The Big Picture, page 4
You may think, Well, if you have a choice, why not build everything? It’s faster and cheaper, and allows for greater creative flexibility….
But it’s never that simple.
While building a set contains the production and provides a greater degree of control, shooting at a live location often opens a scene up. Consider two scenes, both of which involve a couple of people on a beach; Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond in Sabrina and Nick Nolte and Blythe Danner in The Prince of Tides. Both call for two people interacting on a beach at night, yet one we built on a stage in New York and the other we shot live on Fripp Island in South Carolina.
Although we flew to Martha’s Vineyard on Sobrina to shoot some practical locations—houses, streets, et cetera—director Sydney Pollack chose to shoot the picnic on the beach on a stage in New York so we could control the environment. We actually built ourselves a little corner of Martha’s Vineyard at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens. We brought in twenty tons of sand, a dune fence, built a rickety pier and a gas-fueled fire pit, and we had ourselves a beach. No pounding ocean waves, no wind blowing Julia’s hair or drowning out the dialogue. The DP, the great Giuseppe Rotunno (cinematographer on nine films with Federico Fellini), was able to manipulate the amount of light in the night sky and the size of the flame in the fire pit quite easily inside the studio. We didn’t have to wait for the sun to set or the tide to shift. We could shoot our night scene during the day, leaving the crew and the actors fresh and the schedule simplified. Building on the stage was cost-effective and it worked artistically for the scene because the picnic was shot in intimate close-ups. For this scene, Sydney didn’t need a wide shot of the beach. We moved the walls, not the trucks. Building a set gave us total control.
Yet for Barbra Streisand’s The Prince of Tides, we headed out to the beach on Fripp Island, near Beaufort, South Carolina, with truckloads of equipment and a full crew. I had to monitor the weather, study tide charts, and deal with the fluid nature of wind, water, sand, and light. In this particular scene, the character of Tom Wingo, played by Nick Nolte, sprints across the sand along the water’s edge in anger and frustration after a confrontation with his wife, played by Blythe Danner. Since Barbra wanted a wide, expansive shot of the beach, the aesthetic requirements of the script made the decision for us. It was simply too much to build on a stage. The truth is, we can build a small corner of the beach, but not the whole thing.
Yet the decision to build a set, or to travel to a location, is affected by more than the size of the lens on the camera and the scope of the scene. On the film Just Cause, the script called for a number of scenes to be shot in the Florida Everglades. Some of these scenes required a wide lens to showcase the beauty and expanse of the Everglades in the daylight, so we shot these scenes at a live location. The shooting crew went to a makeshift “alligator boot camp” to learn about the swamp. It was no comfort to hear that alligators can run faster than a man, or that it was mating season and they were particularly aggressive and prone to lurking in the drainpipes.
Even though we took every precaution, there were still significant risks working in such an environment. On the shoot, we had three armed alligator wranglers with us at all times. Since alligators are a protected species, the wranglers went in before the call to humanely and temporarily remove as many of them as they could from the area where we would be filming. But it quickly became clear that there was no way we could safely shoot the night work on location. The dynamics of the Everglades shift when the sun sets. It was far too dangerous to send the cast and crew into this environment with the poor visibility offered at night. But the dark of night mandated by the script also meant we didn’t need to see much background. So for the night work, we re-created a section of the Everglades with pools of water two feet deep and thousands of trees on a stage the size of a high school gymnasium.
You might ask, If you went to the effort and cost of building the Everglades, why didn’t you just shoot the whole sequence on the stage? Simple. We couldn’t build enough of the Everglades for the wide daytime shots to work. But under the cover of darkness, the built set filled the bill. We shot the Everglades live and we built it on a stage. In so doing, we met the artistic needs of the film and the practical safety issues of the location, as well.
But these examples are all of exterior locations. What about interiors? Plenty of scenes are shot at locations that don’t offer either wide-open vistas or life-threatening reptiles. How about apartments, offices, restaurants? Why not just build all interiors?
So far, we have managed to ignore the more straightforward issue of the budget. What is the cost differential between building a set on a stage and “buying” that live location? If we build, there are construction costs, but we can move faster. If we shoot on location, we must rent that location for the time that we are there and we lose roughly half a page a day.
The math gets interesting, in part because what we are building doesn’t have great structural demands. For example, when we build a set on a stage, there is no foundation, no insulation, plumbing, wiring, or ceiling. Walls are often built with lightweight wood backed by bracing, not two-by-fours and Sheetrock. Anything not in the shot—say the exterior of a house—isn’t built at all, and anything that can be “cheated,” is. The marble columns for the United States Supreme Court set in Rod Lurie’s Nothing But the Truth were made from cardboard cylinders and faux, trompe l’oeil, marbleized paint. As a result, building costs, which can vary greatly depending on what is being constructed, run eighty to one hundred dollars per square foot, compared to standard building costs, which can run three to five times that.
While each set and each film is different, there is a rule of thumb that if we are going to shoot at a location for more than three days, it may be economically feasible to consider building it. On the other hand, if we have less than three days—say just a few pages of dialogue—it’s probably not worth the cost of building. We can undoubtedly find a location in the real world that will work artistically and cost less than building a set, even after factoring in the lost half page.
