Editor's note: This is the second installment of SHOOT's continuing The Road To Oscar series. This week we hear from directors Robert Zemeckis, John Madden and David Chase, cinematographers Don Burgess, ASC, Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC, and Claudio Miranda, ASC, as well as visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer. Their feedback takes us from Flight to Argo, Not Fade Away, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Life Of Pi.
The last time Robert Zemeckis directed a live-action film dates back to Cast Away which was released in 2000. Since then, he's been a stalwart of motion capture with movies such as The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol. This Oscar season, though, marks Zemeckis' return to live action with Flight which stars Denzel Washington as Capt. Whip Whitaker, an airline pilot whose inspired, imaginative decision to stabilize a plummeting plane by briefly flying it upside down helps to save the vast majority of passengers' lives, confining the fatalities in a crash landing to but a handful. Hailed as a hero, Whitaker clearly has his own demons with which to contend. Blood tests show that cocaine and a high level of alcohol were in his system during the flight. Whitaker's inner flawed character is revealed to us by Washington's tour de force performance backed by an ensemble cast that includes Don Cheadle, Bruce Greenwood, Kelly Reilly, John Goodman and Melissa Leo.
During an advance press screening, Zemeckis explained via a teleconference interview why Flight registered on his radar. "I fell in love with the screenplay," he related, quipping that he went against the advice of his agent who said "you can't do another movie with a plane crash in it," a reference to the aforementioned Cast Away.
Zemeckis described Flight as being an adult drama with ambiguity, the type of film that's difficult to get greenlit in today's Hollywood climate. Yet it's the brand of film that Zemeckis said he grew up with and admired, citing such examples as Dog Day Afternoon and Kramer vs. Kramer. He added that there would be some question if films like these would even get the chance to be made today.
Helping Flight to overcome such odds was it coming in at a relatively modest production budget of $31 million, thanks to Zemeckis and Washington forgoing their usual big-buck fees, and Zemeckis' digital know-how and savvy which enabled visually challenging scenes–such as the plane being inverted in flight and its harrowing landing–to be realized within doable budgetary parameters. Zemeckis additionally deployed a digital morph for a key transition which takes Whitaker from a revelation at a crash investigation hearing to his next destination which results from that revelation.
Flight also added to Zemeckis' digital experience on another front. He noted that Flight marked the first movie he directed that was shot with a digital camera.
"I loved it," said Zemeckis of the RED EPIC camera. Flight was lensed by cinematographer Don Burgess, ASC, whose collaborative relationship with Zemeckis goes back some 20 years.
"I shot second unit on Back To The Future II and III and Death Becomes Her for Bob," Burgess told SHOOT. "Then Bob decided to give me a shot being the first cameraman on Forrest Gump." Burgess went on to shoot such films for Zemeckis as Contact, What Lies Beneath, Castaway and The Polar Express. The latter had Burgess working on their first motion capture project together, an experience the cinematographer enjoyed and learned from. "But ultimately I enjoy going out and shooting live action as opposed to sitting in front of a computer," affirmed Burgess.
And while there had been a decade-plus between their working together on a live-action movie–from Castaway to Flight–Burgess said he and Zemeckis didn't skip a beat. "It was like we never stopped making live action together. It's like riding a bicycle, I guess. We've teamed on so many projects that we have a shorthand with one another, we're completing each other's sentences."
As for the choice of the RED EPIC for Flight, Burgess explained the prime factors were "image quality and the size and weight of the camera. To have a lightweight camera, to be able to get into the plane's cockpit and bring the audience in with the characters and to see what's happening from the pilot's perspective is invaluable to the story. We were in a real airplane, not a set you can cut up or take a wall out from. I felt the RED EPIC would be the best camera for the movie and that proved to be the case."
Burgess is no stranger to RED. He earlier shot The Book of Eli and The Muppets as well as a portion of Source Code with the RED ONE.
