Director Dominic Sena and cinematographer Paul Cameron rev up a rubber-burning remake of Gone in 60 Seconds.


Every 30 seconds, a car is stolen in the United States. Whether the purpose is to execute a VIN-number swap and sale, to send parts to a chop-shop, or to facilitate a joyride, auto theft yields more than $1 million in losses every year. In 1993, California led the nation in car thefts, and 62 percent of them happened in Southern California. No matter what deterrent a car owner might choose strident alarms, steering-wheel locks, engine disablers pros can get past it in less time than it takes for a network television commercial break. The real hotshots can do it in less than 60 seconds.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, whose name has become synonymous with heart-stopping, adrenaline-rush blockbuster films, found it a natural choice to remake H.B. Halicki's 1974 cult classic Gone in 60 Seconds, the centerpiece of which is a 40-minute car chase. However, Bruckheimer is quick to point out that the new version is not simply a remake, but a complete rebuilding of the popular original. "When we decided to go ahead with this project, it was important to everyone that the spirit of the original film stay intact," he says. "But we've enlarged the scope of the story and more clearly defined the characters."

Bruckheimer chose Dominic Sena, a veteran director of commercials and music videos and a co-founder of Propaganda Films, to helm the project. "I would say that I was lovingly a fan of the original film," Sena offers. "Although I don't think that there was much of a story there, it certainly was a fun film." In an ironic twist that is perhaps only possible in Hollywood, one of the first films Sena worked on when he moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s was Halicki's second film, The Junkman. "They said I should see his first movie before I worked with him to get a feel of his style and taste, so I got to see Gone in 60 Seconds as homework," Sena recalls. "Then I went off and worked with him for several weeks on The Junkman. When we were prepping this film, I didn't think anybody knew about the original, but everywhere we went, people knew and loved Halicki's film. Although we pay homage to it, this is a very different movie."

Sena began his career as a cameraman in the early 1980s and has shot more than 100 music videos. He's been honored with a variety of awards for his inventive cinematography, including the Eastman Kodak Certificate of Visual Excellence. In 1985, Sena added directing to his repertoire, working as a director and cinematographer on videos for Sting, David Bowie, Tina Turner, Bryan Adams, Steve Winwood, Fleetwood Mac and Janet Jackson, to name just a few. (He earned a Grammy Award for Best Long-Form Video for Jackson's Rhythm Nation.) Sena added feature films to his long list of accomplishments in 1993, directing the critically acclaimed thriller Kalifornia, which starred David Duchovny, Juliette Lewis and Brad Pitt.

To bring Gone in 60 Seconds to the screen, Sena turned to cinematographer Paul Cameron, a longtime collaborator. Born in Montreal and raised in New York, Cameron took classes in the film department at State University of New York-Purchase. He began his career shooting music videos, segueing rather quickly into commercials, and became one of the early signatories of Dattner & Associates. Sena and Cameron teamed up for the first time to cover the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway. "It was quite ironic," recalls Cameron. "I was walking down the street one day, and I saw a theater marquee for Kalifornia. I went in on a whim and was absolutely blown away. The following day, my agent called and asked if I wanted to go to Norway for few weeks to cover the Olympics with Dominic Sena." That collaboration began a fruitful and productive working relationship that has lasted more than six years.

In addition to videos for David Bowie, Billy Joel, Janet Jackson and Puff Daddy, Cameron has photographed the pilot episodes of Michael Hayes for CBS and Relativity for ABC, as well as Chantilly Lace and Parallel Lives for Showtime. Cameron also won a Silver Clio for his work on a series of Healthnet commercials and an Emmy for NBC's Summer Olympics campaign. In the feature arena, Cameron has photographed the darkly humorous independent film The Last Supper, starring Cameron Diaz and Bill Paxton. "Paul is very passionate about what he does, which is crucial," Sena says. "I get excited about going to work every day, and I want to know that the guy who is shooting for me is as excited as I am when he looks through the viewfinder at a good shot. It's so damn hard to make a movie, you want to know that the person there with you is as passionate as you are."