It starts to become apparent why some scenes are shot on built sets and some on practical locations. The built set at the studio is more contained. No pedestrians. No alligators. No tides or unscheduled gusts of wind. Fewer surprises. No travel time. A built set provides easy access to everything we need and offers us speed, flexibility, and the opportunity for innovative shots. For this reason, we built an entire nineteenth-century Eastern European city the size of a football field (designed by Santo Loquasto) on a stage for Shadows and Fog. The film, brilliantly photographed by Carlo Di Palma in the style of German Expressionist films, with exaggerated and symbolic use of light and shadow, arresting architectural structures, and circular shots, would have been extraordinarily difficult to execute as well if we had shot it completely at night and on location.
But consider that there are places with extraordinary production value—say that ancient amphitheater we shot at in Taormina, Sicily, for Mighty Aphrodite, the streets of Paris for Sobrina, Central Park, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Low Country of South Carolina, or the boardwalk at the Jersey shore—that would simply be too costly or not feasible to re-create on a stage and that should be shot live. Then consider that for A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, we got the best of both worlds when we built a turn-of-the-century farmhouse and then brought it to a location so the interiors and exteriors could be tied together.
As filmmakers, shooting live locations offers us a patchwork of stitched-together days: a street corner in the morning, an apartment in the afternoon, two days at an office across town. We keep the trucks and the crew moving. There is travel time between each location, the load-in and load-out of equipment. With each move, the camera’s not running as the clock slowly consumes the shooting day. Each new location presents both obstacles and advantages. The production value of the architecture and authenticity offered by Grand Central Terminal, offset by the logistics of dealing with the crowds, the restricted hours, the noise. Throw in some live trains, the third rail, the fluid, frenetic pace of rush hours. And while it may be faster, cheaper, and in many ways easier to build our sets and shoot everything in the studio, remember that shooting on location offers a great deal of aesthetic value. In so doing, we capture both the grandeur and the patina, the unparalleled appeal and grit of New York, the architecture of Paris, or the feel of the South Carolina Low Country in a way that would be impossible to do on a stage.
But don’t forget the financial component, or the three-day rule, or the production value of a wide-open beach. And don’t forget that while Hollywood has its back lots, only New York has New York. And that it is on the shoulders of this city, on her avenues and behind her doors, in her neighborhoods and on her faces, that East Coast filmmaking is borne. Think back to the rich history of modern New York cinema. Begin in 1954 with the eight Oscars awarded to Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront. Then think Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Broadway Danny Rose, or Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. Think Sidney Lumet and Serpico, Network, and Dog Day Afternoon.
So move the walls, not the trucks. Go ahead and build that office, that apartment, that corner of the beach. But then get it real, and get it right and find some locations on the streets.
10
KNOW YOUR WAY AROUND THE MARKETPLACE AS WELL AS THE PALACE.
MY very first film as a Directors Guild trainee in 1978 was Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers. A really tough project about the 1960s and the street gangs of the Bronx. The real-life stories of the Fordham Baldies, the Ducky Boys, and the Golden Guineas—a sort of West Side Story, just farther north.
I had never spent much time in New York prior to this, and found the decaying, burned-out neighborhoods of the South Bronx, with the requisite dead dogs, rotting stench, and drug dealers, a harsh introduction to this city and about as far removed from my perception of the glamour of the movie business as you could get. The welcome that of a night shoot, a fire in a trash can, and random gunfire fueled my inclination to run for cover and completely overshadowed both New York and new job. Most of the time, I was too concerned for my life to care much about the neighborhoods south of Fordham Road.
The year before I arrived in New York, in 1977, NASA sent out the twin Voyager spacecrafts, space and time capsules with a recording of greetings in fifty-five different languages, in the hopes of making contact with extraterrestrial life. Both spacecrafts containing a gold-plated record with some “murmurs from the Earth.”
I remember thinking at the time that there were close to seven thousand languages known to be spoken in the world. In Papua New Guinea alone there were 820, all of them indigenous, yet NASA thought they might get a hit with one of the fifty-five. That some life-form in another galaxy might be able to decipher Sumerian or Sotho.
Walking quickly through the streets near Fordham Road in the Bronx, mostly late at night or at sunrise, when the only people out were the very down-and-out or, odd as it may seem, those earning a studio paycheck, I would have sworn that there were far more than 820 languages being spoken in just a single block of the Bronx. That the streets around Fordham Road and Valentine Avenue surely must top New Guinea, if not in indigenous, then at least in the category of immigrant languages. Or if not in languages, then in dialects. Those linguistic offshoots and mutations aptly defined as “an unimportant tongue lacking official status.”
Which brings me back to Fordham Road and my introduction to the dialect of the street. A dialect that, due to the circumstances of a particularly tough night, I dubbed “Stoop.” Stoop, a succinct pattern of speech, short and to the point. Introduced to me by the phrase, “get the f—k off my stoop or I’ll shoot you.” It was a real Marie Antoinette meets Betty Crocker—“Let them eat cake”—moment for me as I was held hostage by a chunk of cement and left to contemplate the firepower behind this “unimportant tongue.”
