American Cinematographer - March 2009 - 68

These shots show production designer François Séguin’s radical transformation of a soundstagelobby space (top) into the unfinishedskyscraper set (bottom) for the film’s finale. Sometimes I’d be having dinner somewhere and make a note that a particular street would make a good background for one of the driving scenes. Visualeffects supervisor Kent Houston was great to work with; he was with the team whenever they shot those plates, and he was always present when I shot the foreground elements against bluescreen. I was able to reference the backgrounds, which he later composited at Digiscope in Santa Monica. (Kent also supervised the pregrade of many visual-effects shots with colorist Trent Johnson at Technicolor Digital Intermediates in Los Angeles. I’ve worked with Trent and TDI on my last four films.) Onstage, we’d have five or six setups with lights on dimmers to simulate the effects the street lighting would have on the people in the car. For day-exterior driving scenes, I’d usually bounce 20Ks into real Chinese silk, which was affordable there. We tried to make the best of the 68 March 2009 crowded sidewalks and the difficulty of attaining permits by shooting certain exteriors with the actors amid real crowds, hiding our camera away inside a small truck. We cut holes in the truck’s canvas top so we could park nearby and shoot with long lenses from inside the truck. Paul and I thought we would get better material if we didn’t disturb the natural flow, but we quickly realized it was impossible. Everything was so crowded that our view of at least one of the actors was always blocked by a pedestrian. We attempted to shoot with this hidden camera at a long, outdoor market at night, but we quickly gave up. Instead, my operator, Stuart Howell, and my great focus puller, David Morenz, got closer to the actors and followed them, handheld, through the outdoor market into an indoor vegetable market. Most people in the crowd just went about their business and ignored us. It wasn’t like shooting in Times Square, where everybody’s jumping around and waving their arms to get into the shot. Dragon was in the crowd ahead of the actors, pulling a little cart with some battery-operated fluorescent tubes to help fill in the actors’ faces. If Dragon or the front of his cart got into the shot, it didn’t matter; you can’t tell where that light is coming from, and Dragon blends right into the crowd. Something I noticed right away in Hong Kong was all the bamboo scaffolding. Even if they’re building a 100-story skyscraper, the scaffold is bamboo. We used a lot of bamboo ourselves, both onscreen and in our grip department. We set a climactic fight scene on the roof of an unfinished skyscraper, using what looked like a forest of bamboo (only a small exaggeration of what a construction site like that would really look like). We also used bamboo to build lighting platforms. They say bamboo is stronger than steel, and it did hold up, but it was scary sometimes, particularly in an opening shot of Nick walking across an open-air corridor 14 floors above the street. Initially, we tried to hang the camera from a wire rig suspended outside the building to follow him, but that was just too expensive. Instead, the bamboo crew fashioned a bridge parallel to where Chris would walk 150' above the street. Stuart could track with him from his apartment to the elevator, then pan around to reveal the Hong Kong skyline, and finally tilt down to the teeming street below. Stuart doesn’t feel extremely comfortable with heights, but he agreed to do it. We were rarely able to rehearse or block the actors for exterior scenes. With constant changes, additional pressures were put on my focus puller, as well as the electricians, led by Sylvain, and my grips, led by Chunkie Huse. When you’ve made a lot of films and understand how to do varieties of lighting, how to work with color temperatures and how to design a look, there’s something really exciting about pushing everything to the point where you’re sort of walking on a tightrope all the time. That’s how it was on Push. We were constantly being pushed to the limit. I

American Cinematographer - March 2009

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