American Cinematographer - November 2008 - (Page 48)

The Making of a President occasionally also used it to shoot him, so it wasn’t strictly limited to his perspective.” One significant moment with the Lensbaby occurs during Bush’s jog and subsequent collapse. The scene takes place in a Colorado resort, with the camera in front of a woozy Bush as he runs through a forest. “It’s a really wide angle, a 14mm, and we were really close,” says Papamichael. “It’s like the whole world is collapsing on him. That’s when he decides to stop drinking.” B-camera operator Danny Hiele was usually tasked with capturing shots with the Lensbaby. Typically, he and A-camera operator Gary Camp took turns shooting the same scene. “Oliver likes mixing it up, so we had Gary, a more traditional operator who’s excellent with handheld and Steadicam work, and Danny, whose background is more music videos/commercials.” (Hiele shot some second-unit landscapes on Stone’s Alexander; AC Nov. ’04.) “It was almost as though Oliver was using them like different tools,” Papamichael continues. “Let’s say we had a scene where Bush confronts his dad in the house after coming home drunk, and they fight. Above: Stone (light blue shirt, center), Papamichael (behind Stone) and the camera crew capture a “walk-and-talk” with Thandie Newton (as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice), Iaon Gruffudd (as British Prime Minister Tony Blair) and Brolin. Right: Stone (in blue shirt) presides over a meeting between Bush and key members of his administration, including Rice, George Tenet (Bruce McGill), Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss), Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) and Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn). characters’ power. “The longest lens on close-ups was probably a 35mm, and we used the 27mm and 21mm a lot,” says Papamichael. “We preferred to get the camera in somebody’s face.” (The camera package, supplied by Panavision’s Dallas office, also included Primo CloseFocus lenses and 4:1 and 11:1 Primo zooms.) W. often presents action from Bush’s point of view, and Papamichael used a variety of tricks to accomplish this. In addition to altering the shutter speed for the character’s confrontations with his father, he shot off-speed, typically at 32 fps, and used what he called a “rubber lens,” a Lensbaby 2.0, to achieve extremely distorted POV shots. “It’s almost impossible to focus,” he says of the Lensbaby. “You can have somebody’s mouth and teeth in focus for a second, and then it goes to the eyeball or goes nowhere. We used it for Bush’s perspective in his youth, when he’s drunk and not perceiving things clearly, and we used it later to suggest his perceptions of other people. We 48 November 2008

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American Cinematographer - November 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Letters Short Takes Production Slate Forging a Bond The Making of a President Thunder Down Under Habitat for Inhumanity Saluting Television’s Top Talents Post Focus New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up

American Cinematographer - November 2008

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