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Fear Stalks The North Woods |
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But for us, real-life filmmakers adapting Stephen King's best-selling novel DREAMCATCHER to the screen, the fear is of...cold feet. And shooting in Prince George, British Columbia, in January and February is indeed cause for the purchase of boots with soles several inches thick, lifting the wearer as far from the icy ground as possible. We may clump around like Abominable Snowmen, but we will clump with warm toes. We hope.
It seemed at first, though, that all our boot-buying was in vain. Winter
started slowly, with record-breaking warmth and little snow, which was great
for the construction of sets but lousy for shooting. There were anxious
meetings during the last week of preparation and the first few days of
photography... And then the snow came, justifying Prince George's claim —
among cities big enough to house a crew of about 250 — to the best snow
statistics in the province, which for movie-makers means a combination of
frequency of snowfall and persistence of the white stuff on the ground.
Why this obsession with snow? Because Stephen King enhanced the mood of his
novel — and complicated the challenge facing his characters — by having almost all of the story take place in a blizzard. Although we are heavily
equipped to blow artificial snow (more about that in a later report), there
are many scenes so expansive that only Mother Nature can do the job. We are
grateful that She decided to join the crew.
So here we are, scheduled to shoot for six weeks (including two weeks of
nights, when we’ll really test our boots) before moving to Vancouver for
eleven weeks, which is mostly on stages, but ends with some exteriors in the
spring. The beauty of this schedule is that by the time we leave Prince
George, with the most physically demanding part of the work behind us, these
snowy woods, white and gray-green under soft, even light, will have set the
visual tone of the film: both lovely and ominous.
The first week's work went very well; we have in the can many of the exterior
shots for the beginning of our main narrative, the transformation of a
carefree hunting holiday into a struggle to survive both a massive storm and
a confrontation with extraterrestrial evil. (Readers of the book will
remember that the story also includes prologue material, flashbacks, and
important scenes set in an imaginary space inside a character's head. We'll
film all of that in Vancouver.) Two moments were particularly striking to
watch.
First was the arrival of the four longtime friends at Hole in the Wall, a
cabin deep in the woods. Trees at the corners of the clearing where we built
the cabin were rigged with ropes and pulleys to fly a huge scrim high above
the roof. One use of the scrim is to subdue any inappropriate sunshine we
might get, but on the night our four actors piled out of a beat-up Scout and
unloaded their gear, the scrim was used to reflect the light of powerful
lamps hidden in the woods. On-camera, the effect was of moonlight, but those
of us off-camera saw a strange, glowing sail in the sky, like a UFO hovering
over the cabin.
Then came the scene of the stranger who has been lost in the woods, now
staggering toward the cabin. This was in daytime, under skies that looked as
though they could dump snow at any moment, although in fact we had to make
the snow called for in the story. But the smooth light made the few colors
in the scene glow: gray-green trees, undergrowth draped in snow-white — and the shocking orange patches of the stranger's hunting hat and coat, bobbing
erratically, bearing a terrible contagion toward our friends' retreat... It
was exactly as we had pictured it when reading first the book and then the
script. And it was very satisfying to have helped make it that way. Even
with cold feet. Make It Snow When Nature makes it snow, it is often the most tranquil and graceful of weather events. But when filmmakers do it, it’s a noisy and hectic affair, with huge fans roaring and garbage cans of artificial flakes being manhandled into the airstreams. Such techniques are required when the story calls for snow on the ground and there is none, or anytime it calls for falling snow, which never comes on cue and rarely photographs well when it does come. Hence the arcane art of snowmaking, practiced only by the initiates of special effects. When our director, Lawrence Kasdan, set out to make a movie of Stephen King’s novel DREAMCATCHER, producer Charles Okun and production designer Jon Hutman soon picked a place (Prince George, British Columbia) and a time (mid-January through February) to shoot the exteriors of a story set almost entirely during a massive snowstorm. And Vancouver-based line producer Casey Grant just as quickly hired the special effects crew headed by Bill Orr, sometimes called "Mr. Snow." (One recent movie, the joke goes, was named for his work on it: "Snow Falling on Cedars.") The location has worked out very well snow-wise, providing vistas of blanketed forest no human agency could achieve. But most of our scenes have still required help. For some purposes and under the right conditions — temperature of -4°C (25°F) or lower and maximum humidity of 65% — Orr and his team can use the same raw materials as Nature: water and cold air. A high-pressure pump sprays 400 gallons of water a minute into a cylinder called a "gun." A powerful fan blasts cold air through the mist; with the wind chill factor, the result is instant ice. The gun is angled to shoot sharply upward over the set, because a longer hang time results in better crystals. Although the guns scream like banshees, this is a very efficient and economical process: at our Gosselin’s store set, Orr’s crew used 300,000 gallons of water to lay a foot of snow over five or six acres of pasture. And there’s no cleanup. But conditions often force the snowmakers to turn to various