Sena and Cameron's version of Gone in 60 Seconds revolves around Randall "Memphis" Raines (Nicolas Cage). Formerly one of the best car thieves alive, Raines has given up the trade to lead a straight life. After an ominous visit from an old friend, Memphis finds that he has no choice but to return to what he does best stealing cars in order to save his brother, Kip (Giovanni Ribisi). In one night, Memphis and his crew must pull off the ultimate car heist and steal 50 cars.

The look

"The most important thing was to keep it very real," says Cameron of the film's style. "Because it has to do with the underworld of car thieves in California's Long Beach and San Pedro areas, we began gravitating toward an 'industrial' look a world of sodium-vapor, mercury-halide and fluorescent sources. We tried to stay grounded in that reality, and we utilized a lot of practicals."

"In most films, when you're in a location with a lot of sodium and mercury sources around, you try to take them out," comments Cameron's gaffer, Jeff Murrell (Men in Black, Get Shorty). "But we decided to use those sources to our advantage and even enhance that look with our own lighting. In addition to putting up several sodium and mercury practicals wherever they were required, we created a gel pack that would emulate that look on either HMI or tungsten sources to support the practicals. In testing, we went through dozens of different color combinations before we settled on the ones that were just right. For the sodium-vapor look, we found that Lee's Apricot [#147], combined with Rosco Cal Color 15 or 30 Yellow [4515 or 4530] on tungsten lamps, matched the look identically on film. For the mercury-vapor look, we'd use a combination of 3/4 Plus Green and Cal Color 30 Blue [4230] on tungsten sources. For HMI sources, which were already blue, we'd add the Full Plus Green and Cal Color 15 Blue [4215].

"The nice thing about the Cal Color series is that if you get close to the look you want in testing, you can easily dial it in mathematically," he continues. "If I saw that we'd gotten very close to the sodium look but it was a bit too yellow, I just stepped down a notch in the Cal Color series and didn't have to worry about affecting the other wavelengths of light and biasing the overall color in any unpredictable ways. It's really a very cool system."

The gaffer cited Cameron's bold use of color as one of the film's distinguishing features. "Paul used an extremely wide variety of colors at every location. Our main palette was the sodium and mercury look, but we also used an Old Steel Blue gel (Lee #725) at a power-plant location, which had just the right amount of gray in it to get the metallic look Paul wanted. We also pulled out a Summer Blue (Lee #140) at a house in Malibu for the exteriors, which created a nice, vibrant look that was slightly different. We also turned to some really saturated reds, yellows and greens at various locations. One great tool we used on this show was the Kodak PreView System; it allowed us the freedom to make some spur-of-the-moment color changes on set, and to know exactly what they were going to look like on film before we shot the scene. The PreView System takes out the guesswork."

Sena confirms that the PreView System brought color timing to a new level. "Usually, you're relegated to primitive communication with the lab 'a little warmer,' or 'make it green' but far too often, that's not enough to get the look we're going for, especially in a situation like this, when what we're doing is rather unorthodox. The timer would be looking at the image and saying, 'Wait a minute, those faces are supposed to be green. I should dial it this way and take the color out of it.' With the PreView System, we were able to send them an example of exactly what we wanted that shot to look like: 'Yes, those faces are green; match this print.' Also, when you're mixing so many colors on the set, it's very easy for your eye to get biased one way or the other, and to misjudge how a particular area is going to look on film. Using the prints pretty much eliminates the surprises in dailies."

Because most of the picture unfolds in garages and warehouses ("places we've all seen a million times before," Sena says), the director decided to lend the locations a unique look by playing with color. "One of the first things I latched onto was a real hard use of color," he notes. "A lot of people have been doing a desaturated look recently, and I thought it would be interesting to go against the stream and see what we could do with some really saturated colors. I wanted to get in there and play with fluorescents and mercury vapors let this room be yellow, the room in the background be green, and the lights outside be orange instead of the usual blue! I started researching that kind of look, and any time I found an image in a magazine, I'd save it. I then went to Paul and said, 'Here, this is my idea, what do you think?' He replied, 'Yeah, let's do it.'"

After testing colors quite a bit in preproduction, Sena and Cameron chose to limit the film's overall color palette primarily to sodium-yellow and mercury-blue, and let the story's individual locations dictate more saturated accents. In the bar owned by Sara "Sway" Wayland (Angelina Jolie), that accent choice was a deeply saturated blue, and in Kip's house, the choice was a vivid primary red.


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