We were hoping to put a light on a certain set of concrete steps, the self-proclaimed owner of which had neither a signed deal with the location manager nor a permit for the gun he was toting. Or for that matter, skills in the subtle art of diplomacy.
Stoop, as I call it, is a regional dialect, or, more accurately, a sociolect: a dialect of a specific social class. Over the last thirty years shooting in New York’s most derelict neighborhoods, I have become quite fluent in Stoop. It is a dialect that you pick up very quickly if you have tendencies toward self-preservation, and one that responds well to both respect and payments in cash.
I must admit that I vastly prefer Stoop to the other dialect I learned since coming to work in the film business. This is also a sociolect, which I call “Studio.” (Think private jet, Hermès scarf, BlackBerry, no socks.) New York “street” doesn’t translate very well to West Coast “office.” Since people in Hollywood rarely speak the sociolect of the cement steps, a statement like “Get the f—k off my stoop or I’ll shoot you” is not well understood. The response is usually, something like, “Did you tell him we are shooting a movie?” At which point you put down the phone and look over at the live set, at the streets even the cops tell you they won’t go down, and you wish that somehow you could describe the stench of this little corner of the world, or the look in the eyes of the crowned king of the concrete steps to that guy in the cashmere sweater vest on the West Coast. You are certain that if he could just smell what you smell, he might better appreciate the very direct dialect of Stoop.
You try a rough translation of Stoop to Studio when you say, “One of the locations is holding us up for more money,” and Cashmere Sweater-vest, No Socks now instantly understands. “Well, just buy him out. Offer him cash. How much could he want? What could that piece of real estate possibly be worth?”
You know that that stoop is worth all the world to that guy in the South Bronx. It is all that he has. A couple of concrete steps. Yet Marie Antoinette, eating gâteau au chocolat on the West Coast, can’t possibly understand that.
But because money is the universal language and currency of both Stoop and Studio, you trudge back to the stoop with studio’s offer of cash and you buy yourself a couple of very expensive concrete steps. All the time wondering about bulletproof vests and whether or not NASA, even for a moment, considered putting “Get the f—k off my stoop or I’ll shoot you,” a murmur from the South Bronx, on the recording for the Voyager spacecrafts. Because somebody, somewhere, should plate that in gold.
So learn your way around both the South Bronx and the Hollywood Hills, around the seven thousand languages, the immigrant and the indigenous, the dialects of concrete steps and of cashmere sweater vests. Learn your way around the marketplace as well as the palace, because “We’re making a movie here” doesn’t mean much if all a person has in the world is the dialect of the streets and the chipped concrete beneath his feet.
11
GREAT CINEMATOGRAPHERS ARE WORTH THEIR WEIGHT IN GOLD.
THE director of photography is, of course, an expert in the nuance and mechanics of the equipment and techniques of film photography, from cameras and lenses to lighting, blocking, shot composition, film emulsions, and filters. So, from a strictly practical perspective, a great DP is worth his weight in gold because of his technical expertise and ability to address the day-to-day photographic needs of a film with practical knowledge.
However, from an artistic standpoint, the director of photography is worth his weight in gold because he is integral in defining the cinematic style of a film. A great DP is not only a master technician but also an artist in his own right, who plays a leading role in creating the look the director ultimately gets on the screen. A great DP will be recognized not solely for innovative shot design and sophisticated lighting techniques but also for the way these two elements come together and help define the film as a work of art. Since DPs all have their own unique artistic preferences and styles, and, not insignificantly, degrees of training, experience, and ability, the selection of a director of photography for a film project has far-reaching consequences.
It is important to note that the personal style of the cinematographer affects not only the look of the film but the process of filmmaking, as well. A DP who can block and light a scene fast, and who can design shots in inventive and economical ways that enhance the look of the film, has a direct and immediate impact on the schedule and budget. But even though the speed with which the cinematographer can light has a huge impact on how fast we can do the day’s work, it is the cinematographer’s contribution from an artistic standpoint that ultimately matters.
Many people don’t understand that the director of photography does not actually operate the camera. Under the direction of the DP, a separate and highly trained camera crew, which includes an operator and two camera assistants, does that. Instead, the director of photography works with the film’s director to craft the look of the film. He or she has to understand the director’s vision for the project as a whole, as well as for each individual scene, then work in consort with the director and key department heads—set design, wardrobe, makeup, et cetera—to execute it.
In the collaborative art of filmmaking it is impossible to completely separate out the contributions of the director of photography from those of the director of the film, especially if you are considering the work of world-class artists like Gordon Willis, Carlo Di Palma, or Sven Nykvist, to name a few. Unquestionably, the film director is responsible for the totality of the film, and certain arenas, like casting and performance, the director owns completely. But when you look at the actual photography, the shot selection, the lighting, the way the camera moves, it is harder to pull apart the interwoven threads of the partnership between cinematographer and director.
