"A lot of Mike’s decisions about how shots would be executed were driven by time and money [considerations]. Do we use a miniature? Can we do this in CG, or should we build an actual set? We had to figure out what each approach would cost us, and if we couldn’t figure out how to do a shot at a reasonable cost, it was cut."
To illustrate this process, Sigel points to an early scene in which a vehemently anti-mutant U.S. senator (Bruce Davidson) is kidnapped by Magneto and imprisoned within a cavernous, underground lair. Carved into a rock wall, the senator’s cell is situated on the edge of a chasm. Looking through the bars covering the cell’s opening, the senator can see Magneto on the opposite side of the abyss. But with a mere wave of his hand, the mutant commands the metallic substances within the cave to transform and construct a shimmering steel bridge across the gap, allowing him easy access the cell. Arriving at the opening, he wills its metal bars to part and enters.
The point of this sequence is to demonstrate Magneto’s vast powers, and several key establishing shots were required to give the scenes scale. "Once we had those shots, the action takes place in the jail cell, which was a very small set," Sigel observes. "Bryan, Mike Fink and I had to figure out which shots would best depict Magneto’s walk across this catwalk as it flies together. Our production designer, John Myhre, could determine whether it was impractical to build something like that walkway. Certain things, like adding an exterior or adding rooms, were more practical for us to do on set because I could do it cheaply and it looked better than it would in CGI. There were other things that were better for Mike to do. We ended up with a series of storyboards and 3-D pre-vis animations based on the sequence at hand.
"Bryan, Mike and I then determined what would be greenscreen elements, where the composites would be and whether we needed second-unit elements to make it work. That process involves a tremendous amount of organization, and it can be as frustrating for a cinematographer as it is for an actor when he’s acting opposite an orange ball on a greenscreen. A cinematographer will always prefer a natural set and a natural actor to part of a set and a piece of green cloth, but that’s filmmaking today."
Sigel shot the majority of the film’s visual-effects work with Eastman Kodak’s SFX 200T stock, while the bulk of the film was shot on Vision 500T 5279. "As always, when you’re doing greenscreen or certain visual effects, you have much less leeway in terms of diffusion and unusual lab processes," he notes. "Although the SFX and 79 normally cut together pretty well, we had to do some digital manipulation to match the SFX to the way we manipulated the 79. It’s possible to get away with that if it’s done well." Deluxe Toronto handled the show’s lab work, and Sigel gives the company high marks for its flexibility in handling "unusual processing."
All Singer needed were one or two shots to get Magneto into the cell "to give the audience a sense of the environment," Sigel says. "The cave includes a waterfall and [an obelisk-like] piece of stainless steel that’s about a mile high, and how could we possibly build that practically? It ended up being done with a model and CG. However, I think one of the hardest things to do in terms of the effects is to create an environment completely from scratch. At best, fantastical CG environments oftenlook exactly like what they are: photo-real illustrations."
According to Sigel, Singer’s work has a high "realism" factor. "I think his biggest fear is that something may look fake. Having said that, I have yet to meet anybody who can bend metal with his mind! We were dealing with an extreme level of unreality, but you have to buy these characters or there’s no story, no conflict."
Sigel spent additional prep time doing camera and lighting tests on the mutants’ costumes and makeup treatments. "The biggest problems were with the X-Men costumes. Superhero costumes can be drawn in a comic book and look really cool, but they are very difficult to reproduce faithfully on a human being. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t have a body like the characters in the comics! The costumes generally look ridiculous, and movement is a problem as well." The cinematographer found that the details of the X-Men uniforms—each sculpted to highlight a character’s form—benefitted from side and edge light, which created interesting glints and textures and separated them from backgrounds.
One character—the devilish Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos)—proved to be particularly difficult in regard to makeup tests. Her full-body makeup featured scale-like appliances covered with an indigo-blue paint, set off by yellow contact lenses and a bright red wig. Applying it all was minimally a six-hour process. "She’s basically naked in the film, covered only in body paint and prosthetics, and I was very impressed with [Gordon Smith’s] makeup job," Sigel says. "It was important to find a way to photograph the makeup so it looked real."
Mystique appears in a limited number of scenes, so Sigel was able to conduct his tests on Romijn-Stamos using a lighting setup that was based on how the actual scenes would be shot. He explains, "The plan was to light her properly and then do it in a gradually more unforgiving way, so Bryan could see what the limits were." Again, Sigel relied on a side halflight to bring out textures. "Rebecca was lit with very large sources to create a uniform sheen, and we then used little, hard kicks to bring out the three-dimensional quality of the scales, creating a bit more range in the textures and keeping the sheen from looking too flat."
Production on X-Men began in September of 1999 and wrapped in March of 2000. Filming took place primarily at locations and stages in and around Toronto, although a cursory amount of filming was later done in New York City. Because of restrictions on U.S. productions imposed by Canada’s guilds and government incentives programs, Sigel could only take two of his regular crew members to Toronto: chief lighting technician Tony "Nako" Nakonechnyj and first camera assistant Jimmy E. Jensen. "Great focus pullers are a rare breed, I don’t know what I would’ve done without Jimmy," says Sigel.
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