An Oceanic Odyssey: Waterworld

This piece was originally published in AC Aug. 1995. Some images are additional or alternate.

“We saw the most beautiful sunsets in Hawaii every night," director of photography Dean Semler, ACS says with a smile. "But if you see 80 or 100 of them in a row, you get damn sick and tired of it all and wish for some smog or something."

Though he voices this opinion with humor, Semler probably voices the feelings of his fellow Waterworld veterans more succinctly than he realizes. This Universal Pictures production shattered studio records for consecutive shooting days (166) and has became commonly known as one of the most expensive films ever made — to the estimated tune of $175 million. But while the media has strung these few facts out over months of repetitive innuendo, little real information about Waterworld's daunting production has surfaced until now.

Originally devised as a low-budget actioner by Peter Rader in 1986, the Waterworld premise was rejected as being too ambitious, with one producer decrying that it would cost "over $5 million!" Several years and rewrites later, Rader's resulting script found its way to producer Charles Gordon, producer-actor Kevin Costner and director Kevin Reynolds, best known for his inventive road picture Fandango, the blockbuster Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and the Easter Island adventure Rapa Nui.

“When I first considered doing this picture a couple years ago, I called up Steven Spielberg and asked him if I wanted to do a film set entirely on water. Steven said, ‘You might, but I'll never do it again. Jaws was the worst filmmaking experience of my life.’”
— director Kevin Reynolds

"This was pretty unique," says Reynolds, who had never before found himself drawn to the science-fiction genre. "I'm very concerned with ecological issues, because I think they are the overwhelming problems the world faces right now and will result in our own self-destruction. But while there have been a lot of post-apocalyptic films, they have all had a nuclear scenario. What was different about this one was that it had to do with an ecological conflagration, a whole world covered in water because of human stupidity and greed."

In essence, that doom is the futuristic result of the pollution-fed "greenhouse effect" gone mad. The Earth's polar ice caps have melted and immersed the land in a great flood, with the scattered vestiges of humanity surviving for centuries upon boats and makeshift atolls built with the rusting scraps of a drowned civilization. There is no history, only rudimentary technology and no dreams of a tomorrow beyond the next wave. On one of these floating islands, a loner known as Mariner (Kevin Costner) has arrived to barter for supplies, his towering trimaran slipping into the atoll's central lagoon. Suspicious of his origins, the agronomic inhabitants of the atoll imprison Mariner and sentence him to a foul death.

In a twist of fate, a flotilla of vicious pirates known as Smokers assault the atoll. Led by the Deacon (Dennis Hopper), they are based on a rotting oil supertanker called the Deez (an abbreviation of Exxon Valdez, perhaps?) whose ancient cargo of crude oil supplies the industrialized Smokers with the explosive firepower to wreak havoc at will. In the ensuing chaos, Mariner escapes with Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and Enola (Tina Majorino), a mysterious young girl who may hold the key to finding Water's End, a legendary spot of dry land. Learning of the girl's possible secret, the Deacon plots a course to intercept Mariner's trimaran and capture the trio, leading to the picture's cataclysmic conclusion and the truth about the mythic Water's End.

"The genre allows you to create a time and place where people see themselves in other characters and, hopefully, learn a subtle lesson," says Reynolds. In that respect, he adds, Waterworld is similar to Planet of the Apes, "which had a similar theme of self-destruction."

But while this eco-adventure's analogical overtones appealed to Reynolds, Semler's interest in Waterworld was piqued by his own mind's eye and friend Kevin Costner. Semler had previously worked with Costner on Dances With Wolves, which he starred in and directed, and the cinematographer earned the Australian native a 1990 Oscar for Best Cinematography. Semler has also lent his talents to The Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, The Coca-Cola Kid, Cocktail, Young Guns I and II, Dead Calm, City Slickers, The Three Musketeers, The Cowboy Way, Last Action Hero, and the critically acclaimed television miniseries Lonesome Dove.

Reynolds was equally enthusiastic about Semler joining the production, reasoning, "Dean understands the pressures and difficulties involved in doing a giant studio action picture. He had also had extensive experience shooting on water with Dead Calm, which looked great. But Dean also has such a great personality and attitude. Nothing keeps him down, and on a film of this size you need a person like that."