Asked to reflect on the biggest challenge Flight posed to him as a cinematographer, Burgess–while making note of the high degree of difficulty in the plane crash scene–observed that, as with all films, it comes down to "understanding the material and designing a look for the movie. For this one, the story is about an alcoholic and his journey. Ultimately it's about telling the truth in that the alcoholic becomes very good at lying–to himself and others. So I tried to make the images as honest and truthful as possible, to put the audience in a very real set of circumstances. The lighting, the approach, the camera angles all fall into place from that point forward. Working through the process and coming up with the look and feel of the movie is the toughest thing to do."
Released earlier this month, Flight has already generated considerable Oscar buzz, particularly for Washington's performance, Zemeckis' direction, Burgess' cinematography, and John Gatins' screenplay, which he initiated way back in 1999.
Zemeckis won the Best Directing Oscar as well as the DGA Award in 1995 for Forrest Gump. Washington's Oscar pedigree spans five nominations and two wins–for Best Leading Actor in 2002 on the strength of Training Day, and Best Supporting Actor in 1990 for Glory. And Burgess was nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar as well as the coveted ASC Award for Forrest Gump.
Additionally, Burgess recently joined production house The Joneses for exclusive representation as a commercial director. The move marks his return to the company through which he helmed spots for several years during the mid-2000s.
Burgess' first tour of duty at The Joneses saw him direct campaigns for State Farm and Cox Communications, among others.
Argo
Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC–nominated for both a Best Cinematography Oscar and an ASC Award on the basis of the Ang Lee-directed Brokeback Mountain–first worked with Ben Affleck on the Kevin Macdonald-helmed State of Play. Affleck was the lead actor in that film.
A few years later Affleck and Prieto got reacquainted when the former visited his friend Matt Damon during the filming of We Bought A Zoo, directed by Cameron Crowe and lensed by Prieto. Affleck told Prieto of a film he was planning to direct and shortly thereafter sent the cinematographer the script for Argo, now the recipient of rave reviews and considered a leading Oscar contender.
Argo is based on real events in Iran when American Embassy workers were taken hostage in 1979 and were held in captivity for over a year. The feature film's story centers on a group of hostages who escaped and took refuge in a Canadian diplomat's home. American intelligence forces devised a plan to get them out of the country by preparing a fake Canadian movie shoot in Iran, getting the hostages to pretend they were crew members who would then leave the country upon completion of advance work, including a location scout. The bogus film is a sci-fi fantasy, Star Wars wannabe titled Argo.
"I saw the opportunity to play with different looks in the film," related Prieto, citing scenes in Iran (actually shot primarily in Los Angeles with additional lensing in Turkey) which called for a more grainy hand-held documentary style compared to, for example, scenes in CIA headquarters with its fluorescent lit hallways and offices.
Then there were the Hollywood moviemaking aspects of Argo, necessitating re-creating the look and feel of how studio feature films were shot in the 1970s.
Prieto conducted some 16mm tests in preparation for the scenes supposed to be staged in Iran, thinking that might be the means to attain the grainy texture he desired. But Prieto said that the results were "a little too soft," prompting him to seek other options, which led to the decision to shoot 35mm at two instead of the standard four-perf.
"Using less of the negative," he explained, "you find yourself somewhere in between 35 and 16, and you get more grain. We also pushed the film stock one stop which added more grain. So we ended up with the grain but sharper than it would have been using 16mm."
For the CIA scenes, among the approaches Prieto deployed was "a lot of camera movement, a lot of choreography between the camera and moving actors to convey a sense of urgency but without handheld nervousness. Camera moves were more precise than the handheld work for the scenes in Iran."
As for the Hollywood look of the 1970s, Prieto said he and Affleck were influenced by the 1976 movie The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, directed by John Cassavetes.
