American Cinematographer - January 2009 - (Page 76)

A Cut Above Clint Eastwood movie, a long day is nine hours. “We used very old-fashioned Western techniques on that movie,” he continues. “If you go back to some of the John Ford Westerns, you see some huge landscapes with small figures in them or a small town set against huge mountains, and we did a lot of that. We maintained that epic Western look all the way through but also made a serious attempt to tell the story like we were telling a Western for the first time. I always tried to strike a balance between making it feel familiar and letting it make its own artistic statement.” In one scene in Unforgiven, notorious killer William Munny (Eastwood) explains to a young, hotheaded acolyte (Jaimz Woolvett) that murder isn’t a glamorous game. “Munny says that when you kill someone, you don’t take only that person’s life, you also lose something of your own,” says Green. “When we were shooting the scene, there was a Chinook, a snow eater, far off in the distance — a huge change in the weather where it can go from 25°F to 75°F in less than an hour. We saw it coming — a huge line of clouds as clear as night and day — and it was coming fast. It was such a terrific moment for the scene, so we all moved as fast as we could to keep that Chinook over Clint’s shoulder all the way through the scene. That’s something that couldn’t happen on most sets. Some directors would be watching playback and making decisions with a committee, and that Chinook would have been over the Yukon before we got the take! But Clint could see we were marching in a direction, and he stood in the perfect spot and made the speech. He could do that because he trusted all of us to make something like that work.” Although movies laden with visual effects cannot take advantage of such natural accidents, Green believes those types of projects offer Above: Green (left) and director Jan De Bont, ASC (at camera) on location for Twister. Right: In a scene from the film, Bill and Jo Harding (Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt) struggle to escape the terrifying funnel cloud. 76 January 2009 Twister photos by Ron Batzdorff, SMPSP. Top photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Bottom photo courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2008

American Cinematographer - January 2009 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes: Triangle of Need Production Slate: Frost/Nixon, The Wrestler Close Focus An Old Soul Brothers in Arms A Cut Above Post Focus: HPA Awards, Still Me New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index In Memoriam: Robert C. Jessup, ASC Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Gabriel Beristain

American Cinematographer - January 2008

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