No Film School
The
opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s 1977 classic Close Encounters of a
Third Kind, set inside an air traffic control room, is used by director
Aaron Schneider (Get Low) as a tonal reference for the screenplay
for Greyhound, written by and starring Tom Hanks. The scene
dramatizes the audience’s first "sighting" of the UFO, except that we
never see it as more than a blip on the radar screen. Similarly in Greyhound,
the audience gathers information about the threat of submarines from the crew’s
perspective.
“The
whole concept of Greyhound is to put the audience into a
real-life WWII pilothouse and engage them in an experience once they get used
to the context and are educated in the language,” Schneider tells No
Film School. “This was a big challenge but a lot of fun. The scene in Close
Encounters establishes how air traffic controllers do their business
in a flight control tower with the communications, the kit, and the verbiage
all unfamiliar to the audience—not unlike a police dispatcher. The language is procedural,
it lends the situation veracity and makes the actual drama palpable.”
DP
Shelly Johnson ASC (Captain America: The First Avenger) picks up the
theme, “Aaron envisioned this movie built on providing the audience with the
situational awareness to understand the story. He told me to think about the
movie as the beginning of Close Encounters when they’re in
that air traffic control room and you’re hearing one side of the conversation
and seeing the other side of it. You never cut to the airplane they’re talking
to, but the airplane they’re talking to is seeing a UFO and describing
everything it is seeing. It is all technical back and forth, but through all
those puzzle pieces, you are kind of discovering what the inner drama is about,
just from this one-sided radio conversation. Aaron said think of that as our
entire movie.
In Greyhound,
captain and crew of a US destroyer spend 3 days in the North Atlantic trying to
protect a convoy of merchant vessels from wolf packs of U-Boats. It’s a
fictional account treated with historical accuracy.
“The
action takes place in 1942 shortly after Pearl Harbor when the Navy had many
career captains who were trained but hadn’t experienced battle,” explains
Johnson, who also revisited Wolfgang Petersen’s acclaimed U-boat drama Das
Boot (1982) for a human perspective on the German battle experience.
“Even though he’s a senior officer, Captain Krause (played by Hanks), is just
as much a rookie as the younger crew members. We want to depict the heroic
nature of these men in the same frame with their vulnerability.”
Large
format photography
Hanks’
(a renowned WW2 buff) script was reportedly very, very technical with dialogue
composed of rudder commands, targeting, vectors, and nautical codes. Schneider
also says the book by C.S Forester on which the film is based includes such
exact details of ship positions and commands that it could be used to map the
battle.
“The
drama lay in the white parts of the page and written in such a way that it left
the staging of the scene open to interpretation,” says Johnson. “It was only in
rehearsal with the actors that we were able to connect the dots and pull the
meaning of a scene together. It’s a big chess game with life and death
consequences and the truth to this lies in Hanks’ reaction before and after he
says his lines.”
This
approach to the film fed into the visual treatment, which was to shoot handheld
using large format photography despite being, for most of the movie, in the
confines of a 10ft x 18ft pilothouse set.
“Aaron
wanted the camera in that 2 ft to 3 ft range,” Johnson explains. “An immediate
advantage is that the longer focal length adds a textural depth to the set.
It’s something the audience will respond to almost subliminally, but we were
less interested in showing detail associated with large-format shooting,
compared to how the optics would perform.”
Johnson
selected Panavision’s Millennium DXL which has a Dragon 8K VistaVision sensor
with Sphero 65 lenses. At the time principal photography began in January 2018,
the ARRI Alexa LF was not yet available while the DXL2 proved out of the range
of the picture’s $50M budget, modest for a Sony Pictures film.
“I’ve
been a big anamorphic fan since I first started out as a cinematographer,”
Schneider explains. “The reason is that you can actually make a more intimate
film on a human level with anamorphic lenses then you can with spherical. The
larger the format the longer the focal length can be to get the shot you need.
“So,
if I’m jammed in a corner with large format on Greyhound, instead
of 21mm, now I can use a 25mm or 40mm and get much the same shot and have a
more natural focal length that doesn’t feel like looking through a peephole on
a door. It means I can get up next to Tom and explore the reactions on his
face, which shows the weight of the decisions he has to make. Greyhound is
a character study in that regard, so I wanted to get the audience up close up
to the actors—large format photography translates into intimacy.”
It
was a feat complicated by shooting on a gimbal elevated 14 feet in the air and
continually rocking at often severe angles to simulate motion on deck.