Prieto's cinematography subtly differentiates the varied locales in Argo, helping to advance the story through his depictions of Iran, Turkey, D.C. and Hollywood. At the same time, his cinematography also unifies locales. For the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran, the street scenes were shot in Istanbul, Turkey. On the other side of the big wall, inside the Embassy gates, shooting took place in a Veterans Administration Building in Los Angeles. "All the scenes that were supposed to be Iran had to have a visual unity, no matter where they were actually shot," said Prieto. In the big picture, the cinematographer added, "Each section–Hollywood, Iran, Turkey, D.C.–has its own little style yet the whole film still had to have a unity."
While Argo was shot mostly on 35mm film, Prieto opted for the ARRI ALEXA digital camera for certain scenes in Istanbul, including to adjust to the low light levels in Hagia Sophia, an architectural marvel that is a museum today after serving in earlier lives as an Orthodox patriarchal basilica and then a mosque.
Prieto has gained a reputation for his affinity for successfully experimenting with different textures. This began most notably, he recalled, when he shot Amores Perros, a 2000 release directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Prieto went on to adeptly deploy different film grains and textures in the Gonzalez Inarritu-helmed Babel. (Gonzalez Inarritu directed this year's primetime commercial Emmy winner, P&G's "Best Job.")
At press time, Prieto was working on director Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street which too is primarily shot on film, with some select night exteriors and scenes entailing green screen work being lensed with the ALEXA.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
While The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is distinctly different from his past successes such as Best Picture Oscar winner Shakespeare in Love and more recently the critically acclaimed The Debt, director John Madden was drawn to all these films by a common bond–the opportunity to tell a worthwhile story. He found exactly that in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel from a script by Ol Parker and based on the novel "These Foolish Things" by Deborah Moggach.
The Marigold Hotel is billed as being India's shining jewel for the U.K.'s most elegant senior citizens as they begin their so-called golden years in retirement. However glossy promotional brochures aren't what they seem as seven retirees who are in need of an inspired transformation find themselves at a challenged resort which they have turned to as a last resort, looking to begin their lives anew in hopes of finding a deeper sense of purpose and relevance.
Add to this a clash of cultures as most of them have never been to India before, a land that's traditional and modern, beautiful yet strange, charming and at times overwhelming. The retirees, each with his or her own emotional baggage, are portrayed by a stellar ensemble cast featuring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup.
They are greeted at the Marigold by a youthful naive would-be entrepreneur played by Dev Patel, the hotel's owner who inherited the once sophisticated complex from his father and is determined to return it to its high-end luxurious glory days.
The young oblivious entrepreneur, his girlfriend and the retirees all find new beginnings in a journey that is comedic, sad, romantic and poignant. Relative to the retirees, Madden related, "The film is dealing with a neglected constituency at a point in life that people don't want to take too strong or long a look at. We all are averse to the notion that we get old and we want to revert our gaze from that reality. I found it quite interesting to take on that subject in a way that disarms the audience. When you take that crossroads to a cultural collision in India, you have a license to immediately explore the absurdities, paradoxes and complexities of being old. We have people forced to start their lives again–it's a rite of passage in a way, a theme that's normally reserved for teenage genre movies. It's a very interesting and beguiling conundrum."
Also drawing Madden to the film was India itself. "It's an amazing country, an amazing world. It's quite intoxicating. The film itself is an intoxication, people being submerged in a world and culture they don't know quite how to comprehend and deal with. The country can be an overwhelming assault on the senses, like we depict it in the film. But sometimes to be able to put yourself in another world is incredibly stimulating–for our characters and for the filmmaker. This adds a dimension to the stories of each character. This is a mixed genre film–paradoxical, hopefully funny but equally kind of melancholy because the stakes are so high for older people.
"If they were teenagers," continued Madden, "this would play like a goofball romp. But these are seniors who are all confronting mortality and trying to make sense of their lives, still trying to see if they can improve their lives even as they draw closer to the end."
A Best Director Academy Award nominee for Shakespeare in Love, Madden has helmed his share of Oscar-nominated and winning performances, including Best Leading Actress and Supporting Actress Academy Award winners Gwyneth Paltrow and Dench for Shakespeare in Love, Leading Actress nominee Dench in Mrs. Brown, and Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Geoffrey Rush for Shakespeare in Love.
