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Reader SurveyOld-Fashioned Filmmaking
Nov 1, 2007 12:01 PM, By Michael Goldman
Paul Thomas Anderson's team keeps There Will be Blood ultratraditional.
Cinematographer Robert Elswit, ASC, shot There Will Be Blood using two Panavision XL 35mm cameras outfitted primarily with Panavision C series and high-speed anamorphic lenses, shooting onto Kodak Vision2 50D 5201 stock for all day work (interiors and exteriors) and Kodak Vision2 200T 5217 stock for night work. Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon.
Shooting film
Elswit shot the film using two Panavision XL 35mm cameras outfitted primarily with Panavision C series and high-speed anamorphic lenses, shooting onto Kodak Vision2 50D 5201 stock for all day work (interiors and exteriors) and Kodak Vision2 200T 5217 stock for night work. These choices were made to line up with the production's traditional philosophy — particularly to suit Anderson's strong preference to use slow film whenever possible.
“We always end up shooting just about the slowest film made,” Elswit says. “Paul just doesn't like high speed. He prefers less grain and strong contrast, and we all like less grain and good contrast in a film [like this], where landscapes are such an important element. It's not always easy [working with slow stocks]. It means a bigger lighting package at times. The faster stocks are easier to work with when trying to create a low-light look with oil lamps, fire, or candlelight. It's easier to augment real sources with artificial lights and hide what you are doing. With the slower stocks, those things are more work. But Paul loves the look of 5201 and 5217, and he understands the challenge in using them.”
Among the retro maneuvers undertaken by Elswit was the periodic use of a vintage, uncoated 43mm lens manufactured in Germany around 1910, according to Elswit, originally for use with an ancient Pathé crank-style film camera.
Anderson purchased a Pathé camera and a package of lenses to go with it several years ago for Elswit to shoot the black-and-white portion of the opening sequence of Magnolia (1999). The DP pulled out one of those lenses for this project, but he had to figure out a way to get it onto a modern motion-picture camera.
“We had a couple of small lenses with that camera, but this [43mm lens] was the one we liked best,” Elswit says. “[For There Will Be Blood], we asked [veteran lens designer and expert] Dan Sasaki to make an anamorphic front element for our [XL camera] with a Panavision mount so we could shoot with it on this movie. I used it for a few exterior shots of the train station, the town, and a few oil derrick shots, but the shot we got with it that I like the best is the [iconic shot] of [Day-Lewis'] character sitting on a train with the young baby [who becomes his adopted son]. That's the last shot of the [beginning sequence of the movie] without any dialogue, and [it] sort of launches the whole story. It's not a lens we used a lot, because it can call attention to itself if you put it in a situation with strong backlight. It's uncoated and really has to be protected from bright skies and light sources — or the image can really degrade. But in fine light, or areas where we could stop down a bit, we used it effectively.”
Throughout the shoot, Elswit repeatedly used high-speed lenses — particularly to shoot by firelight, such as the film's memorable close-up of Day-Lewis' oil-smeared face as he stares at a massive fire that consumes one of his oil wells.
“There was a mixture of burning petroleum being shot into the air over the camera crew, and that is all that lights [Day-Lewis] in that scene,” the DP says. “But remember, we kept it a fairly neutral print. The warmth you see is simply the warmth that comes from the flames illuminating the scenes. The [unique dark color] is just the way the film stock responds to it — no filters or anything.”
Each day throughout production, filmmakers gathered in a warehouse nicknamed “The Feather Factory” (supposedly because feather headdresses for Las Vegas showgirls used to be manufactured there) to watch film dailies on two projectors. Film was shipped to Deluxe Laboratories in Hollywood each day, and then returned a couple days later for viewing. Anderson and Elswit both insist that the use of film dailies was crucial to shaping the movie's creative direction.
That decision, like avoiding DI, came straight from Anderson. “I'm not very good with my imagination,” Anderson says, despite being a feature film writer, director, and producer. “By that, I mean I like knowing what we're getting and shooting it, and being able to see it in dailies and say that works, or doesn't work, instead of saying, ‘We'll work to make it better later.’ So, yes, we shot anamorphic, and that made it kind of ridiculous to think about shrinking it down to take into a DI suite, and we did it all photochemically.”
Elswit elaborates on that point, suggesting that the use of digital dailies on a project shot and finished traditionally like There Will Be Blood would have been counterproductive for several reasons.
“We knew [this film] would finish photochemically, and so the last thing you want to do is try to imagine from digital transfers what a movie will look like a year later when it's in a release print,” he says. “We wanted to come as close as we could during production to the final version of the film, so we worked closely with our dailies timer at Deluxe during shooting to try and get a work print we were happy with. We reprinted quite a bit at the beginning, until we found the right feel for each of the stocks. This is a superior way to work when using anamorphic lenses, but now, digital dailies are cheaper, and since so many films finish digitally, almost no one prints work picture anymore — no matter what format they shoot.
“But I think film dailies are [often] more efficient anyway for a production like ours. The ironic part of digital dailies is that some guy sits in a room with a telecine machine looking at every single foot you shot, making sure it is in sync, and then timing it, and he has to do that in realtime. If you shot six reels of film, that's fine. But if you shot a lot more than that, or multiple cameras, you slowly fall further and further behind. That happened to me on Syriana and [other projects]. In photochemical land, on the other hand, the timer comes in, pulls the negative out, looks at the first few feet on a Hazeltine [color film analyzer], punches in some numbers, and rolls your whole negative. Eventually, he's done in 4 or 5 hours, and then a modern high-speed printer prints everything quickly, and it's out the door the next morning. Then it's just a matter of somebody syncing it up. On certain films, like multicamera shows, that is a lot faster than digital dailies, in my opinion. Plus, the other great thing about seeing film dailies is that you can't kid yourself about focus and all the other technical issues that can come back to bite you later when you go to do an IP. Or when you make a digital file into a negative, and you find out that those 10 shots you sort of saw sharply with your D5 or HD dailies really weren't that sharp at all. And then, of course, the color space of motion picture film is completely different than digital color space.”
Rather than rely on digital approximations, according to Elswit, Anderson therefore prefers to visualize a “meticulously controlled work print that really resembles the final version of the film.” This same philosophy permeated into the finishing process, where filmmakers opted for a photochemical finish at Deluxe.
