During the course of Hard Rain, the water rises from 2" to 16'; instead of altering the actual water level, the production opted for the safer, less time-consuming tactic of lowering the sets into the liquid surface, which remained at a fixed 4' level. Salomon explains, "There were no bases on the buildings; using the ceiling cranes, we lowered the facades so it would look as if the water had risen. When there was supposed to be only three inches of water, we had platforms for trucks to drive on."
The buildings and large props were attached to wire-mesh support footing to keep them solidly anchored in the tank when water was pumped in. The big rain bars kept up an incessant downpour which, in the wider scenes, amounted to as much as 45,000 gallons per minute. "We built the tank so that the water always spilled over to create a horizon," Salomon recalls. "Our rain effects covered the whole 650' x 250' area. Our special effects supervisor, John Frazier, designed the tank and rain rigs. It was a dangerous shoot because the whole thing combined electricity and water! But our gaffer, Dwight Campbell, and I had worked together on The Abyss, so he knew all the problems [associated with wet-for-wet photography.]
"We duplicated Huntingburg's Main Street in the tank, reducing it by about 10 percent, but otherwise we were very true to what the real town looked like. Since it's very hard to build sets in water, we built sets on top of sets. That way, when we had shot one set, we could lift it out and expose a new set behind it. It was designed like a Pandora's Box. We started with the tank crowded with sets, and the last thing we did was the cemetery, which simply consisted of trees and tombstones."
In a hangar adjacent to Building 703 was a tank 30' deep and 40' in diameter, used for a scene in which Christian Slater is trapped in a jail cell and the waters rise perilously around him. Salomon explains that "the whole set was on a platform that we could lower down on a crane to make it look as though the water was rising. For take two, we lifted it out of the water and started over."
Production designer Michael Riva (The Color Purple, Lethal Weapon, A Few Good Men) worked closely with the Salomon and Menzies while planning the film's unique sets. "It reminded us of the old days of moviemaking, when filmmakers could totally created their own universes," Salomon says. "Everything was handmade, and the lighting was created [artificially]. It's not like going out into the streets and shooting. When the lights are out in the town and it's overcast, what's your lighting source? We used sodium-vapor lights like those you find in streetlights, which gave us a lot of yellow lighting. We thought about using a Musco, but it would have been too big for the space we were in. A Mini-Musco would have been all right, but that unit has a generator with it, and we couldn't have a generator in the water. We used a lot of Condors and Dino lights. Unavoidably, we lost many cameras in the drink. We'd fish them out, send them over to Panavision, and they'd get them back to us the next day.
"This was not an easy show, though, believe me!" Salomon admits with a grin. "Principal photography took place over 82 days. We started shooting on August 26 of 1996 and wrapped on January 9, 1997; the last day was 22 hours. We spent a long time in that tank and never saw daylight. We'd go in when it was still dark outside and leave for the day when it was dark. It made me feel like a mole.
"This isn't really a disaster movie," Salomon emphasizes. "It has some great characters, people you care about. The flood is more of a backdrop to what's going on. For me it was all about story and character, and that's what I concentrated on. I was on this show from November of 1995, more than a year and a half. We worked on the script for about a year, and made a lot of drafts. Too often, I've seen situations where someone goes lightly over part of the script because they think they can fix it eventually. It never gets fixed. There's never time once you start shooting; it's like laying track in front of a train. And when you start improvising too much, you start losing the picture.
"The studio was wondering how many weeks over schedule we would go at the time, Waterworld was a big embarrassment because it went so far over, and The Abyss had gone over. Every show connected with water has run long, so it was important to convince the studio that we could do it."
Salomon grimaces as he remembers one dilemma he managed to avoid. "The movie was originally going to be shot on a lake at night. You can imagine being in a lake with no control and no idea where people are in the dark. In such a situation, by the time you get ready for a shot, the sun starts coming up. We needed a controlled environment, so we created one."
The director was grateful to have some up-to-date equipment that made the work a much easier. One was Louma-L.A.'s Technocrane. "The Technocrane does what a normal crane is supposed to do, but it also extends and retracts," Salomon says. "Andy Romanoff and the Louma technicians were very concerned; they'd never even used it in rain, but they waterproofed it and it performed flawlessly. Instead of having to try to make dolly moves in the water, we had our special effects department build a platform for the Technocrane. The platform was on jacks, so we could roll it around in the water and then just jack it down when we found the right spot for it.
"We also found a smaller Cablecam that was remote-controlled, which allowed us to do dolly shots over the water without having any wake. That was new, and had never been used before.
"Also, Howard Preston [of Preston Cinema Services] has an autofocus device called the Light Ranger, which we used," Salomon adds. "One of the problems of shooting in water is that you can't set marks down for the actors. But if you keep the Light Ranger's viewfinder crosshairs on the subject, such as a person moving around, it will focus the camera automatically. We made shots at 96 fps with a wide-open 300mm lens, and they came out razor-sharp. However, the Light Ranger didn't always work if there was too much rain, because a laser measures distance and the drops could sometimes interfere with the beam.
"In addition, we did a lot of our lighting with big helium lighting balloons. We could move them around easily and get beautiful, soft light. They saved us a great deal of time."
Computer-generated imaging was sometimes necessary to complete Hard Rain's sodden milieu. According to Salomon, "We built the town's church full-scale, but we didn't have room for the steeple, so we added it in post using a CGI 3-D model. Cinesite did it for us, and I'm very impressed with their work. In some shots we'd see the ceiling, so we've composited skies in with clouds coming across and lightning flashing, and it looks real. We only did one motion-control shot; for everything else, they just tracked the shot afterwards."
Asked to assess the relative merits of being a director rather than a cinematographer, Salomon offers, "I loved being a cinematographer, and I still think the director of photography and the operator have the best jobs on the set. But I shot my first film as a director of photography when I was 20, and I worked in that capacity for many years. I just wanted something else in my life. I like directing; it's nice to be in control of the whole process. "