grades of "product" — artificial snow. To cover the ground, they unroll huge bolts of white sheeting, then lay down flakes made of cellulose, blown through hoses (this is called "blowing paper"). Buildings, vehicles, and vegetation are sprayed with a sticky mix of the same product and water. And the powder blown in the air when a blizzard effect is needed is also cellulose. Falling snow, however, is made of rice starch. This "popcorn" snow is available in a regular size for backgrounds and a fine grade for foregrounds, where it’s used to fall on actors. Since it often blows into their mouths, it’s a good thing it’s edible. In fact, both cellulose and rice starch are non-toxic and biodegradable (gone in about three months in a wet climate), but if they need to be removed immediately (say in a residential neighborhood), it’s a big job. Orr figures that every day of blowing paper requires two and a half days of cleanup. Set dressing takes long hours of work, often overnight, but it’s done before the camera rolls. Snow falling in a shot is a different story. The minimum situation is a very close shot of a couple actors, where handfuls of the right size product are fed into the airstream of an electric fan (an "e-fan") quiet enough that often usable sound can be recorded. The fan is usually behind the camera, lofting the flakes at the right angle to fall into the shot "naturally." A typical intermediate-size situation is towing a car behind a camera truck. With fans rigged in unlikely places and pillowy bags of product bulging all over, the camera truck looks like a vehicle from cloud-cuckoo-land. A bigger challenge — and a common one on Dreamcatcher — is a wide shot with actors and vehicles moving through a large area. This requires huge fans called Ritters (the most famous brand name). Some are electric, some are "gas pots" with Volkswagen engines, but all are roaring monsters, and the sound recording crew might as well go for coffee until the next scene. It’s a major effort for Steve Dunn, the assistant director, to communicate a "CUT!" to the fan crews. (As I write, I’m a quarter-mile from the set, but I hear every take with the Ritters as though they were just outside my trailer, trying to get in.) The art here lies in knowing where to position the fans to cover the scene, a puzzle complicated by wind on the one hand and the fields of view of multiple cameras on the other. Usually the fans must be high; until about ten years ago, height was achieved on scaffolding, which had to be dismantled and moved by hand not only for every scene, but for reverses within a scene. Then came motorized, telescoping fork lifts that are driven into position and extended to height in minutes, their platforms bearing fans and crew aloft, their handrails festooned with bags of product. On the ground below, other crewmates continually plump up more bags of flakes and tie them to ropes to be hauled up and emptied into garbage cans for feeding to the insatiable airstreams. It’s cold, hard work up there, and ear protection is mandatory. What all this experience, equipment, and ear-splitting racket buy us is a convincing screen simulation of snow falling on our characters, whether they’re on foot or on cross-country skis, driving a snowmobile or a car, in deep woods or on the open road. (There are a few scenes so big that we’ll fall back on computer-generated snow, but that’s a different brand of wizardry entirely.) And sometimes we get unexpected benefits, images powerful in a way Nature would not be likely to provide. We just saw rushes of a snowy night scene in which a rifle-toting Curtis (Morgan Freeman) strides across the military compound he commands, passing beneath security lights that highlight big falling flakes. It’s beautiful in a familiar way. But then an ultra-bright searchlight sweeps across him, blasting both snow and man into eerie abstractions, peculiarly suited to the mood of the movie. It’s a moment worth a lot of rice starch and a lot of noise. We’re Rolling! is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with time present." That passage from Leonardo da Vinci is engraved by an ornamental waterfall outside the building where I’m staying while Dreamcatcher shoots in Vancouver. The first time I saw the quotation, a complicated swirl of thoughts abruptly jelled, and I had an epiphany about filmmaking. I realized this: more than actors or locations, more even than the light that reveals them or the film that catches the light, a movie is made of time. What does that mean? For one thing, when footage is being edited, the filmmakers are seeking a tempo that serves the movement of the story. For another, when a finished film is playing for an audience, time is at the heart of the experience, whether the picture flies by or (God forbid) drags. But what we have right now is not a movie being cut or screened, but a movie being made. And time works in peculiar ways on a film shoot. Let me back up for a moment to Prince George, where time on the set was as tangible as the blaze of the propane heaters. We finished our location work there only one day over schedule after six weeks completely exposed to the vicissitudes of weather and the limitations of daylight. It was a season of very short days, most of which ended with a race to get one more setup, then one more take, before the light failed entirely. As dusk came on, our cinematographer would have his camera teams first set their lenses to maximum aperture, then change shutter angles, pull out filters, mark the film to be pushed in the lab…every trick in the book. The results were miraculous, but even miracles have limits, and time always ran out. (On the other hand, there seemed no end to the cold, dark hours of our night shoots.) But in Vancouver we moved onto soundstages, where we are not only safe from the whims of the weather but also independent of the rise and set of the sun. We can work anytime. We make our own time. And