American Cinematographer - July 2010 - 29

Above: Saito (Ken Watanabe) grabs Nash (Lukas Haas). Right: Cobb gains the upper hand.

Pfister. “They got great detail and resolution on the wide shots, where objects in the frame appear smaller. Seeing that encouraged us to use that model.” The filmmakers eventually decided to add both 65mm and VistaVision 8-perf 35mm to the mix for Inception. (VistaVision was used for aerial cinematography, shot by Hans Bjerno.) In a bit of a departure from their previous work, they also decided to do extensive high-speed photography, which Pfister accomplished mainly with the Photo-Sonics 4ER, which works with Panavision lenses and allows frame rates of up to 360 fps, and the Photo-Sonics 4E Rotary Prism, which goes as high as 1,500 fps. (A PanArri 435ESA and a Vision Research Phantom HD camera were also used for some high-speed work.) “There are very few high-speed shots in anything I’ve done because I feel it is inherently unreal,” says Nolan, “but it’s an essential component of Inception because there is a very specific temporal relationship between the dream world and the waking world. We wanted to use high-speed photography and speed ramps for narrative effect as opposed to aesthetic effect.”

Knowing that he would be contending with an array of cameras, formats and the stop loss associated with high-speed cinematography, Pfister decided to limit his film stocks to two: Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 and 250D 5207. “I don’t change stocks to create different looks,” he notes. “I know that works for some cinematographers, but I prefer to change the lighting or exposure, for example. I like the simplicity of using the same stocks. In day-exterior situations, we’d start out with an ND.6 or .9 and pull the filters out as the light waned.” The production filmed in six countries, beginning in Japan, and Pfister depended on his regular crew throughout the 92-day shoot: camera assistants Bob Hall and Dan McFadden, gaffer Cory Geryak, and key grip Ray Garcia. (In the United Kingdom, key grip Ryan Monro was an important collaborator.) Imagica in Tokyo, LTC in Paris, and Technicolor facilities in London and North Hollywood were tapped for processing the 35mm footage; throughout the shoot, Technicolor’s North Hollywood lab processed the 65mm. (Iwerks in Burbank created 35mm anamorphic
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reduction prints from the 65mm negative for dailies.) After two days in Japan, where the schedule included aerials and some bullet-train exteriors, the filmmakers moved into the airship hangar in Cardington, England, where they had shot major portions of The Dark Knight and Batman Begins (AC June ’05). This became home base for prepping the rest of the shoot. The hangar housed some spectacular sets, including a hotel bar that could be tilted 30 degrees and a massive elevator shaft laid out horizontally. Special-effects supervisor Chris Corbould oversaw their construction. “Chris has been working with us since Batman Begins, and he’s an absolutely brilliant engineer and artist,” notes Pfister. “It’s hard to imagine doing a film of this scale without him.” Another Cardington set, a hotel hallway, comes into play during a scene that features some zero-gravity action. The hallway was built twice, with identical interiors seen by the camera. In one case, the entire hallway vertically rotates 360 degrees, like a rotisserie, with the camera looking into one end and moving either independently (via a Technocrane) or mounted to the set on
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American Cinematographer - July 2010

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