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"We referenced the movie Apollo 13 [see AC June '95] an awful lot," he continues. "It became our yardstick in terms of what we wanted to achieve. In Ron Howard's movie [photographed by Dean Cundey, ASC], the camera was always moving and floating, which gave a nice feeling of weightlessness so we did that, too. We never had a static camera; there was always just a bit of drift to it. The camera would either be mounted on a Steadicam rig or on something like a Weaver/Steadman with a mini jib arm." Equipped with a three-axis head, the camera could rotate, as well as tilt up and down and pan left and right.
For Apollo 13, scenes in which the astronauts were weightless and floating around the cabin were shot in the aptly nicknamed "Vomit Comet," a NASA-converted Boeing 707 which climbs to 40,000 feet and then goes into a parabolic dive, resulting in a minute and a half of real weightlessness. The Apollo 13 capsule was built inside the jet, a luxury not extended to the makers of From the Earth to the Moon. Instead, the production relied upon small teeter-totters which came up through the module's floor. Built off the ground, the module was suspended within a huge iron framework. With metal bars welded to both the module and the iron cage, the unit resembled a giant spider's web. The actors stood or sat on the teeter-totters and were "floated." The mechanisms were counterweighted for the actor's weight so any crew member could easily move them up or down with one hand.
Perhaps inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tattersall wanted to take advantage of the reflections of the control panels in the astronauts' visors, but the panels weren't bright enough to be picked up in the helmets. He solved this dilemma by asking the unit still photographer to photograph the panels with a large-format camera; TransLites were then made from the photographs. "If I was doing a close-up [of an astronaut], I'd put the TransLite next to the camera and hammer a really powerful light through it," he explains. "Basically, we created a photo of the console that was 100 times brighter than the real thing, so it would reflect in the visors."
One of the most enjoyable episodes for Tattersall was We Have Cleared the Tower, which recounts the launch of Apollo 7, the first manned flight following the Apollo 1 tragedy (in which three astronauts died in a pre-launch fire). Directed by Lili Fini Zanuck, the episode is told through the eyes of a documentary film crew which is chronicling the days leading up to the blast-off.
Zanuck chose the episode because it allowed her to shoot in multiple formats, something she had long wanted to do. The filmmakers used both color and black-and-white 16mm to simulate the documentary crew's footage; 35mm within the "objective" A-camera; and home-movie-style Super 8 footage supposedly shot by a character in the film. NASA also allowed Zanuck to use its 70mm footage of the 1967 launch of the real Apollo 7, as well as 16mm black-and-white film taken by NASA security cameras.
Zanuck says, "I wanted the documentary crew cameraman to be a real cameraman, not an actor, since I was going to be shooting the documentary footage live." Thus, Brazilian cinematographer Marcelo Durst was "cast" as the documentary cameraman. "We weren't going to cut and then do another setup," the director adds. "We blocked for both the 16mm and 35mm cameras, and both would start rolling on the 'action' cue. The 35mm wasn't supposed to be doing fancy things, because it was the objective camera. I depended entirely upon the 16mm camera to add the spice."
Zanuck wanted the footage to have an authentic Sixties look, so Tattersall loaded Ektachrome film in the period Eclair NPR that Durst used. A reversal stock, the Ektachrome produces a grainy look with saturated colors. "The 1960s were the most hideous period in history in terms of clothes and wallpaper and colors," laments Tattersall. A laughing Zanuck agrees: "The 16mm footage was really tacky, and when we went to our online session we pushed the envelope."
Not surprisingly, each director wanted to give their episode a distinctive look, and frequently referenced other films by way of example. For the segment on the Apollo 1 tragedy, director Frankel asked his cameraman to think about the overhead lighting Gordon Willis, ASC designed for The Godfather. "It allowed people's eyes to go dark, and the shadows to be very deep," remarks Frankel. "I also liked that the palette was simple and subdued, with red and brown tones. I wanted [those same melancholy] tones, which meant eliminating the cooler hues, the blues."
To achieve a Godfather-type look, Tattersall used overhead soft boxes. He tried to maintain dark wall textures which proved difficult given the 1960s milieu and kept the light soft and falling down.
Episode 8, We Interrupt This Program, tells the story of Apollo 13 through the eyes of the press corps. Here, Frankel wanted the warm, evocative period feeling of Mississippi Burning (photographed by Peter Biziou, BSC), with its saturated tones and blown-out light. "We shot in lots of shady streets, outside astronauts' homes," says Tattersall. "We'd choose areas where we were in shade so the streets beyond were bathed in sunlight, and I used Tiffen Superfrost and ProMist filters to make it bleed and overexpose."
With few exceptions, nearly everything in the series was shot in 35mm on Eastman Kodak EXR 5293 or Vision 500T 5279 stocks. The camera package consisted of two Arri 435s and two 535Bs (one of which doubled as the Steadicam unit). "Arriflex cameras are like Mercedes cars," enthuses Tattersall. "They tend to go on forever. Our schedule was brutal and we were shooting in the heat and humidity of Florida, where it got up to 115°F. We shot over 1.3 million feet of film, but [the minimal] problems we had with the cameras like scratches could have fit on a 400-foot reel."
The versatile 435 cameras proved especially handy on the moon set in Tustin; since the astronauts' helmets hid any lip movements it wasn't necessary to use a silent camera. "The 435s have a real high-speed capability," notes Tattersall. "They can run from 1 fps to 150 fps. With the 435ES model, you can even change the speed of the film in the middle of a shot; the camera has an electronic shutter that compensates the exposure."
Nearly the entire camera package for From the Earth to the Moon was supplied by The Video and Film Company (VFC) in London, which Tattersall describes as "one of the most innovative and creative companies in the business. They are constantly researching and developing new ideas for lenses and techniques that help me bring to the table images that have never been seen before. CEO Mike Pia and I grew up in the industry together, and I can call him at four in the morning if I have a problem."
Tattersall had always considered himself a feature film cameraman, but From the Earth to the Moon opened his eyes to what can be accomplished in the television medium. "You could never tell a story like this in feature form, because it is so intensely complicated and lengthy; you could never get all of the information in," he asserts.
"I believe that the standards of photography in television are changing," he continues. "I was hired to give this project a big-screen, feature film look because, like myself, Tom Hanks and Tony To share the vision that within a few years we will probably be watching television on large pulldown screens with laser projectors at full film resolution."
Tattersall wanted to ensure a long shelf life for From the Earth to the Moon. Therefore, while he composed his frame for the 1.33:1 format, he kept the edges clean for 16:9 HDTV. "We had to create a new ground glass with optimum frame markings," he remarks. "It was designed and built at The Video and Film Company. We called the new format 'Moon Vision.'"
Tattersall says that he personally found the most emotional segment of the series to be the re-creation of Le Voyage Dans La Lune. He was so entranced with the sequence, which combined his love of space and movies, that he asked if he could play Méliès' cameraman in the episode (Tom Hanks also has a cameo, playing Méliès' first assistant director). "There is something so wonderful about being able to play the part of Georges Méliès' cameraman," says Tattersall. "Here I am, a cinematographer on the eve of the millennium, making a film about men traveling to the moon, with all of the inherent technology which that involves. And I'm playing the part of a cameraman from 100 years ago, at the birth of our industry. It felt like I was describing a full circle."
