PRODUCTION DIGGER
going through the magazine. Most of our cast enjoyed that. It also gave them time to talk to Alejandro between the reloads and created a whole atmosphere that he wanted to have on set.” Despite having shot many of his movies on film, he admits he is no longer the biggest fan of the medium. “We live in the moment where digital cameras are the best they’ve [ever] been, and for capturing, I still love digital. The question is how you treat the digital, so it feels more organic. For this film, Alejandro’s vision was to shoot on film, and after several tests, VistaVision was the superior choice. You have a larger format and field of view, but you still have all that depth-of-field.” Actor and DOP Giovanni Ribisi restored a vintage Beaumont VistaVision camera for One Battle After Another and the same camera was subsequently lent to Chivo for Digger . “The camera was sent over to us quite late and was completely beat up,” he recalls. “We had to rebuild it and change the prism. The lenses they used for that film were good at servicing a film that aimed to look like a seventies movie with all the aberrations and flares, but it didn’t work for our film.” With limited time before shooting began, he reached out to Dan Sasaki, Panavision‘s senior vice-president of optical engineering and lens strategy. “He built us a package that consisted of four lenses. Leitz also really saved us and built us a whole set of lenses that were slightly cleaner and allowed me to shoot against
FILLING THE FRAME During the European Parliament
all the skies and windows without blurring too much. Panavision don’t usually like to put bases on lenses that were not made by them, but they very kindly did for Alejandro, Tom and myself.” Most of the film was shot on a 29mm lens. The very wide shots were captured on 21mm, with maybe one shot on 18mm. With VistaVision, a 29mm lens already gives you a very wide field of view. “We shot at f/8 because when you have all these actors sitting around a table, you need a lot of depth-of-field. You want to be able to see action and reaction without having to constantly pull focus or have someone fall out of focus.” One of the limitations of shooting in VistaVision was the relatively small size of its film rolls, which allowed for less than ten minutes shooting. “For the longer shots, we had to shoot them digitally,” adds Chivo. “For example, the European Parliament scene was one extended take and so we knew we had to capture it digitally.”
scene, Tom Cruise delivers a ten-minute monologue. “I love when you can capture a performance that is evolving, where the energy is changing and it‘s getting increasingly visceral without cuts, because you allow Tom to go to those levels. The heights of his performance could not be captured with cuts.” Chivo is very much in awe of Cruise’s ability to deliver the scene in one take, and he tells me that Iñárritu also likes to get as much coverage as possible. “Can you imagine cutting and going back to the end of the scene and saying, ‘OK, Tom, let’s start here.’ He could do it for sure, but I don’t know if you would have that same energy. He’s almost out of breath at the end of his monologue. It’s just unbelievable, and that’s because we didn’t cut.” The parliament is filled with obvious dummies throughout the scene, adding to the fantastical element. This is a
DRILLING DOWN The movie was the first time Lubezki has worked with Tom Cruise, who he says had an “intimidating” knowledge of lenses and camera set-ups
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