 8 camera for film that could be used as Sgt. Enders' flashbacks."

After the biggest master shots for the huge action scenes were in the can, Kimball was usually using two Steadicams and four other cameras to cover action.

All cinematographers bring the sum of their life experiences to each project, so it is important to establish Kimball's background. He was born in Wichita, Kansas where his father was in the aerospace business. When Kimball was four or five years old, his family moved near Dallas, Texas, and later on to Detroit, Michigan.

"When my mother passed away I found a big scrap book full of photos of movie stars," he recalls. "I guess she was a fan, but I never realized that before. My father's family had a musical background. My great, great grandfather started a school of music for the University of Nebraska. It's still called the Kimball School of Music."

Kimball had a paper route when he was 13. He won an 8mm movie camera as a prize for selling subscriptions. In high school, Kimball and several friends used the camera to create little movies. He majored in psychology and music at North Texas State College, and after graduation began his career in Los Angeles with Lee Lacey, a commercial director. When Lacey opened an office in Dallas around 1968, Kimball was named staff director of photography. During that period, Kimball lensed the now classic Alka Seltzer campaign with George Raft and Mike Mazurki and another memorable series of spots that helped create an identity for Apple computers. His narrative films are an eclectic mix including Jacob's Ladder, Curly Sue, Stigmata, The Specialist, True Romance, Top Gun, Wild Things, Revenge, Beverly Hills Cop II and The Legend of Billy Jean.

Kimball likens Windtalkers to a Chinese opera, explaining that it deals with such ethereal values as betrayal and truth, honesty, friendship and kinship. All of these are threads weaved into the fabric of violence. That theme is constant in many of Woo's films.

Kimball says the decision to record Windtalkers in Super 35 format was obvious to him, Woo and Gross. The scope of the story required a wide screen (2.4:1) aspect ratio, and they wanted a kind of rough edge that wasn't too slick or glossy.

"We were staging big scenes like we were covering a real war," he explains. "It took six to seven hours to set up some shots, so we only got one take. Each shot was a massive undertaking with maybe 30 to 40 bombs and mortars exploding, guns firing, and 800 to 1,000 Marines running up a hill. We decided where we wanted to set up the cameras and they pretty much staged rehearsals around those decisions. We shot the battle scenes in continuity, starting at the bottom of the hill and working our way to the top inch by inch. There was a core unit of Marines that rehearsed for probably a few weeks, a bunch of stunt men and extras. We wanted a horrific feeling of realism."

In general, the camera work is subjective like a character in the story. Kimball describes it as a slightly documentary feeling with a tint of 1940s Technicolor footage. He experimented with various looks including Super 8 film for flashbacks.

"There is a lot of magic you can do in postproduction," he says, "but there is never an easier time to get a shot than when you're there shooting it. I believe my job is to give the director and editor (Steven Kemper) as much good photography as I can. You can create different things in post, but Super 8 has a distinct look. Everyone has different perceptions about what looks or feels right, and that's one of the things about the collaborative process that makes movies great. It always amazes me when I finally see a movie I shot on a screen in a cinema. There are always surprises about how the pieces fit together. I also used some Super 8 in Jacob's Ladder and Curley Sue."

Kimball notes that Windtalkers has some things in common with silent films because there are many scenes where the images speak for themselves and tell the audience about the attitudes of the characters without dialogue.

There are also tender moments when Enders is in the hospital where a nuance in softer lighting creates a feeling of empathy for him.

"You have to bring a lot of your own heart and soul to each project," he says. "Sure, we did some testing, but you have to trust your instincts. We were outside almost all the time, so we were always vulnerable to the weather. We had dust and rain storms, but we were expected to keep shooting no matter what because it was probably costing $200,000 to $300,000 a day shooting those big location shots. We were using two SoftSuns from Lightning Strikes. They were on all-terrain construction cranes, so we could follow the action anywhere with the lamps 60 to 80 feet in the air. When the sun went down and it started getting dark at 4 p.m., we just kept shooting and trying to match the light. We also had a Musco and six big arcs. Sometimes I'd lobby for some close-ups, so there's something to cut-away to in case the editor needed it.

