Cinematographer Peter Menzies Jr., ACS lends a keen eye to the action-oriented heist film HARD RAIN.
There's nothing more challenging for a cinematographer than shooting a film for another director of photography, especially when the person in charge is an acknowledged master of the craft. Just ask Peter Menzies, Jr., ACS whom director Mikael Salomon, ASC selected to shoot his new action-adventure picture, Hard Rain. "I had never worked with Mikael before, but I was a big fan of his work," says Menzies.
The son of a leading Austra-lian cinematographer, Menzies worked on numerous films as an assistant and operator for Russell Boyd, ACS. He brought Menzies to America to help him with extensive New York location work on the two Crocodile Dundee films. Menzies' first American movie as director of photography was the impressively photographed thriller White Sands, which he followed with Posse, The Getaway, Die Hard With a Vengeance and A Time to Kill (see AC Aug. 1996).
Menzies was brought in early in preproduction of Hard Rain on a part-time basis. He soon found that working for a fellow cinematographer had its advantages. "When I first went to the set, it was just an empty hangar," he recalls. "I'd go there for a few hours every couple of days and walk around with Mikael and production designer Michael Riva, and we'd all talk. Being involved right from the beginning was a great help to me. Mikael was all for it; I'm sure he used to get frustrated by not having enough prep time, and he was keen to help me."
Menzies found that being a "cinematographer's cinematographer" on Hard Rain was no problem at all. "Mikael is a very intelligent man, and we got along famously," he says. "He was understanding when I went to him and said, 'This is going to take some time, why don't we try something else?' When he'd see me walking up, he knew exactly what was going on, and why I wanted to talk to him. But when we were doing the flood scenes, he was so busy with the pure logistics of what he was doing that he was too busy to worry about what I was up to.
"We talked as much as we could, but when we were really up and running we weren't actually talking much because we were both so busy. He gave me plenty of freedom; he knew I wasn't going to do something he'd actually hate. Still I'd ask him things like, 'Is it okay, storywise, for these people to be in silhouette?' He got along well with my gaffer, operator and assistant, and collaborated very closely with us. I played around a lot with sodium-vapor lights, which we used throughout the movie. We spoke in the very beginning about how much he liked that look.
"The main problem with this picture," Menzies notes, "was something Mikael and I talked about during our first interview: the struggle of how much light we could put in and where we could put it in from. We kept practical lights on much longer than one might in a normal movie, but we had to be able to see something. We couldn't have people sitting in the dark for an hour and a half, so we had to justify keeping some lights on. Even at night, you'd expect to see just a little bit of detail or flashing lights in the [cityscape cyclorama] backing, so we had to light the backing as well as the tank set itself.
"The backing was quite easy to light," he admits, "because it was on dry land, but in the tank it was always a struggle to move lights around. Then we tried lighting balloons, and they really helped us out. They were flexible, safe, and provided a beautiful quality of light. When we floated the balloons, the rain obscured the power cords coming down from them. We didn't have to worry about lighting from Condors or towers or anything else. To see all of those glowing balloons floating up over the set was pretty surreal!"
Salomon and Menzies made careful choices in lighting the falling rain. The cinematographer explains, "It could look absolutely beautiful when we backlit it, but a flood isn't a beautiful thing. We didn't backlight much because we really didn't want a theatrical look; we wanted it to look real. Also, if we had backlit the rain, we wouldn't have had the depth we wanted on such a large set. It was great to see the whole set without it being washed out by backlit rain. Most of the time I'd crosslight it, but sometimes we'd just throw 360 degrees of light with the balloons. Quite often, you couldn't even see the rain falling. Instead, you could just see it on the water's surface, which really enhanced the realism."
Menzies utilized two Panaflex cameras and two "Panavised" Arriflex 35-IIIs, framing his shots in the 2.35:1 Super 35 format. "This was my first time shooting in Super 35; my other films had all been anamorphic," he says. "We chose Super 35 to take advantage of its increased depth of field, and to exploit the wide-angle lenses that we couldn't have used with anamorphic. Even when we used a 14mm lens, the results were amazing. This was the first time I got to play around with the Primo spherical lenses, and they're wonderful. The entire film takes place at night, and because the rain tended to diffuse the image, I didn't use any filters at all. There was a lot of light flaring in different places in the frame, and that was when the Primo lenses really came into their own.
"I shot Hard Rain on Eastman Kodak's Vision 500T [5279] for nearly everything, and it's beautiful! We were on the stage throughout the shoot except for five days when we went to Indiana, where I shot some EXR 5248. When we make the final anamorphic release prints blowing up from the Super 35 negative I think the Vision 500T is going to help us greatly. Its color separation and finer grain are just remarkable."
Menzies shares Salomon's enthusiasm for the Technocrane. "It can telescope out 8' or 9' very quickly if you need it to and it has a remote-control head. We initially thought we would do a lot of Steadicam work on the film, but the depth of the water made it too difficult. Instead, we could swing the crane and telescope the arm across the water, which gave us a very dynamic look and still allowed us to use traditional filming techniques."
Menzies has unstinting praise for the crews he has worked with in this country. "My crew, as on the other films I've done here, was entirely American," he says. "This was my third film with my operator, Robert Presley, and my fifth with my first assistant, Richard Mosier. Both of those guys have allowed me to really push the limits with Steadicam and handheld work. It was raining in every shot of Hard Rain, and Richard was fabulous in the way he protected the gear and kept us shooting. He came up with all sorts of devices to put in front of the lenses to keep them free of water."
The film's special effects supervisor was John Frazier (Twister, Speed, Outbreak and Basic Instinct). "He did an amazing job," Menzies enthuses. "Every day, the effects guys would pull something out of the hat for us. The film didn't have a huge budget, so we were mostly doing in-camera effects. There are only two greenscreen shots in the film, and nearly all of the computer work was just cleanup stuff. We did a few shots where we'd pan and tilt and they would put in the sky, and there were a couple of model shots. Occasionally the rain would cause rainbows, but the effects people would go in and remove those.
"In the end, we were proud that we did so much of the effects work in the camera. By doing most of it in the camera, we also didn't have to compromise in order to serve postproduction needs. We could keep the camera moving and alive."