"That type of style wouldn’t be correct for every movie, but it was in this case because it feels different. In a close-up with an 18mm lens, even if the actor moves just a few inches, the effect is very different than if you’re using a 50mm lens. There is a magnification to the change.
"It’s funny, the film is in 1.85:1, but it feels wider than that because of the use of wide lenses. You can see a lot more, and not only in terms of depth. For instance, if you have a close-up, you see a lot more of the background than you usually would. In this film, there are several scenes set in train cars. If we were on a 50mm doing our close-ups, the audience wouldn’t see much of the car. With the 18mm, they can, which adds to the apparent scope of the film."
Shooting with his preferred Arriflex cameras—both 435s and 535Bs—Ballhaus relied heavily on the three Zeiss/Arri Variable Prime lenses throughout the shoot, particularly the 16-30mm VP1 unit. "We used them on almost every shot," he reports. "You can work very quickly with them because if you want to go a little wider or tighter, you can just adjust them. Also, the Variable Primes are as good as standard lenses, if not better."
Giddyap!
Wild Wild West began shooting in late April of 1998. Following stage work at Sony Studios in Culver City and night exteriors at the Disney Ranch outside of Los Angeles, the production spent several weeks doing day exteriors in Santa Fe, New Mexico, before finishing up at Warner Bros. in Burbank. Ballhaus recalls, "During the last segment of the shoot, the effects work was very complex, so we were only doing three or four shots a day."
The film’s second unit—including cinematographer David M. Dunlap—also traveled to Pierce, Idaho to shoot the film’s opening sequences. Fresh off The Matrix, cameraman Bill Pope added his expertise as well.
Bo Welch’s sets, including Loveless’s bordello-style bedroom, the grimy interiors of the Tarantula walking machine, the interior and exterior of Fat Can Candy’s Saloon, and James West’s railroad car, reflect the film’s genre-blending tone, and were alternately fashioned with complex patterns, deep shadows, rich colors and dark-wood textures. To create separation between the actors and their surroundings, Ballhaus kept the backgrounds "light, but not so prominent that they might distract the viewer’s eye from the actors and the action. Many of our scenes are set at night, and we kept those backgrounds dark; while you can see detail, it’s not jumping out at you. However, the sets sometimes really soaked up the light—inside West’s train car, for example, which had a lot of dark wood and dark green curtains—so we had to add much more light than is apparent. We generally staged scenes so they were sidelit, which added separation, and added backlight when possible."
However, gaffer Jim Tynes stresses that side and backlight options were severely limited due to Sonnenfeld’s penchant for wide-angle lenses. "That forced us to come around toward the camera, but that kind of lighting is right for comedy," says Tynes, who began his working relationship with Ballhaus on the 1988 film Baja Oklahoma after making a lasting impression during a cold-call interview.
Ballhaus’s overall lighting approach traditionally reflected both West’s period setting and the Western genre, as fire effects motivated most of the illumination. "One thing I love about period movies is that the lighting—candles, gaslight or fires—is in constant motion," the cameraman explains, recalling his work on The Age of Innocence and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. "That type of illumination gives the image a much more emotional feeling than if the light is fixed."
As he had done on Men in Black, Bo Welch worked to integrate practical lighting into West’s elaborate sets. "Bo is one of the best production designers I’ve worked with," attests Ballhaus, who had recently collaborated with Welch on the satire Primary Colors. "His sets were fantastic. For the grand ballroom of Dr. Loveless’s mansion, Bo designed eight of these amazing, internally lit translucent columns and a huge fireplace. Those sources gave us a starting point from which to work."
Tynes and his crew built the electrical fixtures, while Welch’s department constructed the shells from plastics resembling stained glass and featuring a spiderweb motif. "Bo wanted the column lights to be fairly warm, so the plastics were rather orange, which I liked," Ballhaus details. "Barry wanted them to be a bit cooler, though, so we gelled the fluorescent tubes inside with 1/2 CTB."
The resulting light from the columns was in the 1500°K to 1800°K range, but after it mixed with the cooler ambiance from above, "any light hitting the actors was closer to 2300°K," Tynes says. "The base light was pretty liberal since this was a comedy, and we always had a lot of it coming in from the top. However, the toplight was always directional, so it never had that flat, ’lit by fluorescents’ look."
The gaffer adds, "The columns were a big scenic element, and we used them to motivate light whenever we could. Like the TV series did, Wild Wild West features a lot of things that could not have existed in the given time period. You can find fluorescent-lit columns like these in any modern hotel or mansion, but back in the day, they would have had to use gaslight. To give the columns a subtle flickering effect, our dimmer-board operator, Cricket Sloat, designed a series of random chases for the entire setup."
Barroom Blast
Fat Can Candy’s Saloon, where West and Gordon encounter the alluring Rita Escobar (Salma Hayek), was constructed on Stage 27 at Sony Studios as a practical structure. This allowed the filmmakers to shoot both interiors and exteriors on a single site, and to block the action realistically, since characters could move freely in and out of the three-story-tall watering hole. "There was too much interaction between the inside and the outside of the saloon to have the interior and exterior separated," Ballhaus says. "Also, the scenes that occur there are all set at night, which would have required us to shoot many more night exteriors, which are more difficult to control. For these reasons, it was much easier to build the entire structure on stage.
"I normally try to keep my night exteriors on the cool side, but Barry didn’t like that too much," Ballhaus notes. "He prefers the color temperatures to be more even, and he generally doesn’t like colored light. There was only perhaps 500°K difference between the interior and exterior [of the saloon], while I would usually have about 1500°K of difference between them. But it worked just fine."
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