American Cinematographer - December 2015 - 44

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Wide Wide West

Top: The crew
readies a scene
inside Minnie's
Haberdashery.
Bottom:
Richardson
takes a lightlevel reading
as Tarantino
discusses a
scene with
actor Tim Roth.

life. Quentin likes great dialogue scenes,
and they are not short, so if we can print
2,000' loads, why can't we shoot 2,000'
loads? Those kinds of things were
instrumental."
The 91-day shoot captured all
exteriors at Schmid Ranch on Wilson
Mesa, Colo., near Telluride. It was there
that production designer Yohei Taneda
and crew built the Minnie's
Haberdashery cabin, a barn and an
outhouse. Landscapes for horse and
stagecoach sequences were shot nearby.
Richardson estimates that 60 to 75
percent of the interior material was shot
on location, as well.
Colorist Yvan Lucas collaborated
with lab timers Dan Muscarella and
44

December 2015

Kristen Zimmerman on FotoKem's
print dailies, which were screened on
location in Telluride at a small theater
that was specially configured for the
project, with a larger screen and 70mm
film projector. When the production
was in Los Angeles, dailies were
screened in a retrofitted viewing area
that FotoKem created for both dailies
and release-print approval. FotoKem
also set up a 70mm projector at Red
Studios for interim viewing with the
crew. Lucas also supervised the final
color grade.
Tarantino says he studied It's a
Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (shot by
Ernest Laszlo, ASC) to understand
how multiple lead characters could be
American Cinematographer

framed on such wide lenses in the
cramped quarters of an interior like the
haberdashery. Both he and Richardson
insist the complications were worth it. "I
think this format works well in a oneroom situation, because you can really
utilize the stage and make it a 'thing,'
creating a complete level of intimacy,"
Tarantino says. "And if you have eight or
nine characters all trapped in one room,
while I'm watching the people in the
foreground where the scene is going on,
I'm also seeing other people in the background. I'm always able to keep tabs on
the characters in an almost theatricalblocking sense."
Richardson worked exclusively
with a crane and dolly, using no
Steadicam or handheld techniques.
Minnie's Haberdashery was essentially
divided into sections - a bar area,
corner-table area, dining area, kitchen,
fireplace and front room - and both
camera and lighting had to travel and
adapt to the different spaces while
capturing all manner of action and
dramatic confrontations, which were
shot nearly entirely in-sequence.
"Quentin has very specific ideas
about where the camera goes," says
Richardson, "and he made sure the
movie was extraordinarily wellrehearsed in terms of positioning the
characters inside the room. There was
one moment when we had to do a little
adjusting with lenses and camera to
remove someone from a background so
that you would not know where everyone was in the room. We altered
perspective by choosing a longer lens
and a slightly different angle."
As gaffer Ian Kincaid notes, when
shooting with wide lenses on the tight
set, "a close-up is more like a medium
shot, in the sense that with the width of
those lenses, you see nearly half the set
- no matter where the person is within
it, unless they are up against a wall. That
meant we had to see a lot of territory, and
we therefore had to illuminate a lot more
than we would for normal coverage. We
were constantly dancing around that
room, sometimes maybe three or four
➣
rounds in a day."
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 2015
