“I don’t think it looks like video, and I don’t think it look like film; I think it looks like some interesting new hybrid,” Fincher explains.
When I caught up with Fincher he was in New Orleans shooting his second feature with the Viper – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, staring Brad Pitt – while simultaneously putting the finishing touches to Zodiac.
Based on the Robert Graysmith novel of the same name, Zodiac centers on the detectives and reporters covering the case of San Francisco’s infamous Zodiac Killer, who taunted Bay Area police with his letters and cryptic messages in the late 60s and then vanished without a trace. Fincher explains that what attracted him to the story was a personal connection to the topic. “I grew up in the bay area during this whole thing and I always felt the same way Graysmith felt. I remember when the whole investigation sort of ran out of steam and people stopped talking about it in 1974, and it always bothered me that nothing was done. Then I read Graysmith’s book, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is an interesting explanation of what happened – and it’s a gripping yarn.’” Zodiac was lensed by Harris Savides, ASC. Vipers were rented from The Camera House in LA, along with a set of Zeiss DigiPrimes and S.two Digital Film Recorders (DFRs). In terms of the workflow, the FilmStream data was recorded uncompressed onto removable hard drives in the DFR called D.MAGs. When these filled up, they were sent off to editorial where an offline version was made for preliminary work in Final Cut. Then the drives were cloned and sent to the digital laboratory, while LTO3 archive copies were made.
“My whole thing was let’s not build hardware and let’s not wait for any more hardware developers to tell us what it is that we need,” says Fincher. “Let’s simply look at our processes and find out what’s out there is readily available, so we can do this as cost effectively and time effectively as possible.
“It seemed to me that there were enough innovations out there that could be strung together, that we could actually ‘split this atom’, and be working in a tapeless environment, which was one of the reasons we started the whole thing,” adds Fincher.
He recalls that at the time they were prepping for Zodiac, the Arri D-20 wasn’t available, but they tested the Panavision Genesis and the Dalsa Origin. “One of the reasons we didn’t go with the Genesis is that tape is such an old idea,” says Fincher. “We’ve got to be honest, all this stuff is still really beta, and of the tools that are out there, the one that seemed the most effective and had the kind of flexibility we needed ended up being the Viper.
“There are parts of the pipeline that are more expensive than film, and so if you’re not getting some of the advantages of it, then you’re just trading one sorry state of affairs for another,” he says. In particular, the Viper’s performance in low light was the key advantage, as they planned to shoot in several challenging lighting environments, “partially because Harris is kind of brave,” he adds.
“There’s a scene we shot for a whole day that was lit with three 40W clear glass light bulbs. You just couldn’t do it on film and you couldn’t have done it with the Dalsa where it stands right now,” he explains.
When asked about the overall look he was going for on Zodiac Fincher explains: “we wanted it to feel like the period and we wanted it to be kind of utilitarian. I didn’t want it to be showy or pretty. We wanted it to feel real.
“We needed to do stuff simply, because a lot of the times we were landing at a location the same day we were lighting and shooting it, so there wasn’t a lot of time.” But it was ‘par for the course’ for cinematographer Savides, who also worked with Fincher on The Game and Se7en. “He’s used to hearing ‘Here’s what we want to do. Can we start shooting in 20 minutes?’”
While it wasn’t a particularly effects-heavy piece, Digital Domain was called on for effects work such as set extensions, and much of the matte painting work was carried out at Matte World Digital by Craig Barron. Additional effects work was done by Ollin Studio in Mexico City.
The DI process
Stephen Nakamura, colorist at Technicolor Digital Intermediates (TDI), is a long-time collaborator of Fincher’s, having timed Se7en, The Game, Fight Club and Panic Room. “I’ve been working with David for 10 years now and he’s always pushing the envelope technologically,” says Nakamura, who reports that he’s built a rapport with Fincher that helps things go smoothly in the DI suite. “I know his palettes, the type of looks he likes and what bothers him about shots, as far as color imagery and density and brightness level go, as well as the amount of detail to use in his blacks. So I’m very familiar with the way that he looks at photography and what he likes.”
He explains that the key to making things go so smoothly in the DI session is carrying out proper tests in advance. “Harris and David did a lot of testing with the Viper just to make sure they knew where the exposure ranges were going to be,” Nakamura explains, “ensuring that they could get the look that they wanted at the end – something that wasn’t going to clip the whites or crush the blacks.”
Nakamura supplied a set of rough Look Up Tables (LUTs) that were used for both offline and dailies. “With other directors, cinematographers are always nervous that the dailies have to be perfect because the director and the editor might fall in love with the dailies, and when it comes to the DI everyone’s going to freak out, because after months and months of seeing it one way, the graded shots look like they’re in a weird color space. But with Fincher, there’s no handholding necessary and ‘the dailies are just dailies’.” He adds that the director tends to be active in color timing sessions and likes to time his own films.