Reynolds adds that he was particularly impressed with Semler's work on The Road Warrior. Released in 1981, Warrior was director George Miller's sequel to his frenetic first feature, Mad Max. A modestly-budgeted, post-apocalyptic nightmare, The Road Warrior inspired a decade of imitators and a Miller-Semler reteaming on the follow-up, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

“There were times when I said to Kevin Reynolds, ‘Hey, what if we just went off to sea in the trimaran with the three actors and a Bolex, without seeing anyone or land for three months?‘”
— Dean Semler, ASC, ACS

"I had never done anything like The Road Warrior before. I went from news to documentary to drama — lighting, operating, doing everything," says Semler, who spent his early days in South Australia's fledgling television industry during the 1960s as a 16mm Bell & Howell-wielding reporter. He made a variety of shorts and documentaries before meeting Don McAlpine, ASC. McAlpine introduced Semler to the Film Australia filmmaking center, where he got experience in 35mm and moved into color. He subsequently shot two low-budget features, Let the Balloon Go and Hoodwink.

"I was never taught by the masters how to use filters, lights or cutters, or how to avoid problems," Semler explains. "If the camera shook, it didn't worry me. I don't mean to put the U.S. system down at all, because it's fabulous and I love this place, but I wasn't brought up with the fear of doing something wrong. The Road Warrior wouldn't have worked if that ‘shake’ wasn't there. [Director] George [Miller] and I talked about the film a couple weeks ago, how the camera was so rough, especially in the climactic chase sequence with the tanker. I was operating, and the area all around my eye was bleeding because the camera was bouncing into my head so much. I just had to close the eyepiece and aim [the camera]. But George always said, 'Just be bold.' There were a lot of offers after that to do Road Warrior-type films. It was one of the most copied films of the 1980s, in style, wardrobe, look. But I never did any of them."

Ironically, the early media buzz on Waterworld was that it resembled "The Road Warrior on water." Laughs Semler, "No one ever mentioned Road Warrior to me at the time — not Costner, Kevin Reynolds, the producers, no one."

It was decided early on that Waterworld would be shot in two segments. The first, with scenes involving the atoll, Mariner's trimaran and the Smokers' attack, would be executed in open water off Hawaii on boats and massive floating sets. The second part would take place on interior and exterior stages in Los Angeles.

Explaining the initial plan for the open-water Hawaii shoot, Reynolds recalls, "We thought we could get these sweeping 360-degree shots of open horizon, so we'd just take the boats, sets and crew over the horizon where we couldn't see any land." But as the actual size of their main set — the atoll where much of the first act of the picture occurs — took shape, the logistics required became dauntingly clear. "We very quickly realized how completely ludicrous that idea was," the director confesses.

Reynolds adds, "On Rapa Nui, we shot on Easter Island over six months and spent quite a bit of time on the water for a particular sequence — a treacherous swimming contest. That's when I first saw how tough it is to line up boats, cameras and people and keep them in one place. Anything you do on water takes twice as long as anything you do on dry land. So, on Waterworld, I realized the need for having superior marine coordination and thinking things through in much greater detail. That meant everything would have to be simplified, because I knew we weren't going to have the 300 shooting days [our original approach] would have mathematically required."

Semler joined the production in March of 1994. "We were planning to start shooting toward the end of May in Hawaii," the cinematographer says. "The location had been fixed and the designs had been done — by Dennis Gassner, who did a fantastic job. I had quite a long prep, spent primarily with Kevin Reynolds, and he had already done storyboards by that time. To his credit, I had looked at storyboards in March and we were shooting those same boards at the end of the year and the beginning of the year after. Kevin was fabulous at pre-visualization, and his cuts worked very well."

Says Reynolds of his preparation, "We were forced to shoot in one direction in order to get a clean horizon without land. If you wanted to do a reverse, you had to turn the whole set around to maintain it, so knowing shots in minute detail was essential. Then we could break it down and take the approach of a military operation. That's the only sane way to do something like this. As for visual style, Dean and I figured that the film was going to assume a look of its own by virtue of the difficulty of shooting on water."