"There is no artistic lighting in these shots that anybody is going to notice," he says. "It's not ugly, but it's not slick. There's a rough edgy quality. When we were shooting in Hawaii, we were air expressing film to Deluxe Labs, in Los Angeles, and we were getting dailies two or three days later. I would usually look at them at lunch with Dan (Delgado) and one or more of the operators. It gave us a realistic feel for what we were doing. We were solving new problems about how to light in a 360-degree circle while trying to interpret John's (Woo) ideas everyday."

Everything in the lighting and camera packages had to be anticipated and brought to Hawaii, including miles of cable. The cameras and lenses came from Panavision, in Woodland Hills, California, which gets high grades from Kimball for reliability of equipment in rugged circumstances and responsiveness to problems.

Kimball used a mix of Primo prime and zoom lenses, mainly 11:1, for variable focus. He says the 11:1 zooms were indispensable while filming big action scenes with characters and extras quickly moving in and out of the frame.

"You think differently about framing when you are shooting in a wide screen format, and Super 35 is different than anamorphic," he says. "It's a different look. Also, the cameras were almost always moving. The Super Technocranes were mounted on top of Chapman Titans. Sometimes John (Woo) would have us start a shot up high from a bird's perspective, and then we'd swoop down and move around to one side, and use that telescoping arm to get into places where it was impossible to lay dolly tracks."

After testing different emulsions, Kimball decided to standardize on the Kodak Vision 5277 film. It's a 320-speed film, which he rated for an exposure index of 100 to get a richer negative. Kimball used Tiffen Sunset grads on all camera lenses to compensate when the sunny sky got dark and overcast. He called for printer lights in the 20s and 30s with the goal of recording a slightly brownish, warmer tone with less contrast and a little mushier look than contemporary films.

Production was completed in Acton, off of Soledad Canyon in Los Angeles, at a veteran's hospital with 1940s-style architecture and a few other locations. "We filmed in the hospital with just two cameras and the lighting was a little softer, shinier and more luxurious."

Kimball comments on his long collaboration with Delgado. It stretches back to the 1980s when Ward Russell was his gaffer on commercials, and Delgado was best boy. "It's nice to have somebody to bounce ideas off," he says. "You can't change your mind on these big master shots. Danny found out what I had in mind while we were scouting locations, so there were no surprises if we needed extra lights or cable."

Delgado adds, "I know how he (Kimball) thinks, but I don't take anything for granted because every situation is different and he always follows his instincts. We went in several weeks ahead of time and laid immense amounts of cable. We brought five generators, which were camouflaged, so we could put them anywhere including the middle of scenes. On the big action scenes, we kept in touch with the crew by mini walkie-talkies."

Some members of the large crew were Guild members in Hawaii, and others came from the mainland. The camera operators included Greg Lundsgaard, SOC, Michael St. Hilaire, SOC, Jeff Mart, SOC, Leo Napolitano, Lee Allison, Douglas Olivares, Greg Schmidt and Sean Fairburn, SOC. Lundsgaard and Mart also handled the Steadicam. Assistant cameramen including Kenny Nishino, Dennis Seawright, Zoran Veselic, Greg Irwin, Tony Nagy, Bob Heine, Mike Weisbrod, Dale White, Vincent Mata, Don Steinberg, Shawn Landis, Jeff Day, John McEveety and Tom Haley. Nishino and Veselic assisted on the Steadicam. Other crew included Technocrane technicians James Favazzo and Brian McPherson. The loaders were Lynda Wu and Scott Ronnow.

In addition to the scenes at the hospital, there are shots of Enders and the nurse at several parties and a romantic night sequence on a beach. Occasionally, she writes him letters and Enders flashes back to memories of the car on the beach and there is a quick cut-away and Enders is back in the jungle in a tenuous fight for survival.

"In the hospital, we flooded the room with arcs coming through the windows, and we also had parallels on the grass," Kimball says. "There's another more softly lit scene with Joe Enders and the nurse on a breezeway at the hospital. We used Xenons for backlight. We lit the scene on the beach with a Bebee Nightlight and a little ambient bounce light inside the car. It creates a little contrast with the harsher look during the fighting."

