Hi, Ho Silver!
Boja Bazelli ASC / The Lone Ranger
“We were lucky to get the older lenses working on such a massive project, but the Panavision connections helped. They’re all hand-maintained by Dan Sasaki, who basically adjusts the lenses and provides what you ask for. For example, if you want more flare, if you wanted them softer, if you want them super-milky, he basically works like a chef and cooks them up the way you want them to feel. They’re great at Panavision. They can do that.”
Bazelli used digital predominantly for night shoots, but the majority of The Lone Ranger was shot on film. “The daytime exteriors are big landscapes, always a film choice. Shooting Anamorphic made it the obvious option to go for the cameras that fit those lenses. But what’s beautiful about the digital world in my mind is the ability to get detail and subtle nuances in a relatively inexpensive way, with reasonably simple lighting set-ups. Knowing we’d be shooting night exteriors without heavy, strong, artificial-looking light, we wanted to avoid the certain exposure you needed for film. Night photography always feels a little stranger and we know it’s something we can’t surmount – obviously you can’t run Anamorphic lenses under a certain exposure or blemishes show up and you make a lot of compromises with focus and noise – so we needed to be very prepared with our lighting package and we did a lot of tests, consisting of multiple exposure adjustments.
“To prove the point about the look for night exteriors, during testing I ended up changing the exposure on film by lowering the frame rate from 24fps to 6fps, which equals about 1200ISO; it let me minimise the light. This would be our night look if we shot on ARRI Alexa, but documented on film because the camera was not yet available. I showed it to everyone – the lower light level looked beautiful and it was better than shooting spherical; I was keeping my eye on development of the Alexa with the full chip supporting Anamorphic lenses, which became available within the last three weeks of pre-production. We got it straight from the factory in Germany.”
Everyone expressed excitement about the way the night exteriors looked, especially Verbinski. All the equipment was supplied through Panavision, including the Arriflex cameras.
"We had around seven film cameras, a combination of Panavision Panaflex Platinum and Arriflex 435s, plus four ARRI Alexas, shooting Anamorphic."
- Bojan Bazelli ASC
While action sequences often employed the full range of cameras, dialogue sequences were predominantly shot on one camera: “Gore likes the lens very close to the actor, so the B camera doesn’t have anywhere to go to create a good matching cut. We don’t have the option of going wide and tight at the same time; one would suffer, usually the wide, so it’s easier for him to change the lens and go wider or tighter in two different scenarios.”
Martin Schaer operated the A camera and Rafael Sanchez gaffed. Mike Popovich was key grip and Jason Talbert the dolly grip, with color timing completed by Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3 in LA.
“We carried two cranes all the time,” says Bazelli, “a MovieBird 17 and a MovieBird 35/45. The grips often mounted them on platforms on the train so we could reach around to get the shots. It was amazing to watch Jason, our dolly grip, nail camera moves with great precision while the train travelled at speed, or while we were hurtling down winding canyon roads at 45mph on our road rig, which we made by mounting the train and our Condor ‘smokestack’ on a 150-foot-long flatbed pulled by a tractor-trailer. We used the road rig when we were in locations with no track, or when we needed to go faster than 30mph.”
One problem the crew encountered centred on keeping the vintage lenses free from the rig-ravaging elements. “We were embattled by all sorts of weather: extreme wind, sandstorms. In New Mexico around April, the wind season starts with crazy temperature changes. In 15 minutes a beautiful day would just turn into wind and sand in your face with masks and goggles being needed. In Utah and Arizona it was extreme heat in the daytime, then cold in other areas for night shoots, and we shot below freezing at ten thousand feet, but the winds in New Mexico were the worst!
“It’s hard on the crew, but even harder on the equipment. We had to replace some of our vintage lenses because the sand would get inside them. We were shooting on film too, with complicated set-ups – on top of trains, with cranes and all manner of moving parts!”
The crew relied on one film stock, also new on the market: Kodak’s 5203, 50 ISO daylight stock, which replaces the old 5201. Bazelli describes it as, “a beautiful fine grain and a clean, natural look, which responds beautifully to highlights. The blacks are fantastic too. It’s a stretch for digital to get to this.
“I ended up pull processing [under-developing] the negative in the end, so everything looked a little softer, a little less saturated, extending the usable range of the film. When combined with a hard print, 30% bleach bypass, it blends a bit better, making a nice combo. We had about a million feet of film, about 500,000ft in digital – it was all developed with pull one stop, effectively making the ISO 25.”
Shooting a lower speed film stock aided in the objective to keep a naked lens. They kept everything, including the workflow, as simple as possible: film cameras without cables, no unnecessary connection to DI personnel advising on the digital image – as rudimentary, punchy and fast-moving as possible. “The ideal is just you, your meter, the camera and magazine,” says Bazelli.
Watch out for his favourite scene right at the beginning of the film: the scholar-cum-vigilante sits on a train, with buffalo reflected in the window, romantically establishing the old west. A shadow catches his eye, setting up the drama of an inciting murder to come. The theatrically satisfying moment was achieved by adding cracks into the ceiling of the train, achieving some flare with the lighting and planting light outside, to create the effect of looking into the sun. The romance and the adventure of the New Western are literally reflected in the scene.
Says Bazelli, “You know, I don’t think we’re ever going to return here again: this scope and this size, using as much natural environment and light as possible, minimising the green screens… it’s a rare production that is willing to make such a commitment these days. Everyone on the crew worked very hard to achieve this and I’m so lucky I could be a part of it.”