Semler describes how Reynolds nevertheless fostered Waterworld's evolving scope, explaining, “He didn't cheat himself with little insert shots. Instead, they became big shots, and we got a lot more big-screen value out of them. A classic example was a shot of a grappling hook latching onto the bottom of an airplane that is taking off from the top deck of the Deez. You could give that to second unit, they hang up the thing and click — you've got it. It took just an hour to shoot it, easy. Instead, the shot became [a view] from the airplane, looking down past the undercarriage to Kevin Costner running across a burning deck, jumping up into the air and hooking the grappling hook right into the lens. That's a Kevin Reynolds insert shot. It took longer to do in preparation time, but wow, is there value."

Responds Reynolds, "To give a picture size and scope, you have to take those tiny actions and place them against a big backdrop — like having a shot of someone lighting a cigarette while miles of explosions are going off behind him. When you see that, you're taken aback by the contradiction of the simplicity and the scale. It would be fabulous if you could do a whole film like that, but you usually have to settle for the moments you can get."

As one hears these descriptions, the mind seems to automatically frame them in 2.35:1, but Reynolds and Semler decided to shoot Waterworld in 1.85 for specific reasons. Says Reynolds, "I didn't want to do anamorphic because even though the look is great, you're limited in terms of lenses. Your depth is very different. Your minimum focus is different. The lenses are more cumbersome. I realized that we were going to need as much flexibility as we could get under adverse conditions."

Semler agrees, adding, "The trimaran figures in 30 pages of the script, and it's a vertical shape. If we had done our wide shots of the trimaran in anamorphic, it would have been a dot on the sea, and Kevin Costner would have been even smaller.

"But the look' of the picture, if there is one, is primarily in its production design and location," says the cinematographer. "Kevin wanted it to be fairly monochromatic, so none of the boats, the atoll, the interiors, or wardrobe had any primary colors or whites even. Everything was just a scaly, old dead-fish color, and very problematic to photograph — like the atoll, which was the size of a football field. You could put 100 or 150 extras on there and they would literally disappear because everything was the same color. So if you had principals in there, and you wanted to pull them out, it was nearly impossible."

Faced with achieving the impossible, Semler followed his instincts when putting together his support team for Waterworld, stressing that his selections were made for more than technical reasons. "We knew it was going to be tough on the temperament, so I looked for people who were going to make it as easy as possible. I brought William 'Bear' Paul along as key grip. He just knows what I want, has a great attitude and sense of humor. My A-camera operator, Mark O'Kane, was also our Steadicam operator on Waterworld. I had done City Slickers, Three Musketeers and Last Action Hero with him, and he had all the right equipment, all the bells and whistles. Mark did an amazing job between running A-camera and the Steadicam, and never had a rest between the two. Tony Rivetti was the first camera assistant, and I know why Clint Eastwood uses him all the time — you don't need a second take because he is an intuitive focus-puller and absolutely painless to work with. The gaffer was Mel Maxwell, who had done City Slickers with me. Mel is an endurer, and I needed someone who could bear with us when we weren't using lights — which was a lot of the time. But I also needed someone who could prepare sets, because we had major sets in Hawaii that had to be lit."

Semler took O'Kane and Bear Paul to Hawaii for some primary tests at sea. He reports, "I made up some demo shots and we tested them out on the trimaran just to give Kevin Reynolds and Kevin Costner a look at it and see what they thought. I didn't want to get to the trimaran on the first day and say, 'How the hell are we going to do this?' We also shot the 'making-of' footage on video so they could see how complex the rigging was to get these shots."

Says Reynolds of the test video, "It taught us in terms of time how long it would take to shoot and get reverse coverage — or the inability to do that. One of the things we wanted to do early on was to use a position way up on the mast looking down with a hothead. We were only really able to get a few shots from up there because it was so complicated putting a camera up there; it took half a day to rig, which meant the boat was out of commission for that time. So one shot could take an entire day."

Soon after, camera equipment was readied back in Los Angeles. Says Semler of the package, "I've always generally used Panavision, although we pulled out an Aaton to use on the trimaran because of its compact size. I had spoken to John Toll [ASC], who'd shot a film about the America's Cup race called Wind, and he swore by it. I had to give up the Aaton to the second unit whose needs were greater than mine. But my basic package consisted of two Golds, an Arri 3 for high-speed, a lightweight Panaflex for the Steadicam, a third Gold as a backup and an Arri 2C for the risky situations.

