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The
X Factor As if James Bond were subtle enough to really be a “secret” agent, get ready for Xander “XXX” Cage (Vin Diesel), an extreme sports superstar known for his breathtaking and death-defying stunts who manages to become a top secret government spy in XXX, the summer’s next explosion-filled action movie from Columbia Pictures. The story? A band of anarchists is plotting to destroy civilized society, and the U.S. National Security Agency’s best undercover agents who have tried to penetrate the gang are showing up dead. Samuel L. Jackson plays a grizzled NSA agent named Gibbons who suggests that the agency needs to recruit an outsider. He chooses Cage, who is in no position to refuse, as he has recently stolen a congressman’s treasured red Corvette to use as a prop for an extreme sports video. The stunt ends with Cage driving the car off a 750-foot-high bridge, the Corvette exploding upon impact as Cage parachutes to safety.
Cage is an unlikely-looking spy with distinctive physical attributes, including a shaved head, bulging abs and radical tattoos. Asia Argento plays Yelena, a strikingly beautiful anarchist, and Marton Csokas is Yorgi, the anarchist leader. “It’s a lighthearted and dangerous story,” observes Semler, who collaborated with director Rob Cohen. “These guys (the anarchists) really act and look cool. XXX penetrates their circle and gets to know and like some of them.” Much of the story plays out against a contemporary Eastern European background, and it incorporates many breathtaking stunts. It was Semler’s first project with Cohen, whose directorial credits include The Fast and the Furious (which also featured Diesel), Dragonheart and Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. The link was Arne Schmidt who produced We Were Soldiers. “Literally two weeks after we finished shooting We Were Soldiers, Arne rang me up and said, ‘I have this film called XXX. Are you interested?’ He sent me the script and I thought it was a pretty good story with interesting action, but the truth is that I wasn’t ready to rush into another film. I had just completed shooting Dragonfly and We Were Soldiers back to back. Arne introduced me to Rob, who overflows with enthusiasm, and he painted this extraordinary picture of the story. All of a sudden the script came alive for me.” Revolution Studios produced XXX for release by Columbia Pictures. Production was slated for about a month in the outskirts of Los Angeles, 12 weeks on stages and practical locations in Prague and two days in Tahiti. “I was grateful that they allowed me to bring so many crewmembers to Europe,” Semler says. His crew included A and B camera operators Mark O’Kane and Richard Merryman, first and second assistants Tony Rivetti and Frank Parrish on A camera, with Fred McLane and John O’Connor assisting on B camera. Ingrid Semler was the camera loader. Alex Witt and Larry Blanford did additional cinematography including establishing shots of locations and Skycam work. Semler also brought his key grip “Bear” Paul, gaffer Jim Gilson, best boy and rigger Joey and John Martens, lamp operator Kelly Way, grip Kim Heath, dolly grips “Moose” Hallory and John Murphy, and Libra head technician Joe Buxon. Semler began his career as a props boy at a TV station when he was 16 years old, and operated a live video camera before segueing into news, documentaries and narrative TV movies. His second feature was the memorable Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. His credits include Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Young Guns, City Slickers, Last Action Hero, Waterworld, and Dances With Wolves, which earned both an Oscar and an American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Award in 1991. During the late 1990s, Semler directed several films, but realized he missed cinematography and migrated back to shooting. His recent credits are an eclectic mix, including The Bone Collector, The Nutty Professor II and We Were Soldiers
“There was no big discussion,” Semler says. “Rob simply said, ‘Cool.’ We had quite a bit of prep time. Our first meeting was in August, and we didn’t start shooting until mid-November. We made two trips to Prague to check out locations. There were also fantastic sets designed by Gavin Bocquet.” Their initial visual reference was The Third Man, a 1949 feature filmed in Vienna by director Carol Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker. “I watched it again and again and again,” says Semler. “We originally decided to go for that look with rich blacks and deep shadows. Gavin was very open to discussing our needs for lighting and he had a lot of ideas of his own. His sets were filled with lighting opportunities.” Semler says that he initially planned to shoot XXX entirely with a 100 or 200-speed fine grain film and emulate the richness of the look that characterized The Third Man. That was before he and Cohen began scouting locations in Prague. “When