Bi-Coastal Creature
After wrapping in Manhattan, the filmmakers traveled to the Hawaiian island of Oahu (to shoot G's romp through Central America) and then returned to Los Angeles. "We started our L.A. filming in the downtown area, which stood in for Manhattan," Steiger says. "That was five weeks, and then we moved into an industrial zone just east of there for a sequence set at the Chernobyl reactor site, which is where our story finds Matthew Broderick's scientist character." From there, Godzilla settled into the stages at Sony Studios, where key grip Tony Marra and his crew had already begun rigging sets, communicating with Steiger and Grce by phone and fax. "We had three major stages," Steiger remembers. "By the time we got there, Tony had everything ready so we could just start shooting."
The five-week shoot in downtown L.A. primarily consisted of a "lengthy chase sequence in which our heroes follow Godzilla through Manhattan and finally discover the tunnel under the city, which leads them right into the nest in Madison Square Garden," Steiger explains. "This is a 30-minute section of the film and we spent nearly half of our New York schedule on it, getting all of the landmarks. Then we faked what we could in Los Angeles, which was much easier to do."
The general street lighting approach in Los Angeles was similar to what had been done in New York. Submits key grip Tony Marra, whose credits include The Rapture, Kansas City, One Fine Day and the engineering of the stunning Titan crane shot which opens Robert Altman's The Player, "Jimmy and I never crowded the frame too much. There was some talk about digitally removing fixtures in post, since most everything was a visual effects shot, but we didn't rely on that too much. But sometimes Roland would say, 'That whole side of the shot is going to be matted out. You can put a truck in there if you want to.' That really made things easy. Otherwise, we mainly hid our Maxis behind cars, garbage bins and wreckage. The grip crew would then go in and place diffusion, gels and flags at every lighting point. Like Jimmy, I had a grid map that detailed all of the lighting, on the ground and on the rooftops."
In order to photograph G's point of view as he chases a hapless cab, Marra constructed a unique car rig consisting of a Shotmaker truck and an Enlouva III crane. He recounts, "Normally, when you do camera car stuff with an arm, the picture car is following you and you're moving the arm around to get nice moving shots. But to get Godzilla's POV, we had to chase the cab while swooping up and down from 26' up. So the arm had to work off the front end of the Shotmaker, with me and a couple of my dolly grips aboard to operate the crane up and down and side to side while we barreled down the street. We timed this while zooming in and out on the camera to exaggerate the height."
The Shotmaker's center of gravity was repositioned between the axles in order to allow for this kind of movement. The Enlouva was then triangulated off with static lines to prevent it from straying too low or too far to either side. "That was important because we were going about 35 miles per hour down the street, slaloming around other cars and burning wreckage," he says. "We also had the street wet down, so I was pretty worried about either spinning sideways or even catching the camera on something, which would have ripped the arm off. Fortunately, we didn't have any problems."
The key grip also utilized some special bazookas that he'd designed for car rigs while working on the TV series Viper. "They were great for working in the cab," Marra says. "They didn't take up any room like a set of sticks or triangulated speed rail would. They're just a vertical posts with leveling heads."
Coming into play during the chase was G's "power breath" blasts of radioactive halitosis that are both destructive and lethal. "Godzilla doesn't exactly breathe fire," Steiger clarifies, "so it's more of a 'shock-wave' effect. To suggest it visually, we used Ritter fans and several other powerful wind machines. We then added a flickering orange lighting effect and Lightning Strikes units to create this orange storm which suggested the blast's power. We'd then backlight the rain or smoke cool blue and balance it to the power-breath effects, which added contrast and heightened the impact.
"There are floor effects in virtually every shot where Godzilla is even around flame effects, shaking effects, rubble falling, things like that. This went for the lighting as well. We always had Lighting Strikes units or flickering fire effects in the frame to add life. With the Xenon beams, these became our main elements, creating a kind of consistent visual style throughout our shoots in New York, Los Angeles and on stage at Sony. That helps hold the film together visually. We also discussed this with our production designer, Oliver Scholl, and set decorator, Victor Zolfo. They added elements to the set that we could either set on fire or hide something behind. In preproduction, we would pore over Oliver's design renderings and scale models of the sets and look for these things."
"We built a lot of lighting into the sets," Grce says. "We'd put uplights under gratings in the floor, nook lights hidden in various places, fluorescents built into the hallways, and circular lights in the ceiling all running on dimmer boards so we could add flicker and create different moods. We also had movable glass brick walls which we could roll into position and light through if we needed something from the side."
Steiger adds, "Metallic surfaces, such as brushed aluminum columns, were also helpful. We could move them in to give us a reflection, which enabled us to cast an actor in silhouette," Steiger says. "On any given setup, Jim and I would ask, 'Where do we put the gimmick?' Where could we hide a Lightning Strikes unit? Or a special reflection? Or a fluorescent tube? Our smoke and rain effects helped us in that regard, because they can diffuse things to a point where you can have very bright fixtures right in the frame, creating interesting flares and glows."
