What led you to hire Nicola Pecorini as your director of photography?
Gilliam: I kept hearing good things about him, and then he sent me a show reel that was really funny and wonderful. Nicola's only got one good eye, and the show reel made all kinds of jokes about him being a one-eyed cameraman. I thought that anyone with that kind of intelligence and sense of humor had to be interesting, so we met, and we got along very well. I also saw a film he had shot called Rhinocerous Hunting in Budapest [see Sundance Film Festival coverage in AC April '97], which was very interesting even though it was made for practically nothing. I thought to myself, 'We're making a dangerous film, and I'm supposed to be pretending to be a young filmmaker again, going out and taking chances, so why not?
What kind of working relationship did you have on the set?
Gilliam: I worked very closely with both Nicola and first assistant director Phil Patterson, who had been a second assistant on Twelve Monkeys. They're both strong, passionate people who really helped me to bring it all together. We planned certain things, such as different looks that would correspond to different drugs, but a lot of it ended up being very instinctive.
Nicola is very smart, and he's had some incredible experiences working with people like Vittorio Storaro [ASC, AIC]. He's very fast on the floor, and he used these special Italian lights that Storaro's longtime gaffer [Pippo Cafolla] has built. They're very light and easy to deploy, and they go through a dimmer board, so we could mix them in various combinations and bring them up and down in the middle of a shot. There are a lot of shifting perceptions in the film, so the lights were shifting along with everything else.
I'm assuming that you shot quite often with your dearly beloved wide lenses.
Gilliam: Oh, absolutely! I think our standard lens was a 16mm, and we also used the 10mm and 14mm. Every now and then, of course, we'd do a long-lens shot with a 25mm! [Laughs.] I think I went wider on this show than I've ever done before; my standard lens used to be an 18mm. Hopefully, though, the wide-angle shots in the film won't look too extreme you don't want the whole thing to become just a freak show. The distances between the characters and the camera became vital, because I didn't want things to get too funny-looking.
You were working with the Super 35 format for the first time. Did you see any particular advantages or shortcomings to that choice?
Gilliam: Actually, I really enjoyed it. Because of all the scenes that take place in cars and in the desert, I felt that we needed to go widescreen. On a lot of my past films, I've been really keen on the use of verticality placing people at the bottom of these great buildings, and so on but Vegas wasn't like that. Things aren't very permanent or steady in Las Vegas, and we tried to capture that in the camerawork. This is probably the most dutched film ever made; I don't think there's a single shot where the horizon is straight, and we sometimes cut from one dutch angle to another in the same shot just to make you feel as if the ground is constantly shifting beneath the characters.
Did you try to adopt the tenets of Gonzo journalism in your working methods on the film?
Gilliam: I suppose we did in the sense that we never looked back we were like sharks, always moving forward, and no matter what happened, we couldn't go back and do things over again. I also shot with a looser frame than I usually use, because I wanted to give the actors some room when they were getting a bit out of control. Johnny Depp is an incredibly brilliant physical actor, and you want to see more of his body when he's moving: a simple head shot won't suffice. Even our close-ups are not from chin to forehead they're almost mid-torso shots.
How did you handle the presentation of scenes in which the characters were indulging themselves with various chemical substances?
Gilliam: We started off with a bunch of theories about how to present those scenes, but we wound up doing a lot of it very instinctively. We didn't really distort too much in a lot of the drug scenes; many of them are surprisingly straightforward, but that's what's so disturbing about them. When we had to get weird we did, of course. We've done some things in post with points of view such as printing four frames and then dropping four to give things a sort of jitter.
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