I saw the size of the locations and we began planning car chases down hundreds of yards of city blocks, I realized there was no way to light for a 100 or 200-speed film on our schedule and budget,” he says. Another factor was that they would be shooting in winter. It wasn’t going to be light until 8 a.m. and it was going to be dark by 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon. Semler decided to use the 500-speed Kodak Vision 5279 film for everything. He over-exposed it “a bit,” usually at 320 whenever he could. “I think it’s more efficient to use one stock,” he says. “As the day got darker, I’d pull the ND3 off and then the ND6 and the 85. There were times I pushed it to 1000 on night exteriors and it held up well.” During preproduction, Cohen had as many as three storyboard artists creating very specific drawings including angles and emulating lens sizes. There were also meetings with the extreme sports athletes who performed a majority of the action stunts. Semler notes that they played an integral part in the design of those shots, because they knew what could be done and what couldn’t, what was safe and what was risky, and what angles were best. They all had small recognizable parts in the film. Production in Los Angeles included several extraordinary action sequences set on a Colombian drug farm. One was a day shoot involving an actual C-123 cargo plane. “XXX has been drugged and wakes up on the floor of the C-123 with these other two guys,” Semler says. “They are flying five feet above the ground. The back cargo door drops down and the three of them are dragged out of the back and tumble to the ground. We shot as much of this scene as possible while the airplane was stationary so we had more control. I had 12K and 18K HMIs outside, and we also used 4Ks to get an ambience inside the plane when we weren’t moving. I had to recreate the look that we created with big lights while the plane was taxiing. I hid 2500 and 400 watt Pars around the cabin to match that look, and it worked. There were no lights outside the windows, because we had four propellers rotating, and we were moving and turning around on the runway. The drug farm covered five to ten acres with hills in the background. Semler simulated moonlight with Musco lights, including two 15-light rigs and two Mini Muscos that could be positioned and moved very quickly when necessary in-between setups. There was no camera filtration, but correction was added in the lab to remove blue from the light. “The power and the magnitude of those lights is marvelous,” he says. “They gave me enough light to get the stops I needed while shooting at night with long anamorphic lenses, including a Panaflex Primo 3:1 zoom. We generally did one take of the stunts by surrounding the actors with up to 13 cameras. We had a major night shot where XXX is trying to escape on a motorcycle. We used VFX supervisor John Frazier’s incredibly versatile flying rig motorcycle.
“For coverage, Vin was on the bike rig and we had him cabled to another crane for safety,” Semler explains. “We filmed him moving in every direction and angle from the perspective of a camera on a Technocrane. Rob loved using the Technocrane and Libra head to keep the camera moving.” The physical effects team mounted the motorcycle on a hydraulic rig on the arm of a Titan crane. That enabled Cohen to put the bike in any position he wanted using a computer to lock in repeatable moves. It turns out that this whole sequence is just a way to test Cage’s mettle to see if he is the right person to go after the anarchists. The NSA having found their man, the setting shifts to Prague. Semler brought a Panavision camera and lens package to Prague from the United States. It was exactly the same kit he used on We Were Soldiers. A local lab processed the negative. Even though the timer didn’t speak English, Semler says, “she did a wonderful job with dailies,” and he was able to communicate with her with help from the lab manager. Because they were shooting long days all around Prague with at least an hour of travel time, Semler decided to look at DVD dailies in his hotel at night. He was also generally able to look at film dailies from two days on Saturday nights, which enabled him to keep in touch. Semler says that seeing film dailies on Saturday was also a nice treat for the crew. “Prague is beautiful, particularly that time of year when the sun is golden and orange and low in the sky, but we didn’t get much of it,” Semler says. “Rob also worked very closely with (costume designer) Sanja Milkovic Hays. It was a fabulous wardrobe. Rob wanted to show off Vin’s body. He was in makeup for about an hour or so getting these tattoos on every morning, so we needed to show them to the audience. “The women were beautifully dressed,” Semler says. “Asia wears some magnificent clothes. She’s very tough, and sort of ruthless with kind of a feline beauty. We kept her in soft light whenever possible. There are shots where she and