American Cinematographer - August 1987 - 61

important secret of re-enlarge¬
Through another twist in
this bizarre series of events, Short
ment.

is able

to

turn

the tables

his

on

captors, played by Fiona
and Kevin McCarthy, and

Lewis
in at¬
tempting to lock them away in the
miniaturization chamber, he acci¬
dentally pushes the wrong button,
miniaturizing the evil duo by 50%.
When Short, accom¬
panied by his girlfriend, played by
Meg Ryan, decides to take the
half-sized villains for

a

ride in

a

Volvo, that's when Andrew
Laszlo's cinematic headaches

re¬

ally began. It all started at the very
first production meeting attended
by Dante, his producer, Mike Finnell, Laszlo, special effects super¬
visor Dennis Muren and blue
screen advisor Bill Hansard. To ac¬
commodate Dante's spontaneous

style of comedic direction, and

to
minimize the hassles and expense

of optically compositing much of
the film's effects, Laszlo, Muren
and Dante had agreed to shoot as

of the effects live
possible.
many

In order

on-stage as

make Lewis

to

and McCarthy appear half-sized
and as if they're riding in the rear
of the car with a normal sized Meg

Ryan and Martin Short in front, a
special forced-perspective car set
be constructed with a stan¬
dard sized front seat and a double
sized back seat. When shot from a
was to

specific angle against a rear-screen
image of the streets of San Fran¬
cisco, it

was

reasoned, all the lines

would meet in perspective and the
Volvo would appear like any other

riding down the boulevard - or so
the crew had hoped. Such was not
to be the case, at least not exactly,
as

Laszlo recalls:
"As the conversation

the difficulties grew and
Since the car which was to

went on,

grew.

normal-sized on-screen was
actually much larger, the size of
appear

the screen had to be double
mal size, which affected
amount

of

light

we

nor¬

the

could throw

the screen which in turn af¬
fected the depth of focus we had
to have in order to pull the illusion
off. Furthermore, it was suggested
on

that the double-sized

the

car

should be attached

to

the

floor, while the normal front end
would be placed on a platform
since it had to be at a specific spot
for the perspective lines to meet. I

totally disagreed with this concept
because the car was supposed to
be veering up and down hills and
around corners,

and there

was no

with this

system to coordinate
the movements of the actors as
way

were thrown from side to
by the G-forces.
"I realized that the only
way to handle this successfully
was to put both the normal sized
front portion and the double sized
rear end of the car on a platform,
along with the camera in front of
the rear projection screen, so they

they
side

could all rock and
It

move

in unison.

out that such a plat¬
form would have to be over 50
feet long, and someone asked,
was

pointed

'Where are we going to get one?' I
said I didn't know, but if we
couldn't find one, we'd have to
build one, and that's exactly what
we ended up doing. Joe was the
first one to buy the idea, and he

immediately understood the ad¬
vantages from a technical angle: if
the actors were to try to throw
themselves around the car, it
would've been a hodge-podge. By

using this hydraulically operated
platform that shook and rocked,
all of their motion would be syn¬
chronized. Joe said, 'If it's going to
do that, this is the way we've got
to

go.'"

"This was also very help¬
ful when we wanted to shoot the
side of the car against the rear
screen. If we'd been using a nor¬
mal car, we would've just turned
the car, left everything else in the

position and inserted a dif¬
background plate into our
projector. With the forced-per¬
spective car on the platform, as
opposed to being attached to the
stage floor, we could do virtually
the same thing: simply turn our
platform instead of ungluing ev¬
erything and re-erecting it for our
same

ferent

side shot. All
our

platform,

and

we were

rear screen

we

did

was

rotate

move our camera

able to use the same
for the side plate."

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American Cinematographer - August 1987

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