Cinematographer John Schwartzman, ASC reteams with director Michael Bay to expose Earth to a planet-threatening asteroid in ARMAGEDDON.
Despite being a dauntingly complex project budgeted at more than $100 million, the concept for the sci-fi adventure film Armageddon seemingly dropped out of the sky. Director Michael Bay recalls, "After The Rock, I didn't want to do just another action movie, but I couldn't find a story I liked. I was working with [executive producer] Jonathan Hensleigh, trying to come up with an idea, and he said, 'You know those horseshit asteroid-destroys-the-world movies? Well, what if we did a really cool one?'"
Their tale opens as astronomers discover a Texas-sized object hurtling toward Earth: a "global-killer" asteroid like the one which wiped out the dinosaurs. In an early indication of the threat, shards of the stupendous slab rain down to perforate New York City. Mankind's survival strategy is to launch a pair of next-generation space shuttles, land on the planetoid's surface, sink a shaft into its core, and insert a nuclear weapon. The blast is designed to split the asteroid in half, causing the pieces to pass by Earth. Tapped to join the landing team is a crack oil driller (Bruce Willis), who insists on bringing along his band of roughnecks (including characters played by Ben Affleck, Steve Buscemi and Will Patton). The first half of the picture illustrates NASA's attempts to train this motley crew for the mission, while the second witnesses their brave attempt to rise to the momentous occasion.
"The scary thing is that these global killers pass us all the time," Bay says, recalling the worldwide scare this past March over Asteroid XF-11, a two-mile-wide object which was mistakenly projected to hurtle within 30,000 miles of our home world in the year 2028. "That's one of the reasons why I was interested in this story. It's totally heroic these everyday Joes have to save the world, and it depicts the best of the space program. In fact, I kept thinking about The Right Stuff throughout the process of making Armageddon, because I wanted to capture that same heroic spirit I felt as a kid while watching the space race to the moon."
Countdown
Preparations for Armageddon geared up in early 1997 as Bay began working with storyboard artist Robbie Consing (The Game) and production designer Michael White (Crimson Tide, The Jackal), both of whom had worked on The Rock. The director says, "Literally everything had to be designed: state-of-the-art space shuttles, space suits, a Mir-style space station, the asteroid itself."
However, such scope doesn't come cheaply, and as Bay recalls, "The production hinged on NASA giving us full cooperation. We knew we couldn't make the movie without them." Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, whose credits also include such strikingly visual films as Con Air (photographed by David Tattersall, BSC), Crimson Tide (Dariusz Wolski, ASC), and Flashdance (Don Peterman, ASC), was instrumental in earning the trust of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. "We submitted a script very early on," Bruckheimer explains. "If NASA says 'Yes,' then you have to go to the Air Force and the Department of Defense they really control the situation. I had a good relationship with the DOD on Top Gun, so that helped. And even though they didn't sanction us on Crimson Tide, I don't think they were disappointed with the movie because it made the Navy look professional and honest. That's [the image] they're looking for." After some minor script changes for accuracy's sake, the doors to NASA's immense facilities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Texas were opened wide for the filmmakers.
Returning for Armageddon was the core production crew that had tackled The Rock (see ACJune 1996), headed up by director of photography John Schwartzman, ASC, a longtime friend of Bay's and a frequent collaborator on music videos and commercials. "One of the nice things about this film was that getting all of us back together was like getting a bunch of old friends together," the cameraman offers while taking a break from his cinematographic duties on director Ron Howard's upcoming comedy Ed TV. "There was no feeling of 'I've got to learn how to work with these other people.' It was more like, 'Let's get back to work.'"
Analyzing his working relationship with Schwartzman, Bay wryly offers, "John knows what I like, and he can handle it when I say, 'This lighting sucks, let's do something else.'" The director specifically refers to a dramatic night scene in Armageddon featuring actor Billy Bob Thornton: "I was bored with the lighting we were using, he was tired, and I said, 'Let's do something different.' So John shot back, 'Well, what do you want to do?' I then said, 'Well, I don't know, John' and the crew started walking away from us as if we were in a fight. That's just the way we work. I trust his exposures and I think he trusts my eye for camera placement and how things will cut."
The situation in question "was a classic," Schwartzman says with a laugh. "Almost every two weeks we'd have a pushing and shoving match, and the good thing about it was that it was never personal and something great usually came of it. That type of thing clears the air, and Michael is a director who never carries a grudge. If you do something he doesn't like, he'll let you know and then just move on. We can sometimes frustrate each other to no end, but we're both trying to make the best movie possible."
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