Lens choice

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 →

He's dead another way, you know. And if you look at the two-camera setup, it was very important that the film was not widescreen, was not 2-3-5 aspect ratio, was not Panavision or anamorphic, I should say. I was still shooting 1-8-5, normal widescreen. But I packed the frame with everybody around Joe and packed the frame with everybody around Ray because there were no close-ups. Because a close-up would isolate them. What's happening in the scene is something that is essential to that way of life.

21:56 · jump to transcript →

But I do it way too much in this movie. What would you say the ultimate push is? Would it be the one on the beach in Jaws? Well, that's actually, you're appealing to the nerd side of me. That was actually a push-in and a zoom at the same time. Right, so you get that weird effect. But that doesn't count. The zoom in, the push-ins in Spielberg would be at the end of Close Encounters. There's about 100 in a row as they marvel at the alien ship.

45:59 · jump to transcript →

Tony Scott

But it's funny, it was location that, for me, I was trying to find locations that have got depth. You've got hallways and corridors. So when you're shooting on this format, you know, my format being anamorphic, being letterboxed, being widescreen, I love to get this wide frame, this wide format. And I use that format because I think it just creatively...

1:30:01 · jump to transcript →

But those are all that, you know, it's the same technology that used to do creatures. So, you know, the trick is to take all this digital imagery and make it as invisible of a tool as, you know, the long lens is. Now me, I was scared, but Lieutenant Dan,

1:34:52 · jump to transcript →

And Gale was to be allowed to shoot in widescreen, not just regular. Yeah, it's kind of like in A League of Their Own on the DVD. You just see my shoulder in most of it. Because they shot it anamorphic. Yeah, no, anamorphic when it's taken down. So I have the widescreen version. It's great to see it the way we really framed it.

28:43 · jump to transcript →

Darren Aronofsky

He knows it's going to come. It hasn't hit him yet, and his nausea is growing in the back of his throat, and it doesn't kick in until there. We call that the vibrator cam, which was just basically shooting with a long lens and shaking the camera viciously. And now the paint is here, and we sort of accompanied it with not only the sound design, but the score as well. All the different elements working together, all the different departments.

8:54 · jump to transcript →

rather an unfortunate choice. I had two monitors in front of me. I was watching the scene on two monitors. We had a closeup shot and a wide angle shot. And I was watching the closeup camera, you know, for performance reasons. And first time when he rips off his shirt and he starts screaming and yelling, I loved it. And I called cut and I was all excited. And my script supervisor, Sylvie Chanel,

46:25 · jump to transcript →

This is the last shot on that day. It's totally drained. Well, she really pulls it off, I have to say. This is the yellow mountain. And this is always a shot that gets people, when you cut from this telephoto shot to where she's actually climbing up. It's impressive. You climbed that during scouting, right?

1:51:56 · jump to transcript →

So every day he kept repeating, doing the same thing, saying the same things, until we got the perfect shot. Because the lighting is pretty critical, because we started with the anamorphic format. So the lighting, it's got to be very detailed and also more of a contrast. So you need a lot more time to do the perfect light. And he had a lot of great patients. He had never complained. Suppose it was planned for two days' work.

27:16 · jump to transcript →

Simon West

And this is Angkor Wat, and the authorities there let us build this village right in front of the temple itself. I've tried to make it look like there's a river and a large lake or whatever. There's actually a very small ornamental pond in front of the temple. But by using a wide-angle lens and not showing the edge of the water, which is literally where the camera is, it looks like she's paddled up the river and made it to this Cambodian village in front of the temple.

59:50 · jump to transcript →

Yep, this was pretty much one of the first times that the boys were ever together saying dialogue together in the movie. I think we should get off the road. Did you always have in mind that tracking Zoom shot for that moment? Yeah, it's an Alfred Hitchcock shot that he designed it, and then I think Spielberg's used it a few times. It's become a little bit of a cliche, but I thought we could get away with it there.

53:13 · jump to transcript →

This is one of my favorite shots, the creeping down one, which was an idea that we had on the set. We were playing around with the wide-angle lens and the camera on a crane, and we were just looking for interesting angles. And we came up with this angle, and then we decided to make it to really feature it as a shot. This is an image that's off one of Alan Lee's paintings, isn't it, on the Two Towers cover, looking up the staircase. I like the fact that the spider's being really creepy and sneaky.

2:23:14 · jump to transcript →

It's like a gay rumble. Oh. We should get back to short bus. Okay. This is a great moment. That short bus was totally random. It just happened by accident. And we did that shot three times. It just went by. Oh, and the yoga ball. Hilarious. We did that shot three times that zoom in on the character of Caleb the stalker. It happened three times.

9:29 · jump to transcript →

Tom Hooper

And here we're in Oxfordshire. The exterior's in a different place, and Eve had this idea of putting all these multiple crucifixes, which are all added, to allow me to shoot through layers of crosses on the long lens.

9:03 · jump to transcript →

There was a wide range of options, which is very refreshing. It's one of those things. I mean, we shot with the Alexa, and David has just got, he's all about momentum and energy, David Boyd. And that's one of his great strengths. And he always sets you up for speed. So he was, let's have two cameras at all times. Let's have a short zoom and a long zoom.

29:33 · jump to transcript →

This scene was, again, really tough. This movie was probably the biggest challenge we've ever had, because you're locked into this one wide-angle perspective, and right here there's all these lighting cues, and we would have to communicate back and forth with our grips and gaffers, and also try to get all this timing right. And not see us, because, you know, we basically have to hang beside Jason, get the cues right, and...

1:23:28 · jump to transcript →

Wes Anderson

Yes, we changed the aspect ratio from the-- We used the anamorphic lenses with-- Some old Cooke anamorphic lenses, and then we switched to a-- Now we're in a... I guess we say Academy ratio.

9:28 · jump to transcript →

What we achieved quite quickly in the cutting room to get certain effects, to pause, to elongate moments, to zoom in on moments, ended up taking a lot of time in post. And I think that Jamie, who is a brilliant online editor and who's worked on some very big-budget kind of Hollywood effects-heavy movies, said that it was the most technically complicated film he'd ever done. And I kind of hold that, and I also feel that. Every shot has got something technically going on.

1:39:42 · jump to transcript →

Joss Whedon

This, again, is a frame you would never have seen in the first movie. This very tight close-up, long-lens thing is a different vernacular, but I never felt it was more effective than it was there. Natasha! Natasha! Now, this is an interesting piece of footage because I wrote this scene... We had a very different scene with the Hulk and Ultron, and it did not play. It was good, but you just... It didn't fit. And I kept saying, "Well, we've got to do something else." So I wrote this scene, and the scene in between the two of them that comes after, and we did it in reshoots. And what's interesting about it is we never actually got them on the same day. And I'll explain more when we see them again.

1:38:21 · jump to transcript →