XXX are driving in an open car rigged with cameras for a mile or so down a road with the light constantly changing. They are passing through shade and sun. In a shot like that, I relied on the latitude of the film and the correction capabilities available in a digital intermediate process.” They shot an important sequence in the beginning of the film in a desanctified church. It’s a massive stone building with an arched stone ceiling that was some 60 to 70 feet high. A heavy industrial metal band from Germany called Ramstein was playing for a crowd consisting of some 500 to 600 extras. The band brought their own pyrotechnics and lighting. Semler had the physical effects crew place fire bars on the sides of walls. They shot flames 15 to 20 feet into the air. The fire bars were going on and off alternately lighting up the big room and sending it into temporary darkness. An NSA spy is shot and killed, which sets the stage for recruiting Cage. This is also the scene where the audience meets the anarchists. They are clustered on a balcony that is about 40 feet above the floor. “Shooting them was a nightmare,” says Semler. “Rob wanted a wide, sweeping shot from the floor, coming over the crowd and onto the balcony for our first close-up of Yorgi. We got a crane from Germany that went up about 48 feet with the Libra head. We had a huge track and extra grips pushing it as it went up. It wasn’t a meandering crane and track shot. It had to get there fast. We were shooting pretty wide open. Rivetti was on a scissor lift on the side of the set, where he was in position to see the lens and focus with a remote control device.” One of Semler’s favorite scenes occurs inside an apartment when Cage first arrives in Prague. It was gritty looking and sparsely furnished with three windows overlooking a side street. It was a real location with no breakaway walls, so Semler lit through the windows. He had an 18K outside of each window with no fill from the other side. He says that the B camera crew covered the scene with a “tight and dirty” two shot using a 400mm lens. Semler observes that when Cage walks towards the window the light on him gets hotter, and in the center of the room he’s half lit. When he turns with his back to the window there’s no light on his face and he is four and a half to five stops underexposed. There is a sequence in this room where another character has a dialog with Cage. They walk around the room in a two shot. The A camera follows them with a nice Steadicam move, while the B camera covers the scene more distantly from the perspective of a 400mm zoom lens. “You see the two heads with incredibly dramatic lighting that was half planned and half accidental,” Semler says. “It’s magical. Vin is perfectly rim lit and the other guy gets just a little bit of fill on his face. Then, they turn and go back the other way. It reminded me of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. I didn’t fill. I left it the way it was. The blacks are true black and the details in highlights are there.” Other locations in Prague included a bar they named the Zither Club as a tribute to The Third Man. The club is a hangout for the Russian mafia and other gangsters. It’s where Cage makes his first connection with members of the anarchy group. The location was kind of a catacomb under a castle located about an hour and a half outside the city. There were many archways and the ceiling was at different levels in different places. Semler mainly lit with some 40 sausage shaped HMI K56 200- and 400-watt soft tube lights with double blue gels. Each tube was about three feet long. He hid them behind chairs and in niches and created a deep blue up light on the walls. “I think it was the most difficult scene I have lit in my life,” Semler says. “It was a very low ceiling with archways and rock walls and no ability to light from overhead. The arches (leading to other areas) were about six feet high on the sides of the room and peaked at approximately nine feet in the middle. We had about three to four pages of important dialogue, and I was running A and B cameras to get the coverage Rob wanted and to help stay on schedule. “It is the first time we see Yelena,” he continues. “She has to be beautiful, and the guys have to look good. I lit from the floor with the tube lights. I couldn’t put anything up high. On any movie, there are always scenes you absolutely dread and wonder how in the hell you’re ever going to get through them. This film was full of those scenes. You just bite away at them bit by bit and eventually they’re behind you.” Another graphically interesting location was the interior of a building in Prague that is ordinarily used for testing transformers and electrical insulators. Semler estimates that it is about 250 to 300 feet long with an arched concrete ceiling that is probably 80 feet high. There were massive machines with huge copper coils and cylinders that looked like something out of a weird science fiction movie. When they