00:00Hi, my name is Michael Baumann. I'm a cinematographer on One Battle After Another.
00:17When Paul started talking about the film initially, he had a pretty strong visual sense of what he wanted it to look like
00:23from the standpoint of a lot in the vein of 70s cinema.
00:26Some of the stronger visual references we had were The French Connection, The Lasty Tale.
00:31A lot of the movies in that period that had a certain stylistic roughness to it
00:35that he really felt was essential in telling this story.
00:38He also really wanted to shoot the movie in VistaVision.
00:40VistaVision is an old format that was around starting in the 50s that was kind of a response to television
00:45that some of the studios were developing.
00:47And instead of it being 4-perf vertical, like a normal 35mm camera,
00:52this takes the film and puts it 8-perf horizontal, which allows for a much bigger negative space.
00:58Each frame is twice the size.
01:00And so it's a much richer image.
01:02So one of the challenges was how to blend these two styles together,
01:06the richness of the VistaVision, and combining it and making it like a 70s type of film
01:11that felt like a lot of the scenes out of The French Connection.
01:13Generally, when I get the script, I do a first read, then start to do a second read
01:22where I start to break it down and add notes and thoughts and things like that.
01:25On one battle, Paul and Florencia Martin, the production designer, had already done a lot of research
01:31and had some general ideas of locations and things like this.
01:34And so it was a good visual jumping-off point.
01:37You know, you're looking at all these locations or having conversations about how to approach certain scenes
01:41and putting that all together.
01:43The scene at the end of the film, we called it the River of Hills.
01:52Willa has escaped from the 1776 camp and has taken Avante the bounty hunter's car
01:59and is driving away from the camp while she's being chased by Tim Smith from the Christmas Adventurers.
02:06The idea behind the scene was how to create tension as these two cars are driving around.
02:11The location manager had found the River of Hills and these roads when we were scouting for the 1776 camp,
02:17which is a place called Walter's Landing, along the Colorado River.
02:20These rolling hills were really something that struck him.
02:22Paul, myself, Flo, Adam Sumner, and Michael, the location manager, went out and looked at it
02:27just to kind of see what it felt like.
02:29And it was really clear as we were kind of driving along that it's such a unique topography
02:35that it allowed us to see the cars disappear, come in and out of the frame,
02:39which was really critical to building kind of how the two cars chase each other
02:44and the cat and mouse on the way to the end.
02:46And we're trying to figure out how to use the camera in that space.
02:49Some stuff on the side of the road with long lenses, you know, 1,000 millimeter, 1,200 millimeter,
02:53to stack the cars up against each other as they popped over the hills.
02:57But what really made it the most dynamic and the most effective was to get the camera
03:00as close to the road as possible, to be able to chase after the cars
03:03or lead the cars as they're going up and over the hills.
03:07Originally, we started working with a company out in Santa Clarita called Padelford Camera Cars.
03:11I had worked with them previously on Ford versus Ferrari.
03:16And Alan Padelford is kind of one of the old school masters of camera car usage.
03:23And he's developed numerous amounts of different types of systems
03:25that really benefited what we were trying to do.
03:27And so myself and Tana Duby, who's the key grip, and Colin Anderson, who's a camera operator,
03:32we spent a day, along with our first AC, Serge Nafta, going through at Alan's shop,
03:37testing different systems, driving around the streets that were adjacent to his facility.
03:42But it was really clear that while we were doing that, using wide lenses close to the ground,
03:47just a few inches off the surface of the road, was super effective for creating a dynamic sense of speed.
03:52Even on our small monitors that we were looking at at the time,
03:55we could tell that was really going to be some powerful stuff.
03:57And so when we looked at it with dailies with Paul, he was really responding to that.
04:01And then we were able to take that out onto the river of hills
04:03and really lean into all that kind of emphasis of speed.
04:07And scale, it just had an incredibly powerful effect.
04:10We saw it for the first time in dailies.
04:17It was immensely technically complicated, mainly also because that was a live road
04:21that was one of the few roads in that part of California.
04:23So there was a tremendous amount of traffic.
04:25And we had to have the ability to lock it up for about a 10-minute increment
04:29when we could set up our own cars, race around, and do all that
04:34while in a safe environment for the crew so we wouldn't have to worry about any traffic coming in.
04:38In addition to that, it was really figuring out how to get the camera.
04:41The VistaVision camera is really originally designed to just work on a tripod
04:44and just get beautiful wide shots.
04:47And we were taking this camera and strapping it to cars
04:50and putting it on these elaborate camera rigs to get it close to the ground
04:54and race around with it and do all this kind of stuff,
04:56which really put a lot of stress on the system.
04:59And we'd try and set up these systems where we'd have one camera pointing forward following a car
05:04and behind it would be another camera pointing backwards pulling the car,
05:09you know, like the car is behind us as we're moving forward.
05:13And so that was only because we had to get as many shots as we could
05:16in this 10-minute window that we had with the lockup.
05:18This camera system hadn't really been used at this quantity of film
05:22because we shot about 1.5 million feet of film for the project.
05:25This camera system hadn't had that kind of level of film run through it in a long time.
05:31And so that inherently had its own problems,
05:33especially when it's vibrating along as we're going 70 miles an hour.
05:37And so we had to discover methods of working within the parameters
05:40that the camera would give us on any kind of day.
05:42So it was almost like you had another actor in the set to a certain degree,
05:46which was kind of a unique experience.
05:48I think the thing that was so exciting about the whole sequence, though,
05:51was the fact that we were doing it all practically.
05:53Really, in the whole film, there's very little visual effects.
05:55But this sequence, it was all shot as natural as possible.
05:59It really allowed it to fall into the space that Paul wanted,
06:02which is kind of that 70s French Connection type of feel.
06:05And he was really enamored with the subway chase in French Connection,
06:09and that was kind of really our guiding light in our North Star
06:11for how to approach that sequence.
06:13Paul really was pretty specific about how Tidy wanted to play on the faces at times
06:22as they're driving, and she's looking in the rearview mirror or in the side mirror.
06:26And that was a lot of figuring out what those rigs would be
06:28to look in the rearview mirror and catch the car as it comes over the crest of the hill.
06:33Here's a really specific shot in that sequence
06:36that is the pinnacle of how dynamic it is.
06:40And it's a point of view.
06:42It's a clean point of view that we mounted on the front of the car.
06:45As we're coming over the top of a hill,
06:47Surge, our focus puller, rolled focus to the crest of the hill.
06:51And we're only watching on a small five- or seven-inch monitor.
06:55And I was like, oh, that's pretty cool.
06:56But to see it on a gigantic IMAX screen with the sound
07:02is such a dynamic and powerful experience
07:04that I don't think is rivaled on any other format.
07:07It really underscores the power of shooting on film
07:10and what VistaVision is as far as projecting it.
07:14It's really a super arresting image that has a strong emotional feel to it.
07:20The ability to experience that by going to the theater is really unique.
07:25The other thing that's really beneficial, I think,
07:27as far as the overall emotional tension
07:30is the incredible score that Johnny Greenwood did.
07:39And the way that they use that score to ebb and flow
07:42as cars appeared and disappeared,
07:44which really adds to the visual strength of the whole sequence.
07:47It's crazy because as they go through,
07:49I was watching the movie the other day,
07:50and I was just like, damn, it's nonstop, you know,
07:52which is really exciting.
07:53And you have all this weird stuff,
07:54like when she's talking about her postpartum depression.
07:56Who would have put that in the old action movie?
07:58You come for the rebellious action film
08:00and you end up staying for the postpartum depression
08:02is like a huge character beat that anchors it in a unique way.
08:05It's a great�
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