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While the lighting approach changes dramatically throughout the picture, Nicolas Cage is bathed in a fairly subtle but noticeable golden glow in many scenes. The star was "lit heroically quite often," Tattersall acknowledges. The difference between the lighting of Cage and other principals is especially noticeable in a scene where John Cusack's Federal Marshal Larkin interrupts Cage as the latter confronts the drug-runners behind the hijacking.
This encounter ensues in a hangar-type building (one of the interiors at the Salt Flats location) that was shot during the height of the midday sun. In the scene, Cage's golden aura is contrasted with Cusack's cold, white illumination, even though the two are but a few feet apart. According to Tattersall, both looks were partially motivated by actual lighting conditions. "Part of the ceiling of this old structure was dirty, gold-colored, corrugated, semi-translucent plastic, which you can see in a shot or two," the cinematographer explains. "Simon liked that, but he wanted some variation, so during one lunch break, when no one was around, he took a shotgun and blew some holes in another section of the ceiling, which was opaque. That gave us some fantastic beams of white light coursing through the dark, dusty interior; we called them 'God's Beams.' We produced these beams naturally for a lot of the sequence, but two-thirds of the way through shooting we lost the sun and had to duplicate the look with Xenons."
After the plane leaves the Salt Flats, it is pursued by helicopters through Bryce Canyon before soaring to a climactic collision with the Sands Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. Notes Tattersall, "The pace of the film picks up dramatically and then becomes relentless. For the Vegas scenes, the restrained color schemes were dropped; we pulled every 'party color' gel out of the truck, and made a lot of the lights flicker, because that's the look of Vegas, with all the crazy blinking neon.
"The plane descends into Vegas in the middle of a rich reddish-orange sunset, and we wet down the Strip to get the maximum reflections from the neon lights. We went from this sedate, carefully controlled look to complete chaos with light. The contrast from the more sedate style of the film to that point makes the Vegas section seem even crazier."
What follows is one of the more extensive multi-camera action scenes ever filmed: a 15-camera setup, including six operated Panavision cameras, two or three Arri 3's, four Eyemos in crash boxes, one remote head, one crane and two tracking units. The lenses ranged from 28mm to 180mm (see diagram). Recounts Tattersall, "We even had an Eyemo in the cockpit, and we got a great shot with it. Dream Quest had been shooting plates with a VistaVision camera (see sidebar), and Simon said, 'Let's use that too.' So one of the VistaVision shots made the cut as well."
The Eyemos were not the only cameras situated in dangerous spots, however. One Arri 3 placed directly in the oncoming plane's path was on a skateboard dolly pulled with ropes by a grip, who was 70 feet away watching a video feed. Another camera quite close to the action was placed on a hothead to allow it to pan with the moving plane. All of the cameras — except for the Eyemos — were wired to video assists. "It was wild," Tattersall attests. "We had 150 screaming extras and 40 stunt people, some of whom were quite close to the fast-moving plane. We didn't lose a single camera, though."
A full-scale mockup of the front of the hotel was constructed in the parking lot of the actual Sands, along with a large reflecting pool which was exploited to enhance the lighting of the scene. "We wanted these scenes, like everything we did in Vegas, to be full of light," the cinematographer says. "The pool helped to double the multitude of lights in the scene. It also helped hide the pulley system that pulled the plane into the front of the hotel."
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