are in use, approximately a million volts of electricity flows through these devices that light up the room with giant arcs of light. That industrial environment was the setting for a rave club. Semler didn’t use the real arcs of light, but rather CGI with interactive lighting. Semler says the room was jammed with some 800 to 900 “beautiful guys and girls with weird and exotic magnificent wardrobes.” A group from London called Orbital wrote music especially for this sequence and also provided their own smoke and lighting effects. Semler added smoke and light from five 4K Xenons and a few 2,500 watt Xenons. Their beams punched through the atmosphere. He also used 40K, 70K and 250K watt Lightning Strikes! for interactive effect. “Wherever they hit it, was like four, five or six stops overexposed,” he says. “I used two 8K balloon lights for ambiance,” he says. “It was a pretty wild show. We had three cameras rolling to give Rob as many options as possible in editing knowing that he likes to use a lot of cuts. We had a lot of action, a lot of players and a lot of smoke with interactive lighting. In this situation, you do the master maybe on Steadicam or wider shot, and the other two guys (operators) are on longer lenses. I’ve worked with (B camera operator) Richard (Merryman) since The Road Warrior where he was a focus puller. He’s totally instinctive. He can find the moments that are happening in a sea of people or action. He and Fred (McLane) just nailed the shots. The B boys generally get the cheers in the dailies, because their moments are unplanned, unrehearsed and unexpected, while the A camera crew has to guarantee getting the nuts and bolts of the story.” Semler likens Cohen to a circus ringmaster who skillfully orchestrated the flow of energy on the set and constantly kept everyone’s enthusiasm at a peak level. More often than not, Semler was shooting with two cameras and sometimes three. There were taps on the cameras, and Cohen was usually staying close to the monitors in the video village. Semler kept the monitors as close as possible to the A camera without creating a hemmed in environment. He wanted some space between the monitors and set. There is an important sequence that opens with Cage and Yelena in a romantic restaurant in the heart of Prague. The anarchists have discovered that he’s a spy. A sniper is concealed in a sculpture on a building on the opposite side of the street. The sun is behind him. Yelena knows that the sniper is waiting for a clear shot, but she has mixed emotions. When Cage moves in front of the window, she shields him. He instantly throws her to the floor out of harm’s way. XXX grabs a silver tray and races outside. He uses the tray to reflect a blinding glare while he escapes. “I couldn’t rely on it being a sunny day, so I had a 100K Softsun from Lightning Strikes! positioned on an 80-foot Condor,” Semler says. “I felt a little guilty bringing it to Prague for one shot, but that was the only way to light and shoot what was written on the pages. That single source lit the whole front of the restaurant, putting everybody into hard shadows from the sniper’s point of view.” As the story evolves, Cage succeeds in getting into the anarchists’ laboratory where they are assembling a doom’s day machine—a solar-powered boat armed with chemical weapons. The computer-controlled boat is programmed to cruise around the world taking out cities. Before Cage can stop them, the bad guys get the boat into the river and it speeds away. For an ensuing chase scene, Cohen introduced Semler to a new type of insert car that was developed for The Fast and the Furious. It’s basically a cut down van with a V8 engine. It can be driven and cornered fast, so the actors can feel every bump, vibration and the inertia of every turn. “The energy comes across without a doubt,” says Semler. “The scenery seems to be whizzing by like its 100 miles per hour. We used this car in several scenes with XXX and Yelena. I had two operators handholding cameras looking into the windshield of the car while XXX was driving. We also brought Danny Wayan’s motorcycle car from the United States for freewheeling coverage at a fast and furious pace. O’Kane and Rivetti were in the sidecar with a handheld camera. It was driving 50 miles an hour and stopping within inches of the mark.” Semler recalls, “Sometimes I’d look at the monitor and think Rob went too far, because there was not enough information in a shot, but he always assured me it was fine, and now having seen the film cut, I realize Rob was right. “The special effects guy built an amazing rig for this scene. It was a hydraulic crane with a bungee line that jerks XXX out of his seat about eight feet into the air. He’s attached to a parachute. XXX fires a harpoon into the back of the boat and parasails behind it until he slides down the cable and gets into the boat for the ultimate confrontation. We filmed the climax on a giant barge that held a mock-up of the boat. It traveled about 