"Our underwater expert, Pete Romano [ASC] from HydroFlex, had a lot of surf-housing cameras, so you could shoot just on the surface and go down about two or three feet," Semler adds. "Those were great for handholding. Richard Merryman, the second cameraman, who worked on the Mad Max films with me, used those quite a bit. And then there were the deep-water cameras, which Pete shot with himself. For the aerial work, we used the Spacecam with Ron Goodman, as well as the Wescam.

"We also had Robert Dunn, a former Panavision technician, on for the whole time in Hawaii. The potential water problem was plain, but we had no problems with corrosion because Bob would service everything each night; each morning we would pick up a 'brand new' package. Panavision had a lot of little gizmos to keep everything dry, but they had to protect their bloody gear anyhow."

From their earlier experiences on water, Reynolds and Semler anticipated their inability to maintain any semblance of steadiness on the open sea, which dramatically cut down their choice of optics. Explains Reynolds, "We couldn't even use a 75mm in certain situations because of the shake. We couldn't keep anything in frame. One of the few ways to minimize that was to go with a wider lens. We also shot a great deal on Steadicam, and Mark O'Kane, the operator, did a fantastic job."

Says Semler, "I think you can go through the script supervisor's notes and find that 70 to 80 percent of the film was shot with a 27mm Primo lens, as far as our principal work was concerned. The longest we used at any time was a 150-600mm Canon for some work with Hopper giving a speech on the bridge of the Deez. But that was only while shooting on dry land. So the lens is in there with the drama and action. I think it's like witnessing it, and I like to put the audience into the action. It's nice to get close enough to an actor that you can smell him. Kevin Reynolds liked that too."

The director agrees, "The closer you are to your subjects, the more you can see their eyes and perhaps empathize with what is going on behind them."

But from the standpoint of his directorial style, Reynolds adds, "There are a couple ways you can approach film. You can simply set up a camera and record action, or you can force the eye. I like having my eye forced. I like seeing something from a completely different perspective, where things are flattened out by an extremely long lens or distorted by a really wide lens. Consequently, I like to force the eye. It's a hyper-reality, which I think is why people go to watch films. But on Waterworld I was really very limited in what I could do. So that was frustrating."

Offering further details, Semler notes, "We also had a new, lightweight, 27-68mm Panavision zoom. And I swore before going out there that it was going to be the lens that was going to save my ass. It weighs nothing, and it's great for handheld and great for Steadicam work — you can push in at 27mm to two feet away and then zoom in to 60mm at the same time, so you can go right into eyeballs. It's a great lens for situations where you don't want a heavy zoom but need a little choice."

The lesser, yet nagging, aspects of water and cameras not mixing were also handled straight away. "We of course had a lot of problems keeping water off the lens," admits Semler. "But Pete Romano also designed this little squirt deflector, which worked marvelously. Essentially it's a watertight Panavision matte box with a piece of optical glass and a tiny copper fanned nozzle in front. Compressed air coming through a hose just blasts away anything that might hit the glass. We used those a hell of a lot because you didn't have to have them turned on all the time, but the assistant could give it a quick squirt and anything there was gone."

Asked to describe the Hawaii shoot, Semler responds with a wishful smile. "There were times when I said to Kevin Reynolds, 'Hey, what if we just went off to sea in the trimaran with the three actors and a Bolex, without seeing anyone or land for three months?"

Laughs Reynolds, "The only problem was that we would have gone completely mad staying on that boat for so long. It was hard enough staying on it for 12 hours a day, much less around the clock."

The first twinges of insanity began early. While Semler had experience shooting on boats, the trimaran design soon presented new dilemmas for the cinematographer and his crew — despite their preproduction tests.

"It was immediately different from Dead Calm, because on that film we were shooting on boats with decks that you could walk on," Semler relates. "Waterworld features a trimaran with a rope-webbing trampoline suspended between three hulls. You can't walk on it —you bounce around on the damn thing. So Bear Paul and our rigging grip, Levon Besnelian, built dozens of amazing platforms for the trimaran out of steel, aluminum and timber — so that we could surround the boat at any time with space to work. We probably built too many of them, but we wouldn't have been able to shoot the picture without them. It was impossible."

