American Cinematographer - June 2007 - 74

Treacherous Ascent Left: Daniela and Robert Jasper, who accompanied Harlin on the climb, continue the ascent. Right: The trio makes its way to the top. going back and forth to create a pendulum effect [with the net]. Several times we reached out to grab it and missed, and it fell back into space. We were at least 2,000 feet up the face, and when you look down from that height, you get this funny feeling. It’s really exposed.” Brown lugged his Hasselblad primes and accessories in a backpack. MacGillivray had marked a dotted line where the sweet spot was on each lens.“If I used only one lens, it was the 40mm, but I tried to use the 30mm a lot,” says Brown. “The 40mm is a little easier to deal with because it has slightly less of an angle — it’s basically what the naked eye sees. The 30mm goes beyond 180 degrees field of view. You put your arms out to the side and get everything.You have to be meticulous and almost have to be able to see behind you, especially for moving shots. I had to move all my assistants beneath and behind me.” Brown eschewed lighting other than bounce materials, despite the Eiger’s challenges in this department. Judson explains, “The sun doesn’t hit the north face of the Eiger. Plus, we were using a wide lens. The sun could be hitting the valley, but our subjects were on the north face, in the shade. If they’re in dark clothing against the rock, you’ve really got a problem. That was one reason why shooting in the wintertime, against snow, was a good choice.” That timing also suited the mountaineers, who wanted to climb when the rock was frozen into place. What’s more, sunlight hitting the snow-covered mountains behind the climbers provided a nice fill. “It made the colors pop,” says Brown. “Even when it’s snowing hard, that light is still there.” The mountain camera team went out in all suitable conditions. “When we went to bed, we had three plans for the following day: a blue-sky plan, a gray-sky plan, and a stormy plan,” says Judson. “We’d start out with one plan, hit lunchtime, and suddenly the weather would change and we’d switch.” This strategy called for several different film stocks, and they used a Kodak package comprising Vision2 100T SO-256 and 500T SO-579 and SO-218; the Estar-based SO stocks don’t get as brittle in the cold. (Ohlund used Vision 100T 5248 and Vision2 100T 5212 and 250D 5205.) Brown, for one, appreciated the producers’ mix of determination and flexibility. “The MacGillivray company never calls it a day,” he says. “Even if the weather was really terrible, we got ready and went out, and it paid off. Sometimes we got conditions where the clouds started to break,” such as an ethereal shot of snow blowing off the Eiger. Horrendous weather “was our enemy and our friend. As much as it compromised our ability to shoot exactly what we wanted, it made the climb very dramatic, which was a good thing.” Brown even caught a spindrift avalanche at the perfect moment. As it happened, his team was re-creating an avalanche that had hit Harlin’s father during his 1966 climb. A Swiss mountain guide had made a huge pile of snow, which they planned to push down for the simulation. “Ironically, there was a 74 June 2007

American Cinematographer - June 2007

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