2008 ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEES FOR CINEMATOGRAPHY
By David Heuring and Bob Fisher
2008 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
By Neil Matsumoto and David Geffner


2008
ICG PUBLICIST
AWARDS
By Pauline Rogers

GOING UNDERGROUND
By Pauline Rogers

It’s 1925 and aging star Dodge Connelly (George Clooney) struggles to keep his ragamuffin team together as they battle their opponents in cow pastures and rinky-dink stadiums across the Midwest. Dodge is determined to guide his team from bar brawls to packed stadiums. But, after the players lose their sponsor and the entire league faces certain collapse, his plans seem doomed. That is, until he convinces college football star and America’s favorite son, Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski ), to join his ragtag ranks. He hopes this will finally capture the country’s attention

Leatherheads is a quick-witted romantic comedy set against the early days of professional football. Although the story takes place in the Midwest, the shooting schedule meant going into, well, frozen weather.
The Carolinas, on the other hand, were more temperate and offered period trains and railroads (the way the teams traveled), as well as several stadiums built in the 1920s. The trick was to populate them with fans. Thank heaven for visual effects where 200 extras, who were signed to cheer and boo, eventually became a huge crowd in—thanks to the art department’s facades—a rather large well attended stadium.

All of which would be shot for best effect by cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC. This is his third pairing with actor/producer/director George Clooney. “Right from the start, George had a very clear idea of what he wanted to do and it was a big departure from his directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” says Sigel. “George is an avid student of film and for this project, he wanted to honor the great rollicking comedies of Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges, with a dash of George Roy Hill’s The Sting,” Sigel explains. “During prep, I had tested shooting reversal-as-reversal, which had a great faded period look, but George wanted a richer, more golden tone, like The Sting. We shot almost all the exteriors with 5201, which is an amazingly clean stock.

“It was an interesting challenge to channel the spirit of these classic films, and yet keep Leatherheads fresh and current,” adds Sigel. “We began by storyboarding with long-time collaborator J. Todd Anderson, to define our cinematic grammar.”
The first issue they faced was camera movement. “George wanted to create some of the complex choreography of a Sturges film, and he also wanted to impose some of the same restrictions on the camera that existed back in the forties,” Sigel explains. “This led to a lot of locked-off frames, or linear tracking shots. We stayed away from big swooping Technocrane shots and almost never violated the ‘proscenium’ of any given set-up.”

To keep it lively, Clooney relied on the movement of the actors and designed shots where they would play the edges of the frame. “Because we didn’t want it to seem like the camera was compensating for the performers, they often had to hit fairly precise marks, and this is where a lot of the comedy is,” Sigel explains. “George loves it when someone leaves frame and pops back in as a means of punctuation.”

A good example is an early scene where Dodge’s team, The Bulldogs, are in an outdoor shower after a game in a small Podunk

town. Production designer Jim Bissell transformed a middle-school football field into a dilapidated 1925 ‘stadium,’ complete with wooden barricades sporting painted advertisements, and a rainwater shower just past the end-zone. It was nothing more than a platform with a wooden fence around it and a giant water tower in the center. Because it was open to the sky, we went with natural light. Knowing it would play in one shot gave us the luxury of picking the right time of day.

“For this shot, we had a [Panavision] Platinum with the 11-1 Primo zoom on a dolly. It tracks in a straight line, perpendicular to the set for about 100 feet. It passes from one character to another and we learn a little about each of them. Finally, the lens crosses outside the shower wall where Dodge meets up with Suds, who is his newspaper mouthpiece. The camera comes to a stop as they walk away with Dodge reciting his version of the game. The speed of the track remained constant, almost like a motion-control shot, and the actors timed their pace to come in and out of frame accordingly.”

The style of the project was further complicated by the fact that Clooney was not only directing, but acting as well. This is where the history between Clooney and Sigel paid off. Sigel was able to quickly communicate if the subtle timing Clooney was looking for was working, or if they needed to make adjustments. “For the most part, we stayed fairly true to our storyboards,” says Sigel.
“We shot 3-perf, Super 1.85 with Panavision Platinum cameras and standard Primo lenses,” he explains. “I love the Super 1.85 because it is an enormous increase in negative size. It is halfway to shooting anamorphic. The 3-perf is great because it is harder for someone to change your framing in post. But, it is brutal for assistant Jimmy Jensen, who has to be extremely rigorous about hairs in the gate.

“A daunting challenge for the team was how to keep the football games fun, with an audience that is used to Cablecams flying across the field, or movies with rapid-fire cutting. Today, we have all these tools to film football—cameras on the helmet, skycams that go flying through the action. There is an enormous range of what one can do. We approached the football similar to the way we’ve set out to shoot the overall style of the film, which of course, includes romantic comedy.

