American Cinematographer - March 2009 - 66

Filmmakers’ Forum Shooting Push in Hong Kong by Peter Sova, ASC A-camera operator Stuart Howell prepares to film an opening shot for Push on a bamboo bridge that was constructed about 150' above the city streets. “They say bamboo is stronger than steel, and it did hold up, but it was scary sometimes,” says director of photography Peter Sova, ASC, who was filming in Hong Kong for the first time. irector Paul McGuigan and I have made five films together, beginning with Gangster No. 1 (AC June ’02). Each has presented a unique challenge, but none more so than our most recent collaboration, Push. The film is about a group of American expatriates who possess extrasensory powers and hide out among the crowds of Hong Kong. A top-secret U.S. agency, The Division, pursues them, hoping to harness their powers for dangerous purposes. Dakota Fanning, Chris Evans, Camilla Belle and Djimon Hounsou star. Paul looked at a few different cities, but by the time I came aboard, he had settled on shooting in Hong Kong, where the story is actually set. When I arrived in the city, I was immediately struck by the sheer amount of artificial light. You see photographs of Hong Kong, but it isn’t until you’re there that all the neon really hits you. Fluorescent tubes, incandescent bulbs, colored lanterns and a huge amount of neon — it’s quite impressive. The Chinese see red as the good-luck color, and when you walk into a grocery store, you see dozens D of red lamps. They believe the more light they have, the more business they’ll get. We couldn’t have fought against the way the place looked even if we’d wanted to! Every kind of light was there; the question was how to control it. We shot everything in Hong Kong, on location and on sets built on local stages. Paul and I had previously worked with François Séguin, a brilliant production designer, on Lucky Number Slevin (AC April ’06). He and I embraced the Hong Kong scene and worked to bring it to the look of Push. The colors on the sets — rich reds and yellows and hues of green — seamlessly meld with the exteriors. François built the set of a large restaurant for an important fight scene between Nick (Evans) and Carter (Hounsou). When I walked onto it, I said, “The floor is real marble! How can you afford it?” His Chinese crew had brought it from mainland China, where real marble is cheaper than what it would have cost to fake it. Night shooting in the city was all about working with available light and then subtracting from it. When lighting an actor, I tried to use the same kind of light that was already there. I could have replaced it with a combination of movie lights and gels, but I wanted to do a “Hong Kong movie” and work quickly using what was available. The look of the place was extreme, and I wanted to go with that, so I used the same kinds of tubes you see all over the city as my movie lights. I had a wonderful local best boy whose nickname was Dragon. Every day, seven days a week, he went to various markets to find an assortment of tubes. Finding two that match is difficult; they mostly come from the mainland, and any two from the same unit can easily be 2000°K different. But Dragon and other electricians managed to find all kinds of tubes and put together batches that were at least within 500°K of each other. Less than that, and you really don’t notice the difference. During location scouting, Paul had discovered a monastery where photographs of deceased monks were mounted on walls and lit by red bulbs; green tubes illuminated the rest of the rooms. We wanted to preserve this unusual look, so I asked François to build a wild wall that would match the existing red wall, which I could then both photograph and use as a light source. I lit the opposite side of the room with green tubes (6000°K-7000°K) that matched the rest of the monastery. The actors’ faces were sometimes warm and reddish on one side and greenish on the other. I liked the way this mixture worked. We approached our day exteriors similarly, finding what was there and then adding to it. For a complex confrontation and chase through a local fish market, we built our own extension onto a real, functioning fish market. We used our fish-market set so we could rig 66 March 2009 Photos by Sylvain Bernier and Peter Sova, ASC.

American Cinematographer - March 2009

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