Asked if directing Oscar-recognized performances is particularly gratifying for him, Madden said simply, "It's icing on the cake. The truth is it's the film and the story that you're committed to. I promise you none of the actors in this [The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel] thought their role had 'podium' written all over it. They don't think that way and there's no way they could anyway because this is a very democratic piece–the story is shared among not just the seven retirees but the four or five Indian actors who have a significant part of the story as well. Each actor has his or her own journey that contributes to the story. At the same time, it would be disingenuous of me to say I wouldn't enjoy seeing any of them nominated for an Oscar. It's enjoyable to see an actor's work recognized. By definition as a director you love your actors and you feel tremendous pleasure in what they accomplish. You can't make a film unless you feel that way. I feel in a pretty lucky position to have had such a talented cast at my disposal to tell a story."
Not Fade Away
David Chase's feature directorial debut which he also wrote–Not Fade Away–was a long time coming and much anticipated.
The anticipation was fostered in large part by his renowned storytelling prowess, most famously on display in The Sopranos, the breakthrough HBO series he created and executive produced. Also heightening expectations was curiosity as to what Chase would do next after The Sopranos ended its six-season run in 2007. He has since spent much of the ensuing time creating, nurturing and getting Not Fade Away off the ground. The film premiered and was well received at last month's New York Film Festival.
Not Fade Away centers on a suburban teen (portrayed by John Magaro) in New Jersey whose garage band looks to become the next Rolling Stones, an aspiration to which his traditional Italian father (played by former Sopranos star James Gandolfini) cannot relate.
The charm of the film is that it's a testament to how 1960s' rock 'n roll inspired and influenced our culture–not told through the lives of rock stars but rather of regular kids moved by its spirit and spurred on to dream about creating their own music.
Chase said he's long aspired to direct a theatrical feature. He chose subject matter close to his heart in that he grew up on 1960s music and described it as the gateway that led him into the arts, poetry, film, humor and drama.
He further recalled that one of his favorite tasks on The Sopranos was putting music to picture.
"I missed that once the show was gone." Expounding on his fascination with music, he observed, "You have music with roots that are in sadness, the Mississippi Delta and misery yet it has the power to make you feel so good. Music moves us."
While he worked long and hard to realize and find the right project for his first feature helming gig, Chase is no stranger to the director's chair. In fact, he won the DGA Award in 2000 for The Sopranos pilot and was again nominated for the Guild honor in 2008 for the series episode titled "Made in America."
The Sopranos pilot also earned Chase an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Director for a Drama Series. His writing also garnered multiple Emmy wins and nominations.
But Chase's overall responsibilities on The Sopranos precluded him from directing more episodes of the series.
"Circumstance would take me out of the [directing] picture. Every year I signed up to direct an episode but often couldn't get to it. I'd be immersed in the writing, overrun with all the other responsibilities of the show." At the same time, Chase noted that being a showrunner was "somewhat like directing anyway. While you're not working with the actors all that much, you're calling the shots, writing shots and scenes into the scripts, paying attention to all the details like wardrobe and props, you're involved in the editing. All this and my hands-on directing experience had me ready to direct a feature film."
Indeed The Sopranos carried the signature of high-caliber feature film storytelling. And while Not Fade Away is quite different from The Sopranos in tone, feel and substance, the two share certain elements such as family angst and tension, suburban life and culture, and simply people coping with their everyday lives and trying to find their way.
Not Fade Away is slated for release next month.
Life Of Pi
In the first installment of our The Road To Oscar series (SHOOT, 10/26), director Ang Lee reflected on lessons learned from his 3D experience on Life Of Pi.
Now as a follow-up, the visual effects supervisor on that film, Bill Westenhofer of Rhythm+Hues, talks about what he learned from Lee.