“Mostly, this was done with sight gags or the actors playing the frame,” explains Sigel. “We did use a Steadicam occasionally, but even there it would almost always move in a straight line, much like a tracking vehicle of the forties would have.”
“A lot of the football games are shot with a fixed camera or almost as if a newsreel camera was recording it in those days.

The exception to it, of course, is that we have some tracking shots where we’re moving within the players, mostly when we want to feature Carter or Dodge.”

“For most of the games, we’d do one or two Steadicam shots with the rig hard mounted to Herb Ault’s Griptrix electric cart,” explains operator Geoff Shotz. “These were all linear tracking shots leading, following or running parallel to usually George or John. Both Tom and George wanted as little camera movement as possible. They really pushed for the action in the frame to provide the dynamics of the shot and not have the camera intentionally aid that.”

As can be seen with the shower sequence, lighting for Leatherheads was as simple as could be, paying homage to the period style, but less theatrical and more “now” in the approach. “This meant less backlight, a little more contrast, but still trying to keep it naturalistic,” Sigel says. “Early on we had a scene with beautiful smoke-defined shafts of light. The location was an old hotel in South Carolina, The Calhoun, which was about to be renovated for condos. Once again, Jim Bissell transformed this construction site into a jewel of 1920’s opulence. While the streaks of smoke looked gorgeous, we realized that we had to be very careful not to use too many of the devices that we associate with contemporary lighting. Generally, one soft, single source felt the most ‘true.’

“Another of George’s sight-gags involved filming an underground swimming pool in a vacant hotel,” Sigel continues. “Dodge and Lexie are being chased by the police after a speakeasy is raided, and there is a very wide shot of the pool where people are coming in and out of doors like a Marx Brothers routine. The pool itself had this spectacular ceiling that George wanted to be seen.
“There is a man floating in the pool who becomes the comedic fulcrum of this scene, so I decided to use the pool as the primary source. We used underwater Pars and tried to keep the hot spots of the Pars just out of frame. Some we even pointed up. Then we agitated the water for a subtle rippling effect. Since we would see almost the entire pool, I worked with Jim Bissell to build as much

practical lighting into the walls as possible, while still keeping true to the period. Along one side of the pool we created a wall with vertical glass ‘stripes.’ They were literally only a few inches behind these windows, so I used strip lights on one end to give the room a glow.”

Without a doubt, the toughest lighting challenge for Sigel was a day exterior, which was the big game at the climax of the film. Shot over two weeks, the scene is meant to be the morning after a thunderstorm, which has left the field a virtual mud-bowl. “We investigated ‘silking’ the stadium we were shooting in,” explains Sigel. “Key grip Herb Ault had it figured out, using construction towers and a diffusion material he found. We came close to doing it but in the end it proved too expensive, so we were left with the age-old challenge of scheduling our shots to have at least some continuity of lighting. Sure enough, we had everything—sun, overcast, rain—you name it. As best we could, we wanted to create an arc to the game, where Dodge’s initial despair turns to hope and finally vindication.”

“For the final game, we did a few Steadicam shots but my first, Brad Peterman, and I spent a majority of our time on the long end of the 11:1 chasing action,” adds Shotz. “As well choreographed as the plays were, it’s still football and anything can happen. You really had to be on your toes.

“I was constantly impressed watching both Jimmy and Brad pull focus on players/actors charging straight down the barrel or zigzagging through a crowded field. In the end, with the constantly changing weather conditions and the mud, it was the most fun to shoot. After all, how bad can it be getting paid to play football in the mud all day?”

“The one saving grace we had was love-interest Lexie, who had her scenes in a press box that could be easily controlled,” says Sigel. “This meant, if we got rain, or even a weather change during a specific section of the scene, we could jump inside for coverage. While there were some shots looking down on to the field, the bulk of the coverage was raking shots across the row of newspaper and radiomen. This allowed us to make daylight, even if there was rain or darkness encroaching. Once again, the lighting was very simple: 18Ks through large 20x20 gridcloths, just off the edge of the frame. It did make us jump around a bit but we still managed to finish ahead of schedule.

“History is filled with artists paying homage to the work of their predecessors, but it is always filtered through the prism of their time,” says Sigel. “All art was contemporary at some point. Like many films before it, Leatherheads faced the conundrum of how you can pay tribute to filmmaking from another era, with modern tools and a present-day audience. In this case, the biggest challenge for the cinematography was to resist. Resist the kinds of camera moves and lighting that we can do with the technology of today.

“If the camera can stay true to these ‘rules,’ I believe the writing and performances will indeed reincarnate the spirit of Hawks and Sturges.”