"It was tough," agrees Reynolds. "But another problem was that you could only put the platforms on or take them off at dock. So in the morning we would have to meticulously plan so we could shoot as much coverage as we could from any given mounting configuration before making a change. We even had two different trimarans. Depending on the shots we were doing, we would sometimes be rigging two boats simultaneously."

Because the trimaran was under sail in most of its scenes, with its necessary crew of five tucked inside the hulls looking at video monitors, it could not be simply anchored or even towed, as the camera was panning around fore and aft for 100 degrees. The trimaran was followed, just out of camera range, by what Semler describes as a "bloody Spanish Armada" of chase and support boats, which supplied the crew with necessary equipment. "Sometimes the Zodiacs couldn't come in to the trimaran because it was too rough," Semler says. "So we had some storage containers designed for camera equipment built into the trimaran and dressed to look like cargo boxes."

Regardless of the inventive use of platforms used to rig the trimaran, the lighting situation also proved relentlessly problematic. "I had to get some light on these actors," Semler says. "That's why I'm there, to make them look like Hollywood movie stars. It doesn't happen naturally, so we would have very large 12' by 12' or 20' by 20' scrims hauled up into the rigging so we could silk everything out — unless, of course, they got in the way of the sails or the wind blew them around.

"For fill, we first tried to have big lights on a barge running along side the trimaran: four 12Ks and maybe six 4K Pars, punched through a 12' by 12' scrim hot as hell. Halfway through one of the first rehearsals, I noticed that the lighting barge had drifted and all the lights were just pointed out to sea. You can't have that happen during a take, so we needed lights mounted on the trimaran. But because waves were constantly coming up over the boat, we were all getting wet and it was too dangerous to have unprotected lights. I also couldn't use anything too big, because we couldn't get the necessary generator on a fast-enough boat. The trimaran has a generator for its own functions, but we had to run an umbilical across to a generator boat — which kept sinking, or trying to — equipped with our 5K Honda crystal generators. Fortunately, Pete Romano had all these underwater HMI lights, 1200-watt Pars. Waves could hit them and there was no danger of getting hurt. They were fantastic, straight daylight."

However, as one might suspect, such lightweight (however safe) sources did little to counteract the brilliant Hawaiian sun and the blinding Pacific glare. Confirms Semler, "Normally when you're creating fill on land in daylight — for glamour, for overriding sun, or for re-creating the sun if you've lost it — you can always cheat the sun in with 12Ks or 18Ks during the medium shots and close-ups. But with three 1200-watt lights? No, only in close-ups. So in the morning, the sun would be in front us. Everything was totally front-lit, dead square. By lunch, the sun was directly overhead. In the afternoon, everything was nicely back-lit. But after four to six o'clock, the sea was white-hot water you couldn't even look into. You'd put your meter out and it would read f396 out there and here I had a 1200-watt light to fill it with!

"But there were so many other problems, with wind and everything else, that I had to just keep shooting to try to stay on schedule. On a normal picture, you try to get 20 or 30 setups on a given day, but on this we were only getting two, three, four or five setups sometimes. I remember going out there one afternoon when the conditions were perfect and thinking, 'Thank God.' So we sailed out and got set up by three o'clock. The actors came out, rehearsed and popped into the water. We were about to shoot when suddenly a jellyfish stung little Tina. We had to pull the actors out, they were drenched, and it was four o'clock. It wasn't anyone's fault, but what could you do? There were terribly disappointing days like that where everything was in our favor and a silly little thing came out of left field. Always the unexpected."

In the search for some certainty, Semler catered to his personal standard for recording the hard-won images of Waterworld, explaining, "I shot the picture primarily on Kodak 5293, which I rated at 100 ASA to overexpose a stop — which brought me down to 64 ASA with an 85 filter. I think all cameramen have their minds set at a certain ASA and compute at that. Having shot a million documentaries when there was no time to pull a meter out, your eyes can tell you pretty accurately where the light is. I like to bring my base rating back to 64 ASA — not on interior sets, but outdoors, because I know damn well that if I don't have a meter, or if it's full of water, I can still get it right

"The 93 also gave me a chance to overexpose, just for safety, and maybe saturate the stock a bit to make it more gutsy. I did some tests and found it to be a bit grittier at 64 ASA.