40 miles an hour, which translates into very high speed on water. At least 60 percent of the car and boat chase footage was filmed by second unit director/cinematographer Alexander Witt, and later more second unit work was done by Jim Arnett.” Just about six weeks after shooting the final sequence in Tahiti, Semler was timing XXX in a digital suite at EFILM. The film was edited off-line by Chris Lebenzon and Paul Rubell and the cut negative was converted to digital files at true 2K resolution. Semler had previously collaborated with EFILM colorist Steve Bowen and Deluxe Labs color timer Mike Stanwick during the finishing of We Were Soldiers. The digital files were projected on a screen that is 16 feet across. Semler would ask the colorist to show him different tweaks that were subtly brighter or darker, or with altered contrast or colors. There is also a film projector in the suite so he could run the work print side by side with the digital images. “I can’t imagine not timing movies digitally now that I have had this experience both on We Were Soldiers and XXX,” Semler says. “It is an extension of cinematography that influences your thinking while you are shooting, because you can make changes that are virtually impossible to do any other way. I can previsualize a shot, and if necessary, I can change colors and contrast without affecting anything else in the frame. I guess it is like dodging when you are printing still photographs. I think this capability will allow us to speed up shooting because sometimes it will be more efficient to remove objects from the frame during timing rather than when I’m on the set. Maybe the sky is too hot, a tree is in the way or I want to put a shadow on a building. I can choose to fix all of those problems during timing. It’s a tool that allows you to manipulate images and correct problems that can’t be done as efficiently in other ways. “Now more than ever, I think it is not only important—it is essential for cinematographers to make sure they are there while the film is being timed. There are so many small things that can make a big difference. There is a scene inside the C-123 where one of the other actors turns into a light that makes his face a little brighter than Vin’s face. That would have naturally drawn the eye of the audience to his face at a moment when Rob wants them looking at Vin, so we put a window on his face and took him down a bit.” There are many painterly touches like that one. At the end, the finished digital files were recorded onto color intermediate film that was used by Deluxe Labs to create an answer print on Kodak Premier print film. “Our relationship with color timers at labs isn’t going to change,” Semler says. “You want them by your side because they have great film eyes and understand how all of this is going to translate onto film prints that will be projected on a screen.”
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“It’s
an extraordinary stunt,” says cinematographer Dean Semler, ASC. “We
covered it from every angle with 35 and 16mm cameras and with video
cameras operated by some of the extreme sports guys who were part of
the stunt. We also had three Hi8 video cameras mounted on the car that
were cabled to tape recorders contained in a crash box in the trunk.
Cage drives off the bridge and drops 100 to 200 feet before he parachutes
and sails down. We’ve got part of the car in the shot. You can see the
bridge falling away behind him. The cutting is phenomenal. It makes
the stunt seem to take 10 times longer.” [For more on the filming of
this stunt, please see the sidebar, “
Semler
suggested framing XXX in anamorphic format (2.4:1 aspect ratio)
during an early discussion with Cohen. “I love anamorphic,” he says.
“It’s a different feeling. When I was preparing for Dead Calm
(in 1989), I shot Super 35 and anamorphic tests side by side. We had
the tests taken right through to release prints. The Super 35 footage
was projected first, and I remember thinking it looked phenomenal. There
was so much depth. Everything was sharp all the way through the horizon.
Then, the anamorphic images came on the screen, and they didn’t look
like a photograph. It was like you were there. That’s the difference.”
“XXX
soars about 30 feet in the air over a barn that explodes when his stunt
double—a young extreme sports rider—jets just a few feet beyond it.
It’s a massive explosion with real pyrotechnics. In fact, everything
we shot on the drug farm is 100 percent real. The only visual effect
was replacing the stunt driver’s face with Vin Diesel’s face, and there
was also some wire removal. As the bike came over the roof with a helicopter
lifting up behind it, it was moving toward a camera with the 3:1 zoom
lens that was shooting 96 frames per second. The other cameras were
running at various speeds from normal to 96. This is where the Musco
lights gave me the punch I needed for shooting up to T11, which I needed
for shooting 96 frames a second with a relatively slow lens.”