“Even
in a ‘static’ frame when the actor was 3 feet away and standing still, the
operator is pulling focus from 2 feet to 4 feet,” Johnson says. “This was all
done largely by feel. The gimbal is moving one way, the actors are moving
another, and the operators are also moving. The assistant is able to watch on a
monitor, but not only are they and the monitor also rocking but the signal has
a very slight delay. So, if they relied on just the monitor, they’d be reacting
to a moment that has already happened.”
VFX,
lighting and white screen
The
film was almost entirely set on sound stages in Louisiana apart from 5 days on
the museum ship USS Kidd moored on the Mississippi at Baton Rouge. As such,
it could have been shot using a set ringed with LED screens in a virtual
production scenario, which is en vogue for shows like The Mandalorian.
The
budget precluded this to a large degree but it was also a prep issue. Schneider
explains, “If you are going to take true advantage of LED backlots, you have to
basically pre-produce your background footage, and in this instance, it would
have required huge amounts of knowledge about the state of the ocean, state of
the weather, the position and lighting of ships which would have been
cost-prohibitive and less flexible to making creative decisions on set.”
Instead,
Schneider charged Johnson to learn all he could about life on board ship in
order to design a lighting scheme that would also be a blueprint for VFX.
“Tom’s
script breaks down the story into 4-hour ‘Watches’ signifying the rotation of
crew on the bridge,” Johnson explains. “I used these precise times to create a
manifesto of how the light would look at different times.
His
research led to thinking about detail such as the sea state, the height of the
waves, and even the air quality. “Because the whole movie takes place over 3 and
a half days, I could sort of map the whole movie out. I could actually
articulate scene by scene exactly what color the water would be, exactly what
the horizon would look like, the wind, and the color of ambient light in
accordance with the time of day and what needed to happen and what needed to be
functioning on the ship. I could actually work out a whole logic.
His
manifesto went up the chain so that Schneider, VFX, and the producer (which
includes Hanks) agreed to it. “Since we were just shooting all the foregrounds,
all the backgrounds (of ocean, skies) that had to be created in post had to
marry what I was lighting for, particularly at night. At night, we needed to be
able to see the horizon so you get a feeling of movement. You need to be able to
see other ships that the crew could see, so my feeling was—okay, if you’re on
the ship, you’re eyes are going to get used to the darkness, plus there could
be a little bit of atmosphere blowing around which would help open the shadows
up.”
This
information was translated scene for scene into color temperatures programmed
for a series of SkyPanels on set and backlighting a radius of muslin sheets,
with additional grid-cloths for sky above the set.
“I’d
shot white screen for a scene set in a suborbital aircraft on Captain
America where lots of light would reflect from the metal interior. I
wanted to avoid the contamination of green light reflected from green screen,”
Johnson says. “It provided a solid base for the lighting scheme that didn’t
look like an artificial Hollywood [green screen] lighting job and from which
the VFX team was able to pull keys very effectively.”
When
your director is also a DP
The
comparison with Close Encounters drove the extent of research,
which Schneider demanded of his heads of department. For this endeavor, they
were aided by actor and technical advisor Dale Dye who has provided military
consulting services to films from Platoon to Band of
Brothers.
“I
learned that the Sonar ping, which is familiar from any submarine movie, is
sent out at exact intervals but as the vessels come closer, the distance
between those pings decreases since the sonar travels less far,” Schneider
explains. “Knowing that meant I could film inserts of the Sonar so that, in
cutting the scene, I could increase the tempo of the ping and the tension of
the scene—in the same way you would increase the tempo of the score. It’s one
very precise technical aspect that you can turn into drama and I wanted Shelly
to learn as much as he could in order to help find creative ways to use some of
the more technical aspects of our setting and give us a bigger palette to tell
the story.”
It
is worth asking how both DP and director reacted to working with one another
for the first time, especially because one of them is a former DP.
“Aside
from technically knowing how to do a crane shot or what is harder or easier to
light, my instinct is always to push for more,” Schneider says.
“Cinematographers want to make the best image they can and will beg, borrow,
and steal to get that done. When I was a DP, it might have been as minute as
altering the angle of a clock to catch a better reflection.
He
continues, “The relationship between a director and a DP can be a mismatch. A
director’s impatience or ambition can interfere with the ambition and vision of
the cinematographer but, hopefully, Shelly feels we pulled together as a team.”
Johnson
relates that he was really surprised during rehearsal, that the director would
stand at the opposite side of the set to him. “Normally, that’s not a good
sign,” he says. “But that really wasn’t it at all. We were just kind of
examining the shot from different angles and then swap notes about what we saw.
Probably 9 times out of 10 we would go with where he was standing.”
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