The area's topography limited available daylight to a mere four hours. Shooting the scene additionally required actors Penn and Lopez along with various crew members to be dangled along the cliff face on bungee cords.
Though this region was favored by the director, Richardson found it to be rather problematic from a cinematographic standpoint. He recalls, "The sun would appear in a valley to the east of a very high cliff, and did not rise over [the precipice] until almost 10:50 a.m., so it wouldn't hit the rocks below. Then the sun would go behind the mountain and put the valley in shadow again at around 3:20 p.m. But we were able to get certain shots before 9 a.m. by moving to an another area which got morning light, [a half-mile from the principal location]."
The final days of production were spent on a night scene that began in the McKenna home, which was situated on the edge of a sheer rock face and extended into the ravine area where Bobby and Grace have their standoff the following morning. Richardson's design for the nocturnal ambiance was "almost hallucinatory in visual style in that it would become difficult to discern between day and night. I pumped extraordinarily harsh white light into the room through the windows during the final night confrontation