According to Pau, Lee adjusted his vision of the fight sequences to fit the wide frame. "While talking about the style of fighting he wanted, Ang was interested in trying to get closer to the action," the cameraman recalls. "Fight choreographers always want wider shots from high and low angles because they help sell the action, but Ang said he wanted the audience to feel as if they could join in with the action. He wanted [viewers] to be watching from an arm’s length."
Pau stresses that the geography of the film’s landscapes mountains, forests and desert was important to the drama. "While anamorphic is beautiful in wide shots, as soon as you move into medium shots or close-ups, the scenery and environment disappear because of the lack of depth of field. Only Super 35 could give us both the wide frame and the depth we needed for the geography as well as the fight scenes, because it would have been difficult to carry the focus for many of them, especially since most take place at night."
To soften the picture’s overall palette, Pau selected Kodak Vision 320T 5277 as his primary film stock. "I rated it at 250 ASA, giving it a slight overexposure in order to be on the safe side when we did our Super 35 blowup," he explains. "I didn’t want the grain to be too pronounced. Continuing with that idea, we shot our daylight scenes with 50 ASA EXR 5245, which has the finest grain possible and can capture extreme details that quality was useful for our desert sequences. If we were dealing with low light or shadow conditions, we used Vision 250D 5246 in conjunction with the 5245." To increase his depth of field, Pau tried to shoot everything at a stop of at least T4, which demanded a considerable amount of light because he was working with slow- and medium-speed stocks.
All of the footage was processed normally in the lab Technicolor New York since "pushing means adding grain and contrast," Pau notes. The cinematographer chose Technicolor because he wanted to do the film’s post work in New York and had enjoyed a great experience with the company’s Rome branch while shooting the action film Double Team in Italy. "Unfortunately, I was unable to visit Technicolor in New York before we began shooting. I just did a preliminary test in Hong Kong, we discussed what I was looking for, I sent footage to them for processing, and everything seemed okay. But when we got our first dailies, they were all wrong green, yellow, warm and daylight-feeling. I called and told them I wanted the look to be much cooler, but the situation never quite worked out."
Pau had only used Super 35 once before. "Of course, the blowup is critical, and I’ve seen no better Super 35 work than that in James Cameron’s films," he says. "We had CFI in Los Angeles do our blowup because of their work on Titanic [see AC Dec. ’97]. They do a fantastic job of retaining sharpness and not losing details. The flesh tones remained accurate, but you still lose about 10 percent of your color saturation due to the optical Super 35 blowup, which is why I see using a digital blowup as being the future of the format." (Pau did some tests with this process by shooting in Super 35, scanning the footage and recording out an anamorphic negative with favorable results, but he had neither the time nor the budget to pursue it.)
While the combatants in Crouching Tiger demonstrate an array of fighting techniques in diverse locations, a few ground rules had to be laid out before shooting began. "We had to determine what kind of combat we would be using fighting with flying stunts or just fistfighting," Pau recalls. "Ang wanted flying; he dreamed of it. That approach requires a tremendous amount of wire work, and in classical Hong Kong films, we traditionally use smoke effects and hard light for those kinds of scenes to help us hide the wires. But those techniques weren’t right for Crouching Tiger, so we instead relied upon digital wire removal."
To Hollywood veterans, this might sound like a standard solution, but Crouching Tiger was not a Hollywood film, and the production’s tight budget at first seemed to prohibit such an easy out. Fortunately, though, Pau’s plan of staying true to the film’s style along with a few favors and the generosity of those who appreciated the film’s merits helped the filmmakers accomplish their goals.
Lee had little experience with visual-effects work, but Pau had gained some while shooting Double Team, Warriors of Virtue and Bride of Chucky, and through his own experiments with the digital retouching and enhancement of still photographs. Since the production didn’t have the budget to hire a visual-effects supervisor, the cameraman took on those duties throughout the shoot and during postproduction. Pau explains, "Most of our digital work was done by my friend Leo Lo at Asia Cine Digital, which has one of the only Kodak Cineon scanners in Hong Kong. Leo did more than 300 shots, which included wire-rig removal and sky replacements. I supervised the work, which also included a lot of color-correction."
To fulfill the film’s more ambitious effects needs, Pau steered the production to Manex L.A., the Los Angeles branch of the Oscar-winning house that was largely responsible for the groundbreaking effects seen in The Matrix. "They were excited about the project and did about 60 shots for us on an incredibly small budget," Pau says. (See sidebar on page 64.)
The five-month Crouching Tiger shoot began in August 1999, with two weeks of work in the scorching 100°F sands of the China-Xinjiang desert. In flashback scenes shot there, Jen first meets Lo, the leader of an outlaw band that attacks the caravan which is taking her family to Beijing. The tempestuous girl chases Lo on horseback, and the duo eventually fall in love. Pau’s 18-member crew from Hong Kong which included Pau’s longtime gaffer, Lee Tak Shing, along with focus puller Kenny Lam, camera team operator Louis Jong, crane operator Jimmy Fok, best boy Shuan Ching Chuen, second-unit cameraman Choi Sung Fai and second-unit gaffer Lam Chun Wan worked in the "English" crew system, with Pau operating the A-camera himself. Virtually all of their camera, grip and electrical gear was supplied by Salon Films, Ltd. of Hong Kong.
The cinematographer explains that the film’s desert exteriors were handled normally, with the crew using reflectors and bounce cards to help control the harsh sunlight. He notes, however, that the desert’s rich, high-contrast look helps distinguish it from the rest of the film’s scenes, making Jen’s memory of the setting seem more dreamlike and distant.
In one of the first major fight scenes tackled by the Crouching Tiger crew on location in Beijing, two men face off with the hooded thief in a dark graveyard. The villain wields the Green Destiny, and the sword empowers him with miraculous abilities. The other combatants are armed with unique bladed weapons as well, and all slash and stab furiously until Li Mu Bai arrives on the scene. His spectacular entry a fantastic descent from a towering tree has him literally flying into the fray. "Our biggest problem was that many of our action sequences took place at night in large exterior spaces," Pau offers. "The graveyard scene was perhaps the most difficult. We’d scheduled it for eight shooting days, but it went on for about 16."
The most time-consuming aspect of these preparations involved rigging the intricate wire-work stunts devised for the film by legendary action choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, who earned well-deserved fame with his extensive work on The Matrix. The trickiness of these setups was compounded by Lee’s unwillingness to predetermine how the fights should be photographed; he preferred to tackle them with an organic, shot-by-shot approach. "Wo-Ping certainly knows how to do his work," Pau asserts, "but each shot could sometimes take a very long time to set up. While Ang’s approach was good in theory, it could then take ages and ages to get things done. When you are doing this kind of work, you should let people know exactly what you want in advance so they can prepare."
Pau had worked with Chow on three previous films, but the performer had never done wire work before, which further complicated the graveyard scene: "This was his first night on the shoot, and our first shot was to be his leap, in which he flies down about 20 feet while flinging the sheath from his sword. Ang had him do it 18 times. Each take was a meticulous refinement of the performance, designed to help Chow deliver the tempo and drama Ang sought."
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