Nako and Sigel first worked together on the telefilm The Rock Hudson Story, and they’ve since worked together on a number of projects, including all of Sigel’s features since 1994’s Foxfire. "Tom allows me to have the kind of creative input that usually only a cinematographer would have," Nako says. "It’s been a great collaboration. [On X-Men,] there were a lot of political issues to overcome. The union officials in Canada felt that their people could do the job. There are good people up there, but the relationship between the chief lighting technician and the cinematographer is an important one. Tom needed somebody who understood his vision and creative process, and he really fought for me." The final agreement allowing Nako to work on X-Men required that a Canadian gaffer be hired as well.
Sigel soon found that shooting a complex picture in Toronto was a thorny task. "They just don’t have the kind of stages that one would normally associate with a production like this," the cameraman attests. "We had to downsize a number of sets and use CGI where we wouldn’t ordinarily have had to, because we just didn’t have enough room. They have good stages in Toronto, but they [either] don’t have enough or they aren’t equipped the way [they are] in Los Angeles. That meant we compromised certain shots when we might have needed a really high angle and couldn’t do it, or compromised the lighting because we just didn’t have the [necessary] space. Fortunately key grip Mark Manchester was very inventive with the space we had."
Nako reports, "We were working at Shoreline Studios, which had some of the biggest stages in Toronto, but they were more akin to converted warehouses than Hollywood studio stages. Our biggest was 14,000 square feet, while the others were 7,000 and 10,000. On a stage in Los Angeles, you’ll have the perms and then the ozone area above that so you can just drop things in. We didn’t have that capability in Toronto; everything had to be hung, meaning we had to bring our lamps up on a scissorlift or Condor. Our flexibility was limited."
One tool Sigel utilized to help him get the most out of his sets was Kodak’s PreView System (see AC Aug. ’99, p. 36), which was supplied to him just a few weeks before he started the film. He says that while the device is intended to give cinematographers a means by which to communicate to the director and other crew what effect changes in film stock, filtration, focal length and processing might have on a subject, programming it proved problematic. "Unfortunately, we were usually making our decisions based on looking at the LCD screen on the PreView’s laptop computer, which is a backlit source and looks nothing like the printouts," he recalls. "We rarely had enough time to output the printouts while working.
"Bryan draws very much on the stimulus of the location, so the PreView was useful for choosing camera setups and angles; I could shoot a location with stand-ins, then bring those images right to him," Sigel continues. "There were some locations that he initially didn’t see the value of, but I was able to go there with the PreView, shoot the place the way I saw it, then show him the results. He’d say, ’Oh, yeah, now I see it.’"
Flashing back to World War II, X-Men’s opening sequence depicts Magneto’s backstory, establishing his need for vengeance against humans in light of their intolerance toward mutants. "As a young boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and was separated from his parents before they were sent to the gas chambers," Sigel details. "The trauma of that event brings out his latent mutant powers. One thing that makes Magneto interesting is that there is a tremendous amount of legitimacy in his argument. You see that his hatred for humanity was created out of the suffering and misery he experienced, so I wanted the opening to have a feel that was very horrific."
The Auschwitz exterior was rendered in drab colors, with muddied ground and rain effects. Manchester hung a 60’ x 40’ silk from a construction crane over the set to create an overcast effect. Sigel then shot the sequence with Kodak’s EXR 5245 and employed a Deluxe skip-bleach process on the negative to increase contrast and further desaturate colors. "I find 45 to be a colder-looking, contrasty film," he notes. "It’s almost as much a tungsten film as it is a daylight film. It’s also very fine-grained, so even when doing a skip-bleach, the grain doesn’t jump out that much, although this scene is grainier than the rest of the film."
As he had on both Fallen and Three Kings, Sigel used the unique look of cross-processed Ektachrome reversal film for another X-Men flashback, this time to represent the anguish of Wolverine’s nightmarish past. "Wolverine has a recurring nightmare based on what happened to him at a secret military lab," Sigel describes. "He doesn’t remember exactly what happened beyond a few fragments, so I wanted to photograph the sequence in a way that represented that feeling."
Toward that end, Sigel shot the scene with Kodak’s 5285, a reversal stock he actually had a hand in bringing to the market. "I’d previously used bulk loads of various still-photography films in doing this kind of work, including Kodak’s Ektachrome Professional Plus. But for Three Kings, I knew we were going to do a huge chunk of the film with it—the entire second act—so I asked Kodak to make us 1,000-foot loads of Ektachrome with edge-coding and Bell & Howell perfs. They were very hesitant to do it, but we ended up shooting 200,000 feet of it, so they were happy in the end. They decided that there was a market for the stock, and they now offer an advancement of it called 5285."
The cinematographer wanted Wolverine to appear hot and feverish in the sequence, so he overexposed by about a stop, bringing out hot highlights along the character’s body. However, the cameraman notes that because of the 85’s dangerously low latitude, over- or underexposure can only be done with extreme judiciousness. "The stock has such a very narrow range that I’d always recommend someone do tests before using this technique," he notes, "but I’ve used it quite a lot. The 85 is daylight-balanced, so using HMIs or daylight will give you the most ’normal’ effect, even with the cross-processing. How far you want to shift away from that is up to you. You can to it with the color temperature of your lights or with your production design, because certain colors will really pop."
Much of X-Men takes place in Professor X’s school for mutants, where he teaches them how to control their powers and interact with society. From the outside, the academy looks like a stately mansion, but underneath the building is a hidden hotbed of superhero activity. Featuring built-in lighting panels and stainless-steel finishes, the facility’s rooms include a laboratory, a chamber called the "Cerebro," and a number of lengthy corridors. Finished in dark-blue, high-gloss coatings and stainless steel, the industrial-style hallways feature continuous lighting coves built into both the floor and ceiling corner joins. They were filled with bat strips, covered with curved opaque plastic panels and wired through dimmer boards, allowing Sigel to easily "redress" the set with his lighting.
