American Cinematographer - March 2010 - 47

Opposite: U.S. soldiers endure heavy combat on Okinawa in a scene from The Pacific. This page, far left: Episode director Tim Van Patten (wearing white cap) checks the shot as cinematographer Steve Windon, ACS films a scene for episode 9. Near left: Cinematographer Remi Adefarasin, BSC at work on another episode. The cameramen also agreed to film all combat scenes handheld, a style modeled on the front-line footage shot by war correspondents at the time. “The cameras back then had huge shutters, and cameramen often shot with the shutter at 90 or even 60 degrees,” says Windon. “We altered the shutter speed during some of the combat sequences, [going as narrow as] 45 degrees. We felt twisting time a little bit would heighten the reality of those scenes.” One idea that quickly fell by the wayside was using wide-angle lenses. “With a wide-angle lens on a handheld camera, the viewer can really experience walking through a jungle or moving through a ship,” says Adefarasin. “You share the experience with the characters, because as they turn their heads, you can see instantly what they’re looking at.” But in order to finish each episode within its allotted five weeks, it was essential to use multiple cameras. The bulk of the shooting, therefore, was done on longer lenses; Windon favored 32mm, 40mm and 50mm, while Adefarasin favored 28mm and 32mm. About one-third of The Pacific was shot on location in Far North Queensland. Windon knew the region well, having shot a TV adaptation of South Pacific there several years earlier. “One thing about shooting in a jungle is that if you put a movie light in there someplace low, the scene will always look ‘lit,’ no matter how good a cinematographer you are,” he notes. He therefore resisted lighting from the forest floor, even though little natural light penetrated the dense foliage. “I stuck with overhead lighting, and we used a bounce card or a white or blue sheet to bounce light up under the men’s helmets.” Australia’s environmental laws precluded hanging lamps from any trees, so Windon hired native tree climbers to string hemp yacht-rigging wire between the trees, and his crew then suspended about 60 space lights, spreading them across 2½ acres. “We ran them all through a dimmer board, which was inside a large shipping container that we positioned adjacent to the set,” he recalls. In an extended sequence shot at this location, Pvt. Robert Leckie ( James Badge Dale) and his unit are picking their way through the jungles of Cape Gloucester when Japanese soldiers ambush them. Later that night, while camped beside a river in a driving rain, they are attacked again. The nighttime battle lasts only a few minutes, and it is pitch black. Windon embraced the darkness, relying on flashes of gunfire and bursts of lightning to illuminate the scene. “Every time there was a lightning strike, you’d see what was happening,” he recalls. “It would freeze the rain for a fraction of a second, which heightened the reality. I was amazed at how much we could see just by using gunfire.” Windon did a bit of testing to see how much exposure he’d get from the weapons — “not that you can get a light reading on a gunshot!” he laughs — and ended up filming the scene at T1.9. “It was tough on the focus pullers, Matt Toll and Matt Windon. We added offcamera gunfire to create a little more light and threw in a few small fixtures, gelled blue-green, to backlight the rain.” www.theasc.com A number of Windon’s scenes called for rain, at times a torrential downpour. Rain towers and hats were set up 20' below the lamps, and because the production didn’t want real rain, a transparent covering was positioned above all the lamps. Wind proved to be another problem, especially during Australia’s winter. (The 10-month shoot ran from August 2007 to May 2008.) After filming in FNQ , where all of the jungle sequences and beach landings were shot, the production moved to the You Yangs, 50 miles southwest of Melbourne, where almost all of the outdoor sets, including the battlefields, were spread across a 200-acre quarry. Adefarasin, whose episodes include two amphibious landings, grimaces slightly as he recalls the first day of production, the landing on Guadalcanal. Two-dozen nervous Marines, on their first mission, are crouched inside a Higgins boat as it barrels toward shore. “Being in a Higgins boat is like being in a tin can with tall walls,” declares Adefarasin. “The boat was tossed around by the waves, the sun was beating down, and the odor of diesel permeated the air. We lost 18 men to motion sickness that day!” Whereas the landing on Guadalcanal turned out to be unopposed, the landing on Peleliu was met with fierce resistance from the Japanese, who were hiding in bunkers and pillboxes in the hills above the beach. The shots of the American boats reaching shore were filmed in FNQ , but once the Marines hit the beach and the battle began, everything was shot in the giant March 2010 47 The Pacific photos by David James, SMPSP, and Andrew Cooper, SMPSP, courtesy of HBO.

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American Cinematographer - March 2010

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