"If we didn't need the depth to cover two actors, we'd also ND-down out there, put an 85N6 or N9 in and bring it down to an f4 or 5.6. It's just softer and throws the background out a bit more, especially when you're using a 27mm. It adds a little bit of delineation between planes, especially when you're using so few colors in the art direction. It adds some kind of separation."

Semler also used very little filtration during the shoot. He explains, "There was no way to use grads because the horizon was always bobbing around. We used some Superfrost whites for beauty shots on the actors, but I don't use a lot of filters. I don't even carry a kit. I strictly used 85s, maybe some 81EFs if the light got too red in the late afternoon."

For obvious reasons, all of the camerawork on the trimaran was done with the Steadicam, and operator Mark O'Kane was "basically out there every day, hanging on," says Semler with a grin. "We would try to get a platform down if we could, but there were lots of times when Mark was marching across the trampoline in the center, operating the Steadicam. Even with the weight of the equipment and the bouncing of the seas, he was able to hold the principals in frame. Mark also had gyros on the Steadicam, one on top and one on the bottom, pulling horizontally and vertically, and they worked quite nicely. He had safety lines on him, because there was a good chance he might go over, and 70 pounds of Steadicam would take him to the bottom pretty quickly. Our dolly grip, John Murphy, was his safety man, but at one stage we gave Mark a tiny, 16-breath air container with a built-in regulator. That way, if he did go over, he would be able to breathe long enough to hit his emergency releases, drop the Steadicam and get to the surface."

While outwardly less complex and dangerous than the open-water sailing sequences on the trimaran, scenes that took place on the massive, floating atoll offered their own pitfalls; one of the most recurring was caused by its inverted clamshell design. The atoll's corrugated steel walls, jutting some 60' above the waves, played havoc with the sunlight, throwing the inner catwalks, landings and lagoon into deep shadow by late afternoon while simultaneously providing plenty of surface for blinding hot spots. In addition to dealing with the atoll's unusual architecture, Semler had to capture the explosive savagery of the Smokers' attack — on paper, a 17-minute action extravaganza that allows Mariner's escape from the aforementioned cage. While stunt coordinator R.A. Rondell orchestrated the pyrotechnics, as well as teams of up to 150 stunt men and 250 extras, Semler did his best to capture the scene in the dying daylight.

Recalls Semler, "I remember one shot in particular where Kevin Costner was backing the trimaran across the lagoon in the center of the atoll. When he got to a certain point, a wall was supposed to explode behind him. So the special effects team set up a thousand shell hits on the wall, which took weeks. We rehearsed, and by the time we were ready, the sun had gone behind the wall and we were in deep shadow. We were shooting on 5293, so we got some 98 ready as well. The producers looked at me, Kevin Costner looked at me, and then Kevin Reynolds looked at me and asked, 'Are you sure it's going to match?' And I said, 'Absolutely.' There had been a couple of shots on The Road Warrior that I had shot after the sun had set, and when they were mixed in amongst the action cuts nobody knew the difference. This was a similar situation, where we had Costner in the foreground and all hell breaking loose behind him — a fabulous disguise for hiding changes in light. So we went to 98 rated at 500 ASA, instead of 320 like I normally do, ripped the filters out, and went wide-open at f1.9 on the Primo lens. It's in the picture. And because we shot it when we did, the explosion is so bright and fantastic. It was a hell of a thing to risk, and I didn't sleep that night, but it worked."

Recalls Reynolds, "I never thought it would match. But I saw it in dailies and somehow with his magic Dean had made it work. But Dean is such a consummate professional that it's not an issue of trust. When he would say, 'It's too dark, we're not going to get it,' it was time to go home. The director is always willing to push if there is a chance to shoot, but Dean, unlike any other cinematographer I've known, will take even more chances. Sometimes you're forced to shoot, but you also know that the shot is going to only be on screen for three seconds; you just hope that once it's timed and balanced, the audience won't notice. Nine times out of ten it works."

