by Jon Silberg
Unit photography by Merrick Morton, SMPSP and Doug Hyun
Photos courtesy of DreamWorks Pictures

Something is definitely not right in Centerville, and Lincoln Six-Echo intends to fi nd out what it is. In the futuristic thriller The Island, shot by Mauro Fiore, ASC and directed by Michael Bay, people like Lincoln (Ewan McGregor) and the lovely Jordan Two-Delta (Scarlett Johansson) exist in a massive laboratory that is sealed off from the rest of the world, ostensibly to protect its inhabitants from widespread contamination that followed an apocalyptic disaster. All they see of the outside world is represented in beautiful holographic images of the last inhabitable corner of the earth: the lush island to which the lucky winners of an ongoing lottery go to live out their days.

But Lincoln discovers that all of this is a lie. In fact, he and the other inhabitants of Centerville are actually clones — known as “products” or “agnates” — cultivated by the nefarious Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean) for the sole purpose of providing spare organs (and an occasional baby) for humans in the outside world. The “winners” of the island lottery are not taken to a tropical paradise, but instead are simply transported to another area of the lab, where doctors kill them by lethal injection and harvest their organs. In the first act of The Island, Lincoln and Jordan manage to flee, but they are vigorously pursued by Merrick and his many associates.

Fiore has shot big-budget action projects before, among them Tears of the Sun and Driven, but he knew from his experiences shooting second unit on Bay’s Armageddon and The Rock that his first outing as director of photography for Bay would be particularly challenging. Bay, he submits, “is a very strong visual director who has a unique way of working.”

As is frequently the case on today’s large-scale Hollywood productions, there was a very short window between The Island’s “green light” and the day cameras had to roll, which meant Bay and his team had very little time for preproduction. The director and a storyboard artist created very rough boards and animatics, but Bay intended to make most key decisions on the day. “We were running against it on this movie,” acknowledges the director. “It was slightly under-prepped, because what’s going on in Hollywood now is that you have to prep a budget, rather than prepping a show. If a budget goes a little beyond where they want it to be, they’ll just pull the plug.”

“Not much was planned before we started shooting,” says Fiore. “You would think that on a film like this, everything would be plotted beforehand and everyone would have figured the whole movie out before we got there to shoot. Instead, we really had to rely on our instincts. It was a pretty interesting approach to improvise on a film like this.”

Even the visual-effects team worked that way. “We never sat down and discussed an overall philosophy,” says Industrial Light & Magic’s Eric Brevig, who served as the show’s visual-effects supervisor. “[Our approach] evolved throughout the shooting. We were dealing with six to 12 cameras sometimes, and we’d have 30 seconds’ notice when we found out how something would be staged. We were definitely running and gunning. Even though we had Super Technocranes and Strata Cranes and other big equipment, it was a guerrilla shoot; you might literally have five minutes’ notice to move four camera setups two blocks because the sun had just come out from behind a cloud. It’s certainly one way to make the filmmaking process exciting.”

Fortunately, the schedule was structured so that the big studio setpieces featured in the first part of the picture could be shot during the latter half of production. This enabled Fiore, production designer Nigel Phelps and gaffer Michael Bauman to conceptualize the biggest sets as principal photography of the exteriors got underway.

Fiore explains that his overall plan for The Island was to sharply delineate between the look and feel of Centerville and that of the outside world. Inside, the lighting would be antiseptic, inorganic and cold, whereas the look of the outside world — especially when Lincoln and Jordan first discover that it is actually inhabitable — would be motivated by warm, hard sunlight that would come as a shock to the clones. “When the characters made it to the outside world, we wanted the color to be very saturated,” says the cinematographer. “We wanted the sky to be overwhelming, almost hyper-real. It’s the first time Lincoln and Jordan have ever been out in the open air and affected by the wind and the sun. It’s almost a dreamscape. As the story progresses and they get more accustomed to the outside world, the look becomes a little more intense, but it is always different from the look inside the institute.”

The contrast between the sedate, confining world of the institute and the subsequent chase through a futuristic Southern California was underscored by camera movement. Scenes in Centerville were covered by cameras mounted on remote heads, dollies and cranes, whereas the majority of “real world” scenes were shot with handheld cameras. Fiore’s main cameras were Panaflex Platinums, and he always had Panavised Arri 435s on hand in case high-speed work was requested.

The new Arriflex 235 turned out to be the go-to camera for a lot of The Island’s action sequences. “On every film, you go in with preconceived notions about what it’s going to be, and then along the way it takes on a life of its own,” observes Fiore. “The same is true for the tools you use. You might go into a production with all types of equipment that you might possibly use, but when you’re feeling things out during the first few weeks of production, something might take precedence that you never expected. On The Island, it was the Arri 235.”

Bay purchased a 235 directly from Arri before the new camera had even shipped, and he says its attributes quickly became clear on the set. “I can’t say enough great stuff about that camera,” says the director. “I swear we shot a third of the movie on it. It’s so lightweight, and we invented special motorcycle-style handles for it. You can’t whip any Panavision camera around fast and be controlled enough to do some of the shots we did on this movie, even if you use a Millennium. The 235 is even quiet enough doing action scenes to record dialogue.”