"What sticks out in my mind is when Ang first addressed the crew at Rhythm+Hues," recalled Westenhofer. "He didn't issue any kind of technical challenge. He simply told us, 'I want to make art with you–to make art with visual effects.' That approach helped to make this film easily the most rewarding thing I've ever done professionally. The challenges were very heavy technically but every step along the way we were contributing to the art of the picture."
Among the most daunting challenges was creating realistic animals, most notably the Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker.
Based on the bestselling book of the same title by Yann Martel, Life Of Pi tells an intricate story in which a shipwreck brings a young man, Pi, together in a lifeboat with several zoo animals, including Richard Parker. Taught as a child by his dad that the tiger was a mortal enemy of human beings, Pi, who's now an orphan, somehow learns to coexist with survivor Parker as they are thrown into an adventurous and spiritual journey.
"You work to make it real," said Westenhofer. "We set out to create a tiger who was going to be a tiger and act as genuinely and realistically as possible–a digital animal like one never seen before. In the end, fourteen percent of the shots of the tiger on screen were of a real tiger. The rest were what we did digitally. To get that realism, we shot hundreds of hours of reference footage of a real tiger to capture how they act and perform. We culled through documentary footage of actual tigers. I told Ang that we wanted to ground all of our animal performances in reference so that it can be as real as possible. Otherwise you can fall into a trap. It's easy for an animator–even if not intending to do so–to anthropomorphize things. If you do that, you lose the animalism of the performance."
Lee earlier told SHOOT he was drawn to Rhythm+Hues and Westenhofer in part based on the animal life they created for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which earned a Visual Effects Oscar nomination in 2006. Two years later, Westenhofer won an Academy Award as visual effects supervisor on The Golden Compass.
Whereas he was visual effects supervisor for Rhythm+Hues on The Golden Compass and The Chronicles of Narnia, Westenhofer was the overall VFX supervisor on Life Of Pi. He oversaw all the effects work spanning several studios.
For example, while Rhythm+Hues handled all the calmer water scenes and the morning after the storm, the actual storm sequences with tremendous crashing waves were done by MPC. "The artists there [at MPC] did a tremendous job," assessed Westenhofer. "Blending tank water with digital water so that it plays realistically in 3D is an amazing feat to pull off."
Westenhofer added that director Lee set the bar high. "Ang wants to be authentic, artistic and symbolic. There's a lot of symbolism in the art he creates. And there's a lot of research that has to go toward attaining authenticity. Working with him was a challenging, amazing experience."
Also benefiting from that experience was cinematographer Claudio Miranda, ASC, both an Oscar and ASC Award nominee in 2009 for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button directed by David Fincher.
Miranda said that Lee gravitated to him because "he knew he wanted to shoot digital and hadn't done so before, and he also wanted to shoot 3D. He liked Benjamin Button which I shot digitally–back then it was with the Viper–and he saw my 3D work on Tron: Legacy [directed by Joseph Kosinksi]. Those two movies got me the meeting with Ang."
"We connected really well. And that continued throughout our working together," related Miranda. "He was good at telling me his feelings about things. How the work should feel, how it makes him feel, what feelings he wanted to evoke. We paid a lot of attention, for example, to make sure that the 3D experience wasn't gimmicky, that it truly helped do justice to the story and the remarkable journey taken by the characters."
Miranda–who deployed the ALEXA, and Fusion 3D rigs from Cameron Pace Group to shoot Life Of Pi–got his career start in music videos and commercials, the first major spot break coming from Fincher. Miranda also served as gaffer on the Fincher films The Game and Fight Club before doing additional photography on the director's Zodiac and then taking on full-fledged cinematographer duties on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
At press time, Miranda had recently wrapped cinematography on director Kosinski's Oblivion.
For The Road To Oscar, Part V, click here.
For The Road To Oscar, Part IV, click here.
For The Road To Oscar, Part III, click here.
For The Road To Oscar, Part I, click here.
And for Oscar season related profiles of directors and DPs, click on David O. Russell, Ang Lee, Juan Antonio Bayona, John Toll, ASC, and Ben Richardson.
