American Cinematographer - February 2015 - 19

The crew rigged
six 4K helium
balloons above
a public square
in Jakarta to
enable 360degree
shooting with
multiple
cameras for the
film's climactic
confrontation.

Making color a priority, Mann -
along with Dryburgh and production
designer Guy Dyas - concocted a visual
design that would allow viewers to instantly
recognize where action was taking place
just by the color of the environment. "The
movie moves through very different worlds,
and they are on a collision course with each
other," the director explains. "So I wanted
each one to very distinctively be its own
thing."
Dyas therefore created what he
describes as "a specific color board for each
country. Hong Kong has lots of golds and
yellows and leans toward red. In Jakarta,
Indonesia, there is an abundance of colors
used to paint buildings and walls, but the
colors were always on the same tonal scale
- even if they were radically different
colors, the intensity or tone was the same.
We tried to make that clear throughout our
designs."
One of the film's key locations was
referred to as the "Kowloon safe house."
Located in a seedy part of Hong Kong, this
is where the "good hackers," isolated and
under pressure, set up shop to hunt their
elusive quarry. According to Mann, the
production transformed a massage parlor in
the heart of a crowded, neon-lit bazaar into
the onscreen apartment. Although the
building was difficult to access and required
extensive renovations, Mann chose the location for its large, front-facing windows and,
he says, "for what you could see outside
those windows - not for the building
itself."
"It was a hideaway, with a back-alley
quality to it," Dyas explains. "Michael

wanted lots of neon outside the window,
and to add to [what was already there], we
constructed large 30-by-60-foot advertising
panels. We lit them so that the bounce light
could work for Stuart and his team, with the
exterior light infiltrating and adding to what
Stuart did inside."
Dryburgh kept the light at a relatively
low level inside the safe house, so that
"whenever we saw the street [outside the
window], it would be the brightest part of
the scene," the cinematographer explains.
"The interior was lit with very small lights -
mainly practical sources, like Chinese
lanterns. We had some LED panels and
small tungsten units hidden between the
concrete roof beams above the main part of
the set, and we had one [6K] HMI on a lift
that we could pop outside the windows."
Dryburgh prepped the show with
New Zealand-based gaffer Sean O'Neill,
www.theasc.com

who then pre-rigged each Asian location
once Mann's primary gaffer, Bob Krattiger,
was able to join the production. (Jack
English served as gaffer in Los Angeles.)
One of the more challenging lighting setups
was for a climactic scene set in a public
square in Jakarta. The initial concept was to
take advantage of the Alexa's low-light
sensitivity and use flaming torches as the
dominant light source, but Mann wanted to
shoot 360 degrees with multiple cameras,
so he and Dryburgh ultimately decided to
rig balloons overhead. Production located
six 4K helium balloons; then, O'Neill
explains, "we had to figure out how to rig
them across a vast area in the park. Luckily,
there were some big trees on either side,
and after an all-day superhuman mission
across gridlocked Jakarta by my best boy,
Scott Harman, we came up with the rigging
we needed to run wires across the park and
February 2015

19
http://www.theasc.com
American Cinematographer - February 2015

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