A more subtle, yet potentially hazardous, aspect of the atoll shoot became apparent only after the floating set was moved from the protective confines of the harbor, where the high walls blocked out the horizon, to open water off shore, where the exterior stunt work and panoramic establishing shots were staged.

"The color of the water was a killer," says Semler, describing the metallic island's central lagoon. "We shot for seven or eight weeks on the atoll with it moored in the harbor, where the conditions were more controlled and we could get people on and off more easily. The color of the water in the harbor could be quite clear, but we would get a lot of shipping through there, and that would stir the silt up, so it varied from a fairly pale to opalescent aqua green. Going out to sea, we were about two miles up the shore and a quarter-mile out, and the water would be a fabulous, almost translucent, cobalt blue. The colors also changed with the direction of the light — front light looked different than back light, which looked different than top light. So we couldn't get precious with lighting or with water color. The atoll had to be where it was for certain shots; we couldn't color the water, and couldn't use filtration to change it.

"I looked at a rough cut with our color timer, Michael Stanwick at Deluxe, who did a fantastic job for me on Dances With Wolves. And I said to him, 'Look, here's your chance to walk out.' We watched it and he was saying, 'Look at that, oh!' It was a very serious problem, but it was a bit like skies. You can have a lot of different skies in a film, changing from white to blue to clouds, and then to dark blue. But if your story is working, people won't be aware of it."

Fortunately though, water color would not figure into Waterworld’s few night sequences, one of which takes place on the trimaran — staged in the harbor, because "it would have been impossibly dangerous to shoot night-for-night on the open sea," Semler says. The other sequence took place on the atoll.

“Night shooting on the atoll was a bit tricky, again because the set soaked up so much light. However, the atoll had electricity, which allowed some use of practicals — searchlights and stuff. So we had Par 64 spots in the watchtowers about 60 feet in the air. But running cable there was a nightmare. It was enough to run half a dozen 12Ks or the equivalent at any one point of an area the size of a football field. And because the atoll was primarily made of steel, it was very dangerous in combination with all the cables and the water. The safety side of it was a great concern, but our best boy, Chuck Sharp, did a great job with both that and the electrics."

Finally leaving Hawaii after over three months of secretive yet well-publicized shooting, the Waterworld production relocated to a series of stages built south of Los Angeles at the sprawling Pacific Tube Company facility in the city of Commerce. There, the Deez, the dilapidated tanker serving as the Smokers' base, was fabricated as a 600-foot, open-air, forced-perspective "miniature" on a several-acre lot. In addition, Deez interiors were housed in an adjacent warehouse; warehouses were heavily used as cover sets while one of the wettest rainy seasons on record pounded the Southland.

"It was just such a relief to be back on dry land, where we had more flexibility," says Reynolds, shrugging off mention of the rains. "But we had a totally new array of complications with this gigantic ship deck."

Constructed on pilings, the land-bound Deez measured approximately 150' across at the widest point. The bridge, from which the Deacon would address his army of fanatical, oil-stained followers, rose some 75' from the plywood deck.

"For the close coverage on the bridge — and there was a lot of dialogue and action up there with Kevin Costner and Dennis Hopper — it was really impossible to do it outside, because the bridge was so high in the air," says Semler. "It would also take too long to get scaffolds in and out, and the deck of the Deez set couldn't really take the weight. Instead, we re-created the bridge inside. We built about five feet of bridge above and below where the actors were standing, and placed a painted eye and a 100-foot bluescreen back behind them.

"Knowing it would have to match, I used an ND9 outdoors while shooting anything that would be intercut with the interior stage footage. So instead of shooting at f11, we were at a 4 while still using the 64 ASA-rated 5293 stock. Inside, I had hoped to get a 4 as well, but I needed a single light source and a lot of spread. So I brought in a 20K and shot straight tungsten, getting rid of the 85 filter and rating the 93 at 100 ASA. I managed to light a 50-foot portion of the bridge, with the 20K slightly to the side, and was getting about an f2.8 to 4 evenly across the front. I couldn't have done that with 10Ks; arcs wouldn't have quite done it, and they also would have been sputtering and smoking. I love arcs, and that's the cleanest light you can get, but the 20K was the perfect solution. I also used some 20' by 20' Griffolyns to the side, with Maxi-Brutes going into them. I would rather have lit Dennis very dramatically from one side, with the other going into shadow, but there was so much going on that I was going to get caught at some point in continuity. So I filled him a little more than I would have. Having used the ND9 outside, I could also match the feeling of depth inside."

