American Cinematographer - January 2008 - (Page 48) Blood for Oil Right: China balls lend a soft glow to a scene in which Sunday objects to the “quail prices” Plainview is offering for the family’s land. Below: Later, after being roughed up by Plainview, Sunday condemns his father for accepting the prospector’s terms. Mexico border,” says Elswit. “The mines were all dug by hand at the turn of the century, and they aren’t being worked anymore. We found one shaft that was 60 or 70 feet deep, and it was connected at the bottom to a perpendicular tunnel that had been created mechanically in the 1920s or ’30s. We could access the vertical shaft via the horizontal tunnel at the bottom.” Elswit captured some of the shots in the shaft while dangling from a harness, including a startling overhead view of Day-Lewis falling backwards into the mine, a stunt the actor performed himself. Gaffer Robby Baumgartner details the lighting for this location: “Over the mouth of the shaft, we built a truss rig that supported a combination of 18/12K Arrimax Pars and 6K Pars, maybe two of each. We couldn’t point them straight down for safety reasons because Daniel was directly below at quite a distance.” A second mine setup, a night sequence in which a worker is killed by a falling drill, was filmed in several 48 January 2008 pieces. The exterior of the mine was shot on location in Texas, but the action inside the mine was captured within a 40'-tall set built by Fisk and his crew at Mystery Mesa. Baumgartner recalls, “The mine set wasn’t quite as long and narrow as the real mine we’d used earlier; it was a bit wider and a little easier to deal with. It was tented in at the bottom, and we lit it with tungsten units.” The hazards of oil drilling are spectacularly illustrated when an explosion on Plainview’s derrick creates a flaming geyser that engulfs the wood structure and burns with a malevolent glow. (See sidebar on page 40.) According to Elswit, the staging of this sequence was “a nightmare,” and Anderson characterizes that day’s shoot as “insane.” Multiple cameras were deployed to capture the action around the 80'-tall pine derrick built by Fisk’s crew. Four of these were controlled by operators; one was placed in a firebox at the base of the derrick; another was set in a crash box to capture the derrick’s collapse; and others were positioned
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