"Tom really likes to use dimmers for exactly that reason," Nako says. "He likes the flexibility of riding the intensity of the lamps, or even doing lighting changes in-shot. Given the fact that so much was happening with practicals on very large sets—our main corridor was about 120 feet long—using dim-mers was much faster than having 50 guys adjusting things by hand. One board operator could do it all. We used about 3,500 #1 Photofloods in our bat strips in the coves, and each 4 foot strip was the equivalent of 2K. The dimmers allowed us to run the coves at different intensities and create different moods, with the main portion of the light coming either from above or below the actors."
Because of the lighting coves, the corridor walls had to be suspended in midair, with a scaffolding truss system holding them up from behind. Sigel admits, "That added a lot of trouble and expense in the construction, but I was really determined to have these coves on both the top and bottom because it gave the lighting more shape and kept it from becoming a supermarket-like, fluorescent environment."
These coves (as well as other overhead practicals built into the ceilings which contained 6K space lights and 1K Par cans with SFP globes) gave Sigel a strong base ambience, allowing him to shoot at his set stop, a T3.2/4, using 5279 stock. Additional illumination was relegated to a few floor lamps for modeling, including Aurasofts, which offered an illumination that closely matched what was coming from the coves.
The Cerebro, an enormous spherical room, serves as Professor X’s interactive meditation chamber. Once he’s plugged into its computer platform, which is built into a central dais, the space becomes a planetarium-like display of his psychic revelations, with images appearing upon its curved walls. "Because this room is huge, we could only afford to construct a portion of it," Sigel says. "A section of curved wall was built and mounted on a track, allowing us to move it around the center platform where Professor X sits, so we could shoot from any angle and still have the correct background. All we built was maybe a third of the circumference of the sphere—no top and no bottom."
Professor X’s gleaming laboratory is more sophisticated in terms of the practical lighting, which primarily consisted of Par cans and space lights built into the finished ceiling. Sigel and Myrhe built the sets with hard ceilings to make extensive use of low angles, giving more options in terms of reflections. "Reflections were a very big element in the production design," Nako confirms. "It was something we capitalized on throughout the film, not only in Professor X’s world but also Magneto’s, because we were highlighting [the latter character’s] capabilities over metal. Myhre wanted those materials to cross over into both of these worlds to suggest a sort of similarity between the characters."
During the film’s denouement, a large group of international dignitaries gathers on Ellis Island to discuss world peace and the need for mutant registration. Little do they know, but Magneto has positioned a device on the Statue of Liberty which emits a blinding-white energy blast that will instantly transform them all into mutants, compelling them to end their persecutory ways and allow the Evil Brotherhood to dominate the world.
Standing in for Ellis Island during the shoot was an old school building in Toronto, and some 500 extras portrayed the world leaders. Sigel’s real test was to create a portion of the energy-blast effect practically. "The ’mutant energy’ not only had to wash over 500 people, but also overexpose and burn them out white, so it had to be really bright," he describes. "Because I had a feeling that a lot of this was going to have to be a visual effect, Mike Fink and I talked about the scene, especially in regard to what we would have to do with the lighting in the wide shots."
Sigel, Nako and their crew began by building a massive fixture to represent Magneto’s energy source, consisting of 12 Dinos mounted together on a horizontal, metal truss fitted with a hydraulic system that allowed the entire fixture to be tilted. "We called it the ’X-Light,’" Nako says. "It was about 40 feet across by 12 feet high, and we used very narrow, 1K Par spot globes— VNSPs—to give it extra punch."
"The truss was hung from a construction crane," Sigel continues. "In the ready position at ground level, it was powered up and hidden behind a huge flag—that way, it would always be at full intensity. By using a block-and-tackle system, we were able to pull it up to about 100 feet in the air in about 2 1/2 seconds, creating this wash of intense light crossing over the scene." As the fixture was raised, it was gradually tilted downward, allowing the most intense portion of the illumination to remain fixed on the crowd below. "It was built by Dwight Crane in Toronto specifically for X-Men, " says Sigel. "Bryan Dwight is truly one of the great Canadian resources."
Nako details, "Because the X-Light was moving, the shadows rake across the ground very dramatically. The effect was suggested by that scene in The Truman Show in which the guys in the control room on the moon ’cue the sun’ and it just pops up over the horizon. That’s what Tom had in mind."
Despite the combined power of the dozen Dinos, Sigel had to overcome the exceptional overexposure latitude offered by the 200-ASA SFX film stock. "Going three, four or five stops over isn’t like it used to be—it’s not a big deal," the cameraman admits, noting that the X-Light offered him about five stops of overexposure while shooting at a T4. "Bryan decided it worked so well that it saved us from having to a number of visual effects. It was one of those happy occasions when we were able to exceed expectations."
Another configuration of Dinos—four 36-globe units with VNSPs mounted in a square configuration and hung from a crane—was used for this scene as a moonlight source, creating the base light. "That one was called the ’BFL’—the big f***ing light!" Nako relates with a laugh. "It was mounted to a platform, allowing each of the Dinos to be independently tilted and panned so you could spot/flood them and feather the light out."
Noting that the storytelling success of X-Men will rely on striking the proper balance between its parallel dramatic themes and superhero-style action, Sigel concludes, "There’s the core of this movie, which is played out in the dialogue, and then [there are] action sequences that are the consequences of the dialogue. My guess is that the dramatic aspects will be toned down to make room for the physical-action aspect, to make it ’interesting’ for the younger audience. I think that’s a struggle for Bryan; he took the film on because it had a dramatic center, and I know he won’t want that to be lost."—