American Cinematographer - June 2014 - 20

Los Angeles sports agent J.B. Bernstein (Jon Hamm) finds himself out of his depth in India in Million Dollar Arm, shot by Gyula Pados, HSC.

Scouring India for Baseball Talent
By Michael Goldman

As the first day of filming Million Dollar Arm in the streets of
Mumbai, India, wore on during a boiling hot day last May, director
Craig Gillespie suddenly realized the enormity of the task ahead of
him. Based on a true story, the film follows a U.S. sports agent, J.B.
Bernstein (Jon Hamm), as he searches for Indian men who can be
trained to become Major League Baseball pitchers. The first part of
the story dramatizes the Million Dollar Arm contest, which was
staged across India in 2007, and the filmmakers were shooting these
sequences in May, near the end of India's summer, to accommodate
Hamm's availability. "As a rule, Indian crews try to stay out of the heat
during that month - it's that brutal," says Gillespie. "We were
shooting in Old Mumbai, there were thousands of people on the
streets, and we really just had to run-and-gun it. As that first day
wore on, I turned to our local key grip, Sanjay Sami, and asked, 'Is it
always like this when you shoot in the streets?' He laughed and said,
'Oh, we would never shoot here. We would shoot on stages, but
never on the street.' That's when I knew how difficult it was going to
be!"
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June 2014

Fortunately, the skilled and hard-working collaborators at
Gillespie's side included cinematographer Gyula Pados, HSC. Gillespie says Pados, with whom he had previously made several
commercials, was his only choice for Million Dollar Arm. The director wanted to shoot the picture mostly handheld, and Pados often
does his own operating. His ability to work handheld under difficult
conditions "really elevated the material," Gillespie insists.
"Craig really wanted me to operate - that was one of the
first things we discussed," says Pados. "He likes to shoot without
rehearsal [because] he wants the camera to react to the actors. On
this movie, especially, that was part of how he wanted to tell the
story. As the movie starts, we are farther away from J.B. and a little
bit locked off as he tries to be strong, and then, as we get to know
him, we see behind the mask a little. At that point, we do more and
more handheld, with the camerawork getting increasingly personal.
That was the arc Craig wanted; he was very specific about it."
Initially, Gillespie and Pados wanted to shoot the movie on
35mm in the anamorphic format, and Pados envisioned using two
Panavision anamorphic-lens packages for this approach: the older,
softer C Series in India, and the sharper G Series in the U.S. (where
Atlanta stood in for Los Angeles). However, the Arri Alexa Plus 4:3

American Cinematographer

Million Dollar Arm photos by Ishika Mohan and Ron Phillips, courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc.

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American Cinematographer - June 2014

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