The rotting interiors of the Deez, built as cover sets in Hawaii and again in Commerce, were cavernous, requiring massive wattage to bring their rusted and stained surfaces up to an acceptable exposure. "One pre-lit section in Hawaii had 80-foot ceilings, was a couple hundred feet long and about 70 feet wide — it was huge!" exclaims Semler. "But again, the sets were dark, dark, rusty, dark."

The main light sources inside the Deez were skylights cut in the "roof" — the top deck. Large portions of bulkhead and decking had huge sections hacked out of them, implying that the Smokers were cannibalizing their home for raw materials. To achieve the effect, Semler explains, "In Hawaii, we strung up 4K Par lights from the ceiling. You can't point a Par straight down, so we aimed three or four 4K power spots about 20 feet across into 6' by 6’ acrylic mirrors, punching the beams down to the floor. There were a dozen rigs like that permanently set in the ceiling; it was a lot of work to do, but it created these hot spots all the way down the interior of the ship. The pools were very extreme, about four or five stops overexposed. Then we used 10Ks and Maxi-Brutes from the side — either straight tungsten light, or I'd put ½ CTO or full CTO over them to suggest they might be a firelight. But once again, the extremes were just horrendous down there. The set just soaked up the light, so we were still only shooting between f2.8 and 4 in there; the hot spots were between 16 and 22. It was hot as Hades, so we had to shield everything with heat-proofing.

"When we were shooting in the Los Angeles Deez interiors, we did something different. We didn't have as much space to work, so we didn't use the 4Ks and mirrors. Instead, we had very narrowly spotted Maxi-Brutes, pointed straight down. Again we got a 16 or 22 in the pools, but the set was very contrasty and soaked up a lot of light. I could put a Maxi-Brute on a wall and get an f16, but it would barely register on film as a color. Fortunately, the Smokers also had fires elsewhere, drums of burning oil, and electricity in the Deez. So there were a few practicals."

While the Waterworld production schedule continued on from the summer of 1994 through the spring of 1995, struggling to meet a timetable based on its projected late-July release date, the media took the picture and Universal to task for a budget that had swelled to nearly twice its original $100 million quote. But the criticism had little perceptible effect on the production itself — the filmmakers standing by their approach to the material.

Says Semler, "I stood out there with Kevin Reynolds on one of the particularly difficult days — the wind had changed, the sun had disappeared, everyone had been stung by jellyfish and there was a volcano erupting somewhere — and I asked him, 'You don't think you would have done this on a stage with a lot of bluescreen and digital effects, do you?' And he said, 'No way, it would never feel the same.' And I agree. There were many, many days where we didn't have the right light to be shooting in, but that raw roughness is now part of the film's style. Waterworld is not a glossy picture, but it does have a reality to it. You just can't get that tangible look and feel in a studio; on the other hand, there were a lot of occasions when there was no time for art."

Agrees Reynolds, "A lot of the film was shot on the fly. We had to get the day's work done because our shooting days were so enormously expensive. But I think that raw or dirty look lends itself to the picture."

Would Reynolds consider directing another water-set film? "When I first considered doing this picture a couple years ago, I called up Steven Spielberg and asked him if I wanted to do a film set entirely on water," he recalls. "Steven said, ‘You might, but I'll never do it again. Jaws was the worst filmmaking experience of my life.' And now I know what he means. I'll never do another water picture; once in a lifetime is enough. It's just too hard."

Looking on the brighter side, the ever-positive Semler, preparing for his directorial debut with the Steven Seagal actioner Secret Smile*, counters, "At least we were in Hawaii. We left after about 138 million days or whatever on Waterworld, but if we had asked the crew to shoot for another month they would have been ecstatic. It was a great location to be stuck in.

*EDITORS NOTE: Secret Smile was shelved, but Semler and Seagal would make another movie together, The Patriot (1998). Semler instead made his directorial debut with the action film Firestorm, also released in 1998, but shot a year prior to the Seagal project.