You expect a film like this with big war scenes to have more than it's share of visual effects slight of hand. Cinesite visual effects supervisor Kevin Lingenfelser has worked with Woo on all but one of his American films, including Mission Impossible II, where he and Kimball first met.

"I happen to be a huge fan of John Woo," he says. "John is a visually-oriented director who likes to do as much as he can in camera and I respect that. We were fortunate to come onto the film early, which gave us an opportunity to plan and form a very close collaboration with Jeff, whose crew shot all of our plates."

Cinesite created an armada of 2-D warships for an early scene where the Marines were landing on the beaches in Saipan. They also created six CG warplanes that were integrated into a battle scene. The third scene is a shot of an animated butterfly, which serves as a visual metaphor for the calm before the storm. It's a long shot, approximately 900 frames, which is an eternity in visual effects time, especially when a CG character is the focus of attention.

"We fade up from black with the camera about an inch or two above a body of water at some indeterminable place in the jungle," Lingenfelser says. "The butterfly is far off in the distance on the left side of the screen. It kind of flitters around. A leaf floats by and the butterfly seems to follow it until it comes to the beginning of a trail of blood that enters the frame from screen right. The butterfly flies off the right side of the screen."

Lingenfelser says that Cinesite identified some 20 to 30 specimens of butterflies from the Solomon Islands. They showed Woo pictures and then used the Internet to locate people who had specimens of the butterflies that appealed to the director. After they acquired the butterflies, detailed photographs were taken with a macro lens and the images were scanned into digital format. Texture painter Brian Ridley used those images as references for studying textures, colors and other details. They also studied real time and slow motion live action film to get a handle on wing speed, velocity and height based.

"Our animator, Lynn Basas, used Maya software to build and animate a CG butterfly, which flies into the scene from a pretty good distance at a leisurely pace," he explains. "It hovers, which is obviously a different flying characteristic than just the normal flight path, and then it flies off the frame. It's very much a performance piece. The butterfly is about four or five inches in width and it fills about 15 percent of the screen once it gets into the foreground. It's moving throughout the shot. We can see its head, wings, body, legs and antennae with a lot of different patterns."

The trail of blood seems to be coming from a prosthetic dummy of a dead Marine who is floating in the water. The camera tilts up and pulls back revealing Sgt. Enders firing his weapon at a Japanese soldier hiding in the reeds.

"The artificial blood photographed very saturated and orange on film," Lingenfelser says. "We isolated the blood and gave it a more realistic, deeper, darker scarlet tone. The butterfly was composited onto that color corrected plate."

The CG airplanes were authentic to the Hellcats that were used in the actual battle. Lingenfelser notes that there were no Hellcats for test flights in appropriate geography. The 3-D artists used still photographs as a reference.

"Initially, there were only going to be two Hellcats," he says, "but we wound up with six. Two of them fly into the right side of the screen and off the left side. The other four digital planes are more dynamic. Two of them drop 500-pound bombs which were timed to practical explosions on the ground."

The armada of vessels, which included battleships, destroyers, light and heavy cruisers, were created in computer space and composited with plates photographed by Kimball's crew also in Super 35 format with the same 5277 film employed for live-action shots. There are other digital touches that add to the believability of the composites, including the addition of muzzle flashes from guns on the planes and ships.

"Jeff and his crew were the greatest," Lingenfelser says. "There are three shots that had zooms built into the plates. I didn't want to hinder Jeff's camerawork or John's overall vision. Needless to say, even with the proper camera data recorded, these shots were exceedingly difficult to track. Most current 2-D/3-D tracking software doesn't have the ability to track animated focal lengths, except for 3-D Equalizer, which Jeff Baksinski and his team used to make base tracks that were further finessed by hand in Maya. The final result is a more dynamic shot that is seamless with the rest of the footage."

Kimball concludes that every once in a while a cinematographer gets to help a director tell a story that has the power to both enlighten and touch people on an elemental level. He notes that 57 years after that seminal battle was fought in the Solomon Islands, the last four surviving windtalkers were invited to visit Washington, D.C., to receive medals from President George W. Bush.