IBC
“He is an entertainer. Everything is made for audiences to
experience larger than life,” Mandy Walker ACS ASC, the director of photography,
is talking about Baz Luhrmann, the director of Strictly Ballroom, Moulin
Rouge and the cinema screen but Elvis is now in the building.
article here
“The discussion I had with Baz really early on was about the
emotion of Elvis’ journey which has incredible highs and deep lows. It’s at
once epic and intimate,” Walker says. “We also wanted to portray the impact
that Elvis had on American culture at different periods.”
Luhrmann had been planning the biopic for a decade and
compiled a reference book of images, documentary footage and home movies for
production/costume designer Catherine Martin and fellow production designer
Karen Murphy and Walker to draw on.
“The costume, colour palette and texture was very specific
for every sequence. For instance, once Elvis got to Hollywood he had this
motorhome outfitted in red velvet and gold and shiny black so we used that as cues
for colour tests.”
Elvis is played by Austin Butler whose vocals are on the
soundtrack (and recorded live for some scenes) in a story told through the
prism of Tom Parker, Presley’s colourful manager-cum-promoter, played by
Tom Hanks.
“A large chunk of the film is reality,” the director
declared at CinemaCon in April, an event fittingly held in Las Vegas. “But
there’s a touch of the film that’s a morphine dream from Tom Parker. Elvis is
kind of the original superhero. He rises so high, then finds his kryptonite and
falls so low and then a beautiful, powerful tragedy ensues.”
Walker, who previously lensed Luhrmann’s biopic of Australia
(2008) joined the project in mid-2019 on the back of shooting Disney’s Mulan.
She began by writing detailed notes as the director talked her through every
scene.
“Baz is great at taking you to the emotion of the story. I
knew when there’d be a dramatic moment or when we want to move the camera and
be frenetic and chaotic.”
A scene set in the International Hotel, Las Vegas, where
Elvis realises he can’t rid himself of manager and Tom Parker, is particularly
poignant.
“We went really dark in that scene, the curtains are closed,
it became almost black, until the light from the television comes on,” she
tells IBC365. “Elvis watched television almost 24 hrs a day in this period. He
had a TV with him wherever he went and would have it on multiple stations. That
was one of the saddest moments in the movie. He’s been shut in, trapped in a
cage.”
He can’t walk out, you want to say.
The film arcs his childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi to his
rise to stardom starting in Memphis and his conquering of Vegas, all of which
was shot in Australia. Huge sets were built at Village Roadshow Studios near
Brisbane for Tupelo and Shake Rag, an African American community in
Tuplelo where young Elvis discovers the blues and exteriors of Beale Street and
Graceland in Memphis. Interiors including the International (later name changed
to Hilton) on stage sets, about 80 of them in total.
“Vegas and Memphis have changed so much there really is no
Memphis or Vegas left from that period,” explains Walker of the reason not to
travel to location. The same rationale was used by director Jane Campion and DP
Ari Wegner to shoot The Power of the Dog in New Zealand rather than
Montana.
The epic/intimate nature of the story leant itself to
telling in the widescreen shallow depth of field 65mm format, mainly Alexa 65
and some high speed shots on Alexa LF, running at least three and sometimes
five cameras at a time.
Lenses were crucial with Walker choosing Spherical for the
first half of the story in the ‘50s and ‘60s switching to anamorphic for 1970s’
Vegas. Specifically, these were Sphero 65s of the type originally used on Lawrence
of Arabia and T series Anamorphic with 11:1 and 3:1 zooms and a 55mm
Petzval.
These were supplied and customised at Panavision in LA by
lens guru Dan Sasaki
“We went through three different series of lenses that Dan
tweaked and tuned to end up with two full sets. We tested every iteration with
costume and with mock-ups of sets. Baz is meticulous about testing and planning
and that meant that by the time we came to shoot everyone was on the same
page.”
The colour treatment in the film alters with the period. The
Trupolo and Memphis sections are keyed into the evocative look of contemporary
stills photographers Saul Lieter and Gordan Parks in particular.
“Gordon Parks used to shoot with a very soft colour palette
that shows some colours popping out and some fade. It’s like a hand coloured
look. We called it ‘black and white colour’ and thought that a good inspiration
for the look of the poor neighbourhood where Elvis grew up.”
For the 50s and 60s eras Walker leant into simulations of
Kodachrome stock and then changed to a more glitzy and saturated feel for
Vegas.
“By the time we got to Vegas we used T-series lenses that
Dan had modified to make them less visually pristine. If left unmodified these
lenses typically produce a horizontal blue flare but he changed the optics so
that we saw other colours like magenta, green and sometimes yellow flares.”
“I’d go through dailies on set every night with the dailies
colourist and tweak scenes and ensured there was a consistency of look across
each era.”
In 1968 Presley made a televised concert aired by
NBC to mark a return to live performance after seven years during which
his career had centred on the film industry. Later known as the ‘Comeback
Special’, it re-launched his singing career and is recreated in the film
sometimes shot for shot.
“We actually did this for a lot of the concert scenes where
we had doc footage available,” Walker says. “It was important to Baz that we
reproduce the concerts as Elvis had performed them including the first two
Vegas shows. Baz called this our ‘Trainspotting Scenes’ meaning that we’d be
very particular about matching the lighting and camera angles, even down to the
dimmer board operators who would change the lights to the music just as in the
original. We studied this footage meticulously to reproduce the shots.”
This included rounding up as many old rock and roll light
sources they could find across Australia. They appear in shot for the earlier concert
scenes (and where Elvis is at the Louisiana Hayride TV show wearing a pink
suit) augmented with hidden fixtures like ARRI orbiters for better control of
colour temp.
For the ’68 TV special they used TV studio lights with LEDs
to fill in the shadows. In other scenes she placed Fresnals for a harsher light
and 20k Mole Beams for directional light with softer more subtle
edges. These were contrasted with the more dramatic scenes for which Walker and
her Gaffer Shaun Conway used 8x8 LED softboxes.
Variety https://variety.com/2022/film/reviews/elvis-review-austin-butler-tom-hanks-baz-luhrmann-1235269244/
has called the film a “fizzy, delirious, impishly energized, compulsively
watchable fever dream — a spangly pinwheel of a movie that converts the Elvis
saga we all carry around in our heads into a lavishly staged
biopic-as-pop-opera.”
For such a high energy 159-minute montage you would think
that work on set would be equally frenetic but not so according to Walker.
Principal photography lasted 83 days, not extravagant for an $85m budget film.
Even the split screen sequences were planned well in advance.
“The film has ended up looking just like we envisaged very
early on,” she says. “I’d walk with Baz around the sets used for the Hilton
ballroom and we’d talk about the approach to the sequence from every angle.
Because of all the prep for visual language we all did everyone was in harmony
with those ideas.”
Ends
You may want to add these links:
https://www.ibc.org/interviews/interview-mandy-walker-dop/3642.article
https://www.ibc.org/trends/behind-the-scenes-mulan/6206.article
No comments:
Post a Comment