On his previous major feature film, Panic Room, Fincher made extensive use of previsualizations to plan out production, but for Zodiac he decided to dispense with previs except for a few of the key murder scenes, because more often than not they weren’t able to shoot where they wanted to and, “we didn’t want to make ourselves crazy by constraining how we were thinking about it.”
Fincher reports that often they had to improvise in the field, in cases where, “a location fell out and we had to end up going to another place. We tried not to make ourselves unhappy by having an exact idea of what we wanted it to be.” It was simply the logistics of shooting in San Francisco.
“Shooting in San Francisco is just a nightmare, so I don’t recommend it to anybody,” adds Fincher. “It’s a beautiful city and one of the reasons it’s so beautiful is it’s just impossible to shoot there. One of the reasons LA is so ugly is because people shoot there all the time. It’s like shooting in Paris. The reason why Paris is so fantastic is that there’s no film crews running all over it. But by the same token, it’s just too hard to shoot there.”
Benjamin Button
Last fall, Fincher started shooting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in New Orleans with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, another long-time collaborator who has worked extensively with Fincher on spots and music videos, including the director’s previous Viper spots.
Fincher reports that it’s been much easier to shoot in the Big Easy. “It’s been great actually. It’s been extremely responsive, and not obsequiously so. It’s a city that’s rebuilding. But people are sensible about what they’re negotiating for; you don’t feel like your being gouged, or they’re making you go the long way around.”
The film is a screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic short story of man who ages backwards, shot with four Vipers, also rented from The Camera House. Two of the Vipers will serve as witness cams (running in HDStream mode) collecting metadata for the extensive head replacements, as Brad Pitt’s face is mapped to an actor wearing a blue ski mask.
It’s a technique that Miranda and Fincher tried out earlier this year on an Orville Redenbacher spot, which resurrects the deceased popcorn company founder in CG and was also shot with Vipers. “We’re trying make it look like it takes place over 100 years,” says Fincher. “So we’re trying to have enough of an evolved look that we go from gas lamps to early electricity to fluorescence.” “It starts off as a smokier, industrial revolution kind of look and we’ll probably do something with saturation, so it starts off a little more desaturated and adds a little more color as it goes on,” he explains. “But it’s a fairly utilitarian look and we don’t want it to get too painterly. We want people to buy it. We don’t want people to say ‘Oh, I see, it’s a fable.’ I don’t want to let the audience off the hook.”
What’s changed technologically between Zodiac and Button? Well, for one thing, they are using S.two’s new i.Dock docking station, which automates offline ingest and dailies creation. In addition, Fincher explains that he’d dispensed with the use of the LUT baked into offline versions, simply because, “we now have more confidence that people will be able understand that we’re able to go anywhere with the images. We’re not so paranoid that the studio is going to look at the pictures and say, ‘Oh my God! This is what the movie is going to look like?’”
“We also felt that, with the amount of time that it took to bake in the meager LUT color corrections, it just didn’t warrant it. We’d rather have the immediate feedback. We’d rather have hourlies instead of weeklies,” he adds.
Cinematographer Claudio Miranda explains that he too finds many of the on-set color systems on the market these days to be “unwieldy”, and for Button, he is relying on Adobe Photoshop and Apple’s Aperture to communicate looks with Fincher via simple reference stills.
He explains that with Photoshop, he can take in raw DPX files and export TIFF files to Aperture (which is designed for still photography) for more advanced look manipulation. While it doesn’t produce standard LUTs that can be passed down the postproduction chain to a colorist, “it provides a simple way to convey looks. I’m able to take a little memory stick home at night, and I set looks and get looks from David, and we seem to be on an even keel,” says Miranda.
The film’s extensive head and face replacement effects make Button a far more ‘effects-heavy’ film than Zodiac, but according to Miranda, “for everything else we’re trying to shoot it real-for-real as much as we can. So we’re shooting in the French Quarter of New Orleans, in all these beautiful, interesting locations.”
He faces a hefty 150-day shoot that will take him well into next August. Fincher says he hopes to work with much the same team at Digital Domain and Matte World for effects and Technicolor for DI, but he added that “there’s a year’s worth of effects work on this one.”
Indeed, with all the work on his plate at the moment, he’s had less and less time for commercials these days. “Splitting your attention like that is really difficult,” he says, with some understatement.
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Scott LehaneScott Lehane is a Toronto-based journalist and documentary film producer. He can be reached at scottlehane@sympatico.ca |