Nesting in the Darkness
Built on Sony's Stage 30 (where Esther Williams shot many of her films during the lot's MGM days), the Madison Square Garden set was "largely a cheat," Steiger admits with smile. "The outside oval consisting of the seats and such was foreshortened, with one side destroyed by Godzilla's tunneling and the other intact. But because they built the set from wall to wall, the question became, 'How do we light it?' This portion of the film is set at night and it's very dark inside, so we went largely with our practicals. We again used a lot of Xenon flashlights, carried by our characters, as well as controlled electrical discharge flashes, and fire effects.
"There was a big portion of the Garden that Anna Foerster and the model crew was going to do with miniatures, but we ended up using the stage much more than was planned because we kept the lighting dark and suggestive. By placing our wreckage properly, using some fire and electrical effects staggered in the distance while concealing things with smoke, we could suggest that the set was much bigger than it really was. That allowed us to do some much wider shots than planned, which made the models less important to that sequence."
Adding to this plan, Grce set up clusters of Par cans coming down from the ceiling to create pools of light and accent specific points. "We didn't have many lamps up there," he says, "and there was virtually no fill except from the bounce we got from the Pars and Xenons." This spotty illumination and the heavy smoke also helped the mechanical effects crew deal with G's relatively small offspring, which were generally backlit and textured with carefully placed highlights.
"We had basically used the same lighting strategy on the Penn Station cavern set within Stage 27," Steiger relates. "In one setup, we shot it from the remains of a subway platform at one end, looking into this great dark space. At the other end, we placed a single flickering orange lamp and a flame bar, which gives the eye something to focus on and suggests much more than is really there. We never thought we would shoot the tunnel set from that angle. We had originally intended to only shoot from where we placed the flame bar, but the illusion worked."
Add Grce, "For budgetary reasons, the tunnel set hadn't even been built the way it was supposed to be. It was scaled down and only finished to a certain extent on the far side and the walls. But Tony Marra and his crew blacked all of that out and we just sketched the rest in, primarily with fire lighting effects as our key and Xenon beams adding some detail. That one flame bar at the end was the only real fire. In fact, we used very little real fire on the show."
Grce notes that effective faux flames were done with lamps fronted with a double layer of Rosco golden amber gel and running on either Magic Gadget flicker generators or programs created by dimmer board operator Dave Slodki.
To create a toplight above the subway platform, a 6' x 10' softbox was suspended directly over the actors. This fixture was gelled with CTB, while twin 4' x 4' boxes of flickering orange were hung on either side, slightly in front. A lone fluorescent tube crackled behind them in the twisted wreckage. "We had also rigged up some Dinos with heavy diffusion to create a backlight on them," Grce says, "but we switched them off in the end. The smoke picked up so much light that it was just too bright; instead of seeing a black void, we had this white mass. Knowing when to turn certain lamps off is half of lighting." ("Even if you went to great expense and had to fight with the unit production manager to get them!" Steiger jokes.)
Marra observes, "The subway platform was literally 55' in the air, and there was no room up there for any kind of cranes or scaffolding for a camera platform. The solution was to do a lot of Steadicam work up there; down in the cavern, we placed the technocrane on one 6' by 6' square area and used the telescoping arm to get a lot of moving shots without laying track.
"The camera was constantly moving on this show, and we used everything we could think of to keep it moving. On the beach in Hawaii, for instance, we used the Akela crane for a reveal shot that's an important story point. Roland had wanted a walk-and-talk between a military guy and Matthew Broderick as the scientist is being told what's going on. It was a long shot and we used the Akela to start just in front of the two actors as they walked, move 180 degrees around them, establish this destroyed village in front of them, and then rise up 80' into the air to reveal that they had been walking in Godzilla's footprint. We then see that the next footprint is where the village used to be. There's no cut, and it's a great shot."
Marra credits Drinon, rigging key grip Matt Moles, best boy grip Mike Fahey and the rest of his crew with helping the L.A. portion of the show to run smoothly.
After 104 shooting days, Godzilla finally wrapped production in the fall of 1997, though the miniature and digital visual effects units continued working through April of 1998. Steiger served as an advisor throughout the post process, which helped to successfully blend his photography with the CG elements and ensure that the digital Godzilla's virtual lighting was true to its sources. "This was perhaps the most fun I've had on a movie," Steiger says with a laugh. "It's strange to be telling all of these stories about the film, because Roland and Dean have been very protective of the script and of what the new Godzilla looks like but I'm sure it's all on the Internet by now anyway!"
The cinematographer's next project will be the comedy Bowfinger's Big Thing, directed by Frank Oz, and starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy.
