Lens choice

Working with models, we'd done some of that on Brazil, and I was gonna be doing a lot more on Munchausen later, and so it was a chance to try out lots of ideas. The extraordinary thing about building this great glass city was, again, we were on a very small stage, and we had to shoot with wide-angle lenses.

7:18 · jump to transcript →

to get it far enough away. The problem with that is that wide angle lenses distort things and you don't get true verticals. So every one of those buildings is carefully placed at a slightly different angle to end up with proper verticals. That was a dangerous moment. Sliding down the pole was our first and only injury on the thing. The landing wasn't good and I think he broke his ankle or certainly strained it.

7:36 · jump to transcript →

Oliver Stone

He looks at his claymore and he can't reach it because he thinks that if he reaches for it, it's going to make noise and they will hear it and kill him. He's terrified. He's looking at his grenades because he had told him to throw the grenades too. Don't fire. Blow your claymore, throw your grenades and shoot your rifle in that order. That's the standard policy. He can't do any of it. He can't call for his other men. He put a wide angle lens on the camera. It looks like they're further away from him. The enemy is getting closer.

20:32 · jump to transcript →

Oliver Stone

What the hell, it's only a movie. This is interesting, we have the NVA shooting at the, keeping the air support from getting too close and they're getting blown to smithereens. Squibs in the ground, that's tough, complicated. Great shot though, long lens, seeing them in the background.

1:19:54 · jump to transcript →

Let's see what's on HBO tonight. Now, this movie is filmed in widescreen. Sometimes that's called Cinemascope, or anamorphic. And 35 mm film is not wide enough to contain this frame. It wouldn't fit. So Panavision and some other people... ...invented lenses that actually take this image that you're looking at... ...and squeeze it to the width of a 35 mm frame... ...which is almost half as wide as what you're looking at. If you hold up a piece of anamorphic film to the light and look at it... ...all of these guys would be tall... ...and skinny and mushed together. The whole image would suddenly get all squinched. When you project the image, then you have to have a similar lens... ...that unsqueezes the image. But this was an effort to make big, widescreen movies that-- Not necessarily in Cinerama or techniques like that... ...but that you could make on ordinary film, and have an experience that was... ...different from what you're seeing on television. It had a different aspect ratio, real wide screen. And the challenges of shooting it are quite interesting... ...because those lenses require a lot more light... ...and give you a lot less depth of focus. So you're always kind of struggling with it. It's a very special kind of look that I actually prefer. And it gives you some real challenges in composition and so on. But you don't see too many pictures shot in anamorphic nowadays. They have another process called Super 35... ...that isn't quite so difficult to shoot. I think, Frank, we did Bird on a Wire in Super 35. Right. Well, from the standpoint of coverage in this movie... ...it was an editor's tour de force almost. It was covered so well. You mean, in terms of you having the footage that you needed. Yeah. We had very, very, very few problems. Well, thank goodness we had enough time to shoot this movie... ...so that we could get the coverage that we needed... ...because it was so tricky to tell this story along the way.

51:44 · jump to transcript →

I told Heather, now hold up the cord so they can see that you pulled it out of the wall. Okay, wrap it up around the phone. He's so neat. I remember that. Well, we had to establish that it was pulled out of the wall. Right, that was an issue, I remember. I think we did some earlier takes where she just put it down. And then you, like, zoom in, super close up on the... There you go.

1:06:41 · jump to transcript →

Jim Piddock

Well, apparently simple, I should have said, because here in a minute... Well, let's first just have a look at the props, all present and accounted for. Silly to have them in the purse if we're not going to take them out and display them every now and again. Quite a wide lens they're using there, isn't it? Not so flattering on the ladies. Well, this is a little bit better. Just off centre there. Oh, and here we...

22:29 · jump to transcript →

I mean, look at this. I mean, is this the new Lewis or what? Are you kidding? Zoom in. I could never get tired of Betty. How could you ever get tired of that ass, Takashi? That line seems a little out of character for Lewis. I think he would have said derriere. I mean, were you thinking about that at the time, about what a shift it was for you?

53:14 · jump to transcript →

Bill Paxton

This is just a regular Handycam, a regular 8 Handycam, whatever the standard was at that time. This landing of the dropship was complicated in terms of trying to hit a mark while shooting at high speed. The dropship was shot overcranked, so the model had to be really moving fast and those landing legs were fairly frail. We would do take after take and the landing legs would get crushed. This film is not a wide-screen film. If I did it again, I'd shoot it wide-screen to be consistent with the first picture. But I didn't like anamorphic for the visual effects problems it created. I'd had a bad experience on Escape From New York trying to do anamorphic visual effects, so we decided to shoot 1.85. I almost shot the film in Super 35, but I got talked out of it by somebody that didn't understand that format, and then I wound up shooting all my subsequent films in Super 35. I still don't care for anamorphic. You have problems with lenses shooting miniatures, with depth of field, there are problems in composite. On Escape From New York we didn't have much money and we were inexperienced in anamorphic, so I didn't really have an alternative that I considered viable at the time. But now when I see the two pictures back-to-back screened - it doesn't make too much difference on video - I actually like the look of A/en better because I just like the aspect ratio. And I've come to know and love the 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The interesting thing is that the first film was anamorphic so it used more of the negative area. This is a 1.85 picture. In this exact year Kodak was in transition. They were changing their emulsions. This was a higher-speed negative than had been used previously. They hadn't worked out their T-grain emulsion. So it turned out grainier than I wanted. But this was actually the standard, just what that stock was that year. Because we weren't using the full negative, like with an anamorphic film, we weren't getting quite as much image quality. If I had shot Super 35, it would have looked terrible because of the graininess. By the time I got ready to do 7he Abyss a couple of years later, they had improved the emulsions enough that Super 35 looked pretty great. I was surprised recently at how grainy it was. Nobody noticed the grain at the time cos most films frankly looked like that.

45:14 · jump to transcript →

I knew it. And Ball House was great. I mean, you know, just there's nothing he hated more than a Zoom, you know, never tearing down a wall, never being in an unnatural place, always having a certain, you know, not putting the camera where it couldn't really be put. Come back here. Come on. Don't go. If he has a set, he doesn't want to move the walls because the newsroom was a set. So these practical locations were so perfect for him because it just killed the argument of let's move a wall.

1:32:22 · jump to transcript →

John McTiernan

You notice the Fox logo is stretched, they wouldn't let me use anamorphic on this, 'cause of the opticals. So I put the... Fox anamorphic logo and then...

0:03 · jump to transcript →

We had more dialogue than we kept in the movie. See, wives spitting. Now it's Jay Johnstone. You said men like the throwing up scene, but not women. Did women like the spitting scene? The little spitting was okay. It was so quick. Everyone likes spitting. That's a Paramount shot. That's made elsewhere. And then you can see, we would shoot with a long lens and just fill up those bleachers behind there.

1:07:15 · jump to transcript →