American Cinematographer - August 1990 - 32

wanted to

see

the actors' breath.

Refrigeration units were brought
in and left on overnight to get the
stage down below 32 degrees. So
would arrive

we

on a

beautiful

day, 80 degrees outside, and put
anoraks on, and scarves and

pants, and all go inside," he
chuckles. "Later, we would

for lunch. It was quite a
spectacle, a whole crew dressed
in winter gear on a steaming hot
day in the middle of 20th Century
emerge

Fox."

During his three years on
Miami Vice, Wood photographed
countless night exterior action
scenes,

including "hundreds of

shootouts." This

experience came
on a non-stop action
thriller like Die Hard II.
"The backbone of this

in

handy

movie," states Wood, "was [di¬
rector] Renny Harlin's storyboar¬

Above: The

ding. We were constantly work¬
ing from beautifully drawn and
very dramatic storyboards, and
they really held it together. But
sometimes, especially working
with action, when you get to the
location the storyboards aren't
possible. So then you just figure

snow

flies and so does
a

helicopter on an

over-heated

sound stage.
Below: Franco
Nero and host of
bad guys set up
their headquar¬

out how to do it. Certain times

you find that things take off, and
you see lots of other shots that
you really like, and then you go

ters.

beyond the storyboards. But in
most cases, we went directly
from them."
The warm, LA oranges
of the original Die Hard were

generally inappropriate for a film
that takes place in a blizzard, so
Wood had to formulate
ent
sets caused

strange shift in my
perceptions. On one stage we
had

an

a

almost full-sized 747 air¬

plane wing, which is gigantic, but
it seemed to get small once we
had all the people and equipment
it. But on the next stage over,
the miniature set of the airport
terminal seemed to get bigger
and bigger. After a while you
had the illusion that you were
on

actually looking 15 miles away."
At least

30

they didn't have

might think. Not so! After brav¬
ing the frozen North Woods and
Rocky Mountain winter, the
intrepid Die Hard II crew had
returned to sunny Los Angeles -
only to don their snowsuits once
again. Wood explains:
"We still needed some
shots of the church exterior and of
the shootout around the terror¬
ists'

plane. So Stage 16 at Fox was
refrigerated. The shots were
close,

so

we

wanted to

to battle the cold anymore, one

chipped ice for

American

August 1990

Cinematographer

snow,

and

use

we

a

differ¬

approach to the color scheme.

To start, he took a look at how
real airports are lit.

"Basically airports are lit
by all sorts of very modern light¬
ing. They're all either sodium
vapor, which is an orange kind of
light, or mercury vapor, which is
kind of a blue-green light, or fluo¬
rescent. So I decided to

use these
actual fixtures throughout the
sets. We ordered large quantities
of mercury vapor, sodium vapor,

and fluorescent

lighting, lit the

sets with the actual

lights, and
that if we

then just supplemented
American Cinematographer - August 1990

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