No Film School
The tense mid-air disaster movie 7500 was shot almost
entirely in the cockpit of an Airbus A320 airliner. DP Sebastian Thaler explains
how it was done.
7500 stars Joseph Gorden-Levitt
as Tobias, an American co-pilot on a routine flight from Berlin to Paris.
Shortly after take-off, the plane is hijacked, leaving Tobias and his pilot
Michael to fend off hijackers while trying to make an emergency landing.
Apart from an introductory series
of shots from the perspective of airport terminal surveillance
cameras, the directorial feature debut of Patrick Vollrath takes place
entirely in the plane’s cockpit. This stylistic exercise recalls Alfred
Hitchcock’s Lifeboat or even Joel Schumacher’s Phone
Booth which used claustrophobic locations to squeeze maximum dramatic
tension.
Vollrath and Austrian DP
Sebastian Thaler had made the short film Everything Will Be Okay (Oscar-nominated
in 2016) trialing lengthy single-camera sequences, which though they didn’t
know it then, proved invaluable for tackling 7500.
“For Everything Will Be
Okay we had tried shooting in such a way as to give our actors the
freedom to move 360-degrees and also to give myself as the camera operator the
freedom to improvise too,” Thaler explains. “For 7500, Patrick
wanted to achieve a documentary-like approach. All the dialogue was improvised
save for some of the technical air traffic commands and we keep the camera
running for long uninterrupted takes.”
Similarly, Vollrath decided not
to shoot any material from outside the cockpit looking in. “The camera was to
always stay locked in with the actors,” Thaler says.
Thaler’s fly-on-the-wall camera
work is unobtrusive and all the more remarkable since there were at least three
actors and at times more, with him in the confined space of the cockpit for
takes up to 50 minutes in length.
“The most important thing for me
was to give the actors the confidence that they can move freely in the cockpit
without being disturbed by the camera,” Thaler reports. “At the same time, I
had to make myself as ‘invisible’ as possible despite the spatial confinement
in order to allow the actors the space for emotional development. Moving around
each other was like a dance. After a few days, everybody instinctively knew how
to move and not touch each other during the scene and we found our
rhythm.
In preparation, Thaler had been
granted access to the cockpit of a plane during a flight. “We flew at night
since that was when we were setting our story and experienced the space, how it
might be possible to move, how the instruments illuminated the cockpit. I took
photographs of everything and we used that to rebuild in the studio what we saw
in the air to be as realistic as possible.”
The production purchased a real
Airbus destined for scrap, and sliced and diced the vessel so that they could
manipulate the front third of the aircraft for camera. The segment of the
aircraft used for filming included the front galley (food-prep area) and
the first eight rows of seats, but it had no flight instruments. The ceiling
was raised by 10cm or so to enable actors and crew to stand upright and the
cockpit itself was elongated by a similar degree just to allow a little bit of
extra space.
The Airbus came without its
instrument panel so production designer Thorsten Sabel and the art department
had to buy or rebuild those and worked with Thaler and his electricians to rig
the lights and displays specific to his lighting and color palette. The light
sources and the practical lights were placed tactically. They were modified and
replaced by film lights.
Thaler used the Cine Reflect
Lighting System (from The Light Bridge) that diffuses and modulates
the light source. Thaler used this to create dynamic yet natural-looking light
to intensify the hostage situation.
“The lighting conditions in the
cockpit were particularly difficult because of our goal to make long and 360
degree takes,” he says. “In preparation, I discussed with Patrick all possible
movements of our actors to understand where we would need some additional
practical lights and where we could integrate our film lights into the
cockpit.”
During filming, a lighting board
operator and gaffer watched a feed on a monitor and would fade the lighting in
and out in accordance to Thaler’s camera movements so that he didn’t throw any
shadows on the actors.
In a throw-back to old-fashioned
special effects, they hoisted the plane on a pneumatic rig that allowed it to
be shaken by hand to simulate the plane’s vibrations as it encounters
turbulence or makes steep ascents or descents.
Thaler’s single camera was the
compact ARRI Alexa Mini shooting open gate at 3.2k to leave headroom for
reframing in post.
His first choice of lenses were
Leicas but after finding that they produced a strange lighting effect from the
cockpit dashboard he selected a set of Zeiss Ultra Primes and Celere HS
Primes.
He mostly used 18.5mm and 25mm,
the longest focal length being 36mm. “The further the narrative progressed, the
more that closer lenses were chosen. I really like to be physically close with
my camera to the actors. With long lenses you create a noticeable distance
between the audience and the protagonist. When you are really just 20
centimeters away from the actor’s face with the lens to catch their emotions,
you have to be very careful and empathetic to not cross the line of feeling
uncomfortable for the actor. You have to build up trust and a relationship with
your counterpart so they let you into their comfort zone.”
Critical to the story’s realism
is that Tobias can only see the hijackers as blurry figures on a grainy
black-and-white CCTV monitor from a camera outside and above the cockpit door.
This material was shot at the
same time as filming in the cockpit. Thaler and Vollrath had rigged three
similar POV cameras for coverage but chose to just use just the one.
The first portion of the film
features scenes looking out from the cockpit windows to the airport terminal
and passenger gate while the plane is parked and then taxiing.
This backdrop is formed of images
shot on multiple cameras at Vienna airport, stitched into a single 270-degree panorama
and front projected at the studio in Cologne.
The production shot bluescreen
for the plane’s taxi sequence (landing and take-off) and for mid-air sequences
featuring the lights of a city.
As one can imagine, the process
was physically demanding. “Each take would be around 40-50 minutes long and
we’d do 4-5 takes a day. Any longer was not possible. We broke the script into
sequences in the course of which [we knew we would] capture certain emotional
moments. After each, we discussed what we could do better or what we missed and
then went again.
“In between each take, the art
department would come in and reset everything (such as making adjustments to
the flight path dials). In such a tight space with only one entrance and exit,
we had to have a strict protocol of art, make-up, lighting, actors, director,
and so on going in and out. It was a very complicated process.”
Co-incidentally, German actor
Carlo Kitzlinger who plays the plane’s captain Michael, was previously a
commercial airline pilot.
“There was a very nice moment
when in the film Carlo/Michael makes the first announcement to the passengers
and he said that with the front projection and whole environment that it felt
real as if he were flying again.”
No comments:
Post a Comment