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Old-Fashioned Filmmaking

Nov 1, 2007 12:01 PM, By Michael Goldman

Paul Thomas Anderson's team keeps There Will be Blood ultratraditional.

           

The director organized the production to rely on traditional filmmaking approaches, including an extensive location shoot in Marfa, Texas, where the entire cast and crew spent weeks on a small ranch, filming on elaborate sets created by Production Designer Jack Fisk. Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon.

DI denied

A digital intermediate was never an option for There Will be Blood because Anderson chose to shoot with anamorphic lenses. And besides, he's not too keen on the process anyway. In fact, Elswit greatly doubts Anderson will ever go into a digital suite.

“None of us like the way prints from the DI look from a negative shot with anamorphic lenses,” Elswit says. “With 2K Dis, there is a slight degradation in the image when compared to a print off the original neg. Even the dupes look better. This isn't true with Super 35 or Super 1:85. With those formats, I think the DI is an improvement over the optical blow-up process. But the bigger negative area in anamorphic still gives the photochemical process an edge for those kinds of shows — at least in 2K.

“But beyond that, Paul wants the most neutral conversion of the movie possible — of what is actually recorded on motion-picture film, especially in a location film like this one. He spends enough time in preproduction — and while we're shooting the movie — figuring out what it will look like. And then we print dailies as well, so we actually see a version of it, which I reprint to get it to look like what we want the movie to look like, so that when it is done, we have a work print that ultimately looks very close to what the answer print will look like. Once we do that, finishing it all isn't a laborious task. Paul's movies are fairly simple to finish because that work print already exists and has already been timed fairly close to what the final version of the movie is going to look like.”

Anderson also says the DI process is too overwhelming for the kind of work he likes to do. “The DI suite just has too many options,” he says. “I would never get out of there. I think I'd still be working on this film. I need to have some limitations, and doing it the way we did it — a conformed work print — was the best way to do it. I know few people do it that way anymore, but I think that is kind of sad.”

Tichenor, who has cut for Anderson since Boogie Nights in 1997, says he and the rest of the team all agreed that the movie didn't need the process.

“There are digital shots — like the sequence with the burning oil derrick and digital derricks periodically — but except for those, we did not go into anything on this film to manipulate the color,” Tichenor says. “It's a very dark movie. There are several shots by firelight. Dark scenes, very contrasty, a single source kind of thing where the face is lit, and it just falls off into blackness. That's all the work of Robert Elswit. There was no need to help that stuff.”

Elswit did talk Anderson into letting him attempt to digitally color time a 6-minute sequence near the end of the movie, but the effort was for naught. The DP says that's because he and Anderson weren't satisfied with close-ups of Daniel Day-Lewis compared to the original version.

“When we shot [the sequence], I felt we didn't control the windows [behind the characters] that well,” Elswit says. “I asked Paul to let me do a DI on that 6 minutes, do some control on those windows, make them more like magic hour, and tune them up a bit. It was probably the sloppiest thing I did on the movie, so I thought it might help. We made the best version we could, given all the tools you have in the DI world — putting [Power Windows] in place and changing values and contrast. I didn't screw with the foreground, just the background. But we looked at it side by side with a print off the original negative — a cut negative. The difference we both saw was in [Day-Lewis'] close-ups. Whatever the translation between 2K digital files to film space — it had a different feel and look, and we noticed it most in close-ups. … We took that [DI version of the sequence] out and went back to the original neg and made a print from there.” <

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