During the prep stage, Totino, who calls himself a “casual” football fan, made a conscious decision to avoid cross-referencing other sports-themed films. “I didn’t want any other film to sway or persuade my thinking,” he says. “I also wanted to stay away from Oliver’s previous work. I’m a very big fan of his films, and I think Bob Richardson is an incredible cameraman — a genius. He’s come up with his own style, and I thought it was very important for me not to mimic that. That’s not who I am or where I think the film should have gone. But I did watch Raging Bull a lot, because that film evokes a certain feeling, and I think a lot of Any Given Sunday is about feelings.”
Totino reports that Stone encouraged this intuitive attitude toward the subject matter during preproduction. “Some directors are more verbal about their visual ideas, but Oliver tries to bring you into an experience,” Totino describes. “Going down to Miami and spending time with him in preproduction brought out a certain feeling. He kept on saying, ‘This is Miami, it’s sun, it’s warm, it’s hot.’ The reality of our lives before and during the film were brought into the film.”
In order to observe some actual gridiron action and capture crowd footage for inserts, Stone and Totino brought a camera crew to a Dallas Cowboys game at Texas Stadium last December. “The real game was actually much slower than you would think,” Totino attests. “I was frustrated being on the sidelines with only certain lenses and a minimum of movement. I thought it was important to bring the viewer onto the field by getting the camera inside the plays, which is very difficult. You have 22 men crashing into each other, which is a huge amount of weight being thrown around. It’s hard to get the camera in places where you can make interesting shots.”
To bring the game’s ground-war ferocity to the fore, the filmmakers employed a variety of “trick plays” in their shooting strategy. A small, modified Arriflex IIC dubbed the “Ratcam” (built by Steadicam operator Jimmy Muro) could be used either handheld or on a small pole to capture the man-to-man skirmishes along the line of scrimmage. The Ratcam allowed Totino to practice his own form of method cinematography when he donned a helmet one day to capture the unnerving point of view of a quarterback about to be mauled by blitzing linebackers. “We used a few actual NFL players — like Lawrence Taylor and Keyshawn Johnson — on the shoot, as well as a lot of ‘arena football’ players,” he says. “They all had a great attitude, and we got along really well. But they were afraid to hit me even on the second and third take, so I started cursing them out and calling their mothers names so they’d be a bit more aggressive!”
To enhance the film’s pounding, you-are-there immediacy, the filmmakers also utilized Clairmont Camera’s Image Shaker, which had lent stunning realism to the battle sequences in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Stone personally asked Spielberg how he’d captured the nerve-rattling quality of those scenes, and subsequently hired camera operator Mitch Dubin, who had worked with the device on Ryan. “The Image Shaker is a kind of plastic diaphragm that attaches to the front of the lens and gives the image the appearance that everything is shaking,” Totino describes. “You can even control the degree of shakiness. It was great for running plays and quick little moments when we panned on and off the action. It just helped add to the speed and the violence, the strength and energy of the whole play.”
Another device used to weave the film’s crazy quilt of footage was a “bungee camera” that could zip up and down the yard marks of the football field. “We ran cables along the Orange Bowl from goal line to goal line, suspended from the stadium,” Totino says. “We used prime lenses on an Arriflex 435 with a Panavision mount on the bungee. We were very limited in using it, but sometimes we could achieve a floating feeling over a player — a nice aspect of the bungee-cam. It’s almost like a point-of-view shot, but without the jerkiness of the camera moving around on the operator’s shoulder. The bungee-cam is smoother, and you can do quick pans with it.”
To further fracture and distort the action, Totino also exploited some of the techniques he’d honed in his video work. “We played around with shutter speeds and camera speeds,” he says. “We used some slow-motion, step-framing and even some strobing. I’m also a big fan of the streaking effect you get when you throw the shutter out of sync. I did the entire U2 ‘Staring at the Sun’ video using that technique.”
Totino’s responsibilities were further complicated by Stone’s exhaustive, multi-camera coverage of each play. “Most times we had six cameras on a setup, which makes it impossible to keep lighting continuity,” Totino points out. “Some angles worked and some didn’t. Sometimes I’d put up cameras and tell Oliver, ‘You know, this shot might not work.’ And he’d say, ‘Okay, let’s just go for it, I’ll be happy with just 60 percent.’ Then, of course, we’d be looking at dailies and he’d say, ‘Well, how come you didn’t get 100 percent?’
“Working with Oliver can be a huge psychological mindgame,” Totino concedes with a laugh. “But to be honest, those mindgames added to the film. Some people aren’t used to working that way, and they feel abused. But it’s Oliver’s way of getting the most he can out of his crew.”
[ continued on page 3 ]