PRODUCTION DIGGER
Chivo. “I travel a lot with Alejandro; he’s my teacher, my brother and my friend. During that time, we drank coffee and wine and went to all these galleries, primarily in Amsterdam and London.” During these travels, certain paintings particularly stood out to them. “A lot of our inspiration came from Bruegel and Bellini, where the characters have this uncanny fill light. Their work is almost shadowless, very much like a diorama. We approached the sets in a similar way. The dioramas are complex in the sense that they are multilayered – and some of these layers were created by using miniatures.” More than 30 different sets were built on various stages across Pinewood Studios, and proxy sets were constructed with grey canvases. Chivo worked closely alongside set decorator Anna Pinnock, who was there throughout the entire process. “We mapped the movie and storyboarded with a little digital camera,” he says. “It took us a while to figure out how to get the right tone.” Sophie Wilde plays a theatre director, and her character’s vision for a play became central to the film’s visual language. “Part of the creation of the miniatures had to do with her character recreating the past,” he says. “We loved the idea of her building these dioramas, like you would see in a natural history museum. Most of these characters are taking us towards extinction, and all these dioramas are the sets of a play. It’s slightly weird because they look real, but they aren’t.”
END OF THE WORLD The production team used more than 30 sets on Digger, with Lubezki (left) using fill light to achieve an artificial aesthetic, as well as natural light for the ‘reality’ scenes
To capture the film’s artificial quality, Chivo utilised fill light. By contrast, in the scenes set in ‘reality’, the lights came from real sources and he implemented handheld camerawork to distinguish the scenes from the rest of the film. They deliberately relied on an imperfect lens with lots of halation and blur to help achieve this effect. “Little by little, we transitioned to handheld camera, so you can have the energy of the camera moving between the actors.” In terms of the ‘unreal’ scenes, he admits that the solarium sequence was particularly challenging for everyone. “The whole conception of that was super tricky. I based the light on a Rembrandt painting that Alejandro and I found in a
gallery. It’s one of [the] only landscapes that he did and it worked perfectly for the tree in our scene.” When playing with the lighting, there was one major limitation. Tom Cruise’s makeup could not be heated more than 19°C. They had to ensure it stayed cool and without too many variations, or risk expanding the glues and the makeup. “We didn’t want to melt it, so we had to use LEDs. The lights are also changing constantly throughout the film, [so] LEDs made more sense for us.” VISTAVISION Creating the film’s uncanny visual language wasn’t only about lighting. The choice of format and lenses were equally as important, and Digger marked the first time Chivo has shot the majority of a film in VistaVision. “Back in the day, we used VistaVision for visual effects. The first time was on Meet Joe Black . We had a complicated effect where Brad Pitt’s character is run over by a car and we used it to shoot all the different plates. When I saw the dailies, the projection was horrendous, but the image was breathtaking and looked spectacular. It planted a seed in my head that one day I could shoot on the camera.” The cameras are still extremely loud – he does an impression of how they sound on set – remarkably like machine-gun fire. “Some actors love it,” he says enthusiastically, “as they get to feel the tension of this expensive film
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