it always settles into a rhythm, a pattern glimpsed in every "making of" documentary — but only glimpsed, because it takes so long to play out fully. It’s worth examining closely because it is the real pulse of shooting a movie. Look at Scene 20, the four friends at dinner their first night at the cabin, before things get weird. After all the months of planning (that is, looking to the future) during which the scene was written, the actors were cast and their wardrobe chosen, the set designed and dressed, and a thousand other decisions made…we come at last to the day of filming. (Filmmakers are big on the expression "on the day" to mean "at the moment of actually doing it.") The set is cleared of most of the crew, leaving Lawrence Kasdan (director), John Seale (director of photography), Eric Batut (sound mixer), Steve Dunn (first assistant director), Barbara Tuss (script supervisor), and Bryan Korenberg, (property master, who always has a lot to do for a meal scene). The four actors — Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, and Timothy Olyphant — sit down at the table and begin to run their lines. They worked on this scene during the week of rehearsal that preceded production, but that was a long time ago, in a hotel conference room. Now they’re in the cabin, in the world of their characters. Kasdan moves around them, shuffling their positions to suit the dynamics of the scene, making changes in timing and emphasis, suggesting bits of business and exchanges of looks. The energy level in the circuit of actors rises as they bounce their lines off each other. Kasdan consults with Seale about how to cover the scene; they agree on a difficult but exciting scheme, using three cameras tracking around the table, each seeing different actors at different moments, while avoiding the other cameras. Multiple cameras are the norm on this picture, but this is a particularly tricky case; the goal is to catch the spontaneity of this moment as the characters experience it. Now the "keys" and their teams, the people responsible for each department’s special function, are brought in to watch a run-through. Also watching are the "second team," the stand-ins who will take the actors’ places while cameras and lights are adjusted. Then director and actors step out as the set fills with an apparent chaos of activity, everything happening at once, from laying dolly track to placing beer bottles. Dunn remains to watch, using his network of AD’s (as radio-wired as the Secret Service) to call for anything needed and to get answers to the last-minute questions that inevitably arise. As soon as everything’s set, he coordinates the return of director and actors. Then he begins a series of ritualized announcements, a litany that demands and concentrates attention. "Rehearsal!" (The camera and boom operators’ final chance to practice.) "Picture’s up!" (This is it.) "We’re on a bell!" (A bell rings on the stage and a red light goes on outside, enforcing quiet.) "We’re rolling!" (The cameras turn over.) "Speed!" (This from Batut, whose recorder is up to sound speed.) The camera assistants chime in, holding slates in front of the cameras and calling the scene number, the take, and which camera they’re marking — "Twenty, take one, A mark!" "B mark!" "C mark!" — each with a "CLACK" of the sticks. The assistants slip away and freeze; everyone else is already still; the spell is cast. Kasdan cries "Action!" Students of human behavior, from psychologists to mystics, have observed that we are obsessed with reviewing the past and planning the future. We find it hard to live fully in the present. But I’m here to tell you that for the duration of the take, everyone on the set is nowhere else but there. The camera operators and dolly grips move as intently and gracefully as athletes. The script supervisor minutely scrutinizes the actors’ moves for matching, listens for every word of the dialogue. The director absorbs all the nuances at once, feeling for the total effect of the moment. And the actors…the actors are in that rapt zone where they can repeat a line exactly while hitting a mark precisely, and at the same time can inhabit the characters, enjoying their twentieth trip to this beloved cabin, bantering with friends they’ve known all their lives. Pete: "Name it!" Beaver: "I’ll name it…after we make a small wager. Say fifty bucks?" Henry: "What’s the subject?" The scene is long and complex, filled with intertwined dialogue, yet they somehow make it natural, infectiously effervescent. It’s work that requires a level of attention outside of everyday life. Tuss has a stopwatch running on every take, but this is a kind of time that doesn’t come in clocks. Kasdan calls "Cut!" Everyone lets out a breath, but concentration remains fierce. Everyone saw something that could be better in the next take, and there’s a rush to make adjustments while Kasdan confers with Seale or Tuss or Batut — and always with the actors. Then Dunn starts the litany again: "Picture!" And so on, for however many takes, until Kasdan has what he needs and says, "Let’s move on." Only then is there a real release of tension, as the work shifts to a new setup, announced by Dunn: "New deal!" This process repeats over and over every day, for the weeks and months of our schedule. We get shot after shot in the can; eventually there will be a few thousand of them. Every setup confronts an immediate, undeniable reality. Every take focuses the mind on the present moment. The discipline is unspoken but universally understood — Be Here Now. Others before and since Leonardo have thought of time as a river flowing, and in modern days some have seen a similarity to a film unspooling. I’m tempted to pursue the implications of my mini-satori by the waterfall: if a movie is time, maybe time is a movie… But enough of theory. We’re still shooting this movie, and right now — this very instant — "We’re rolling!"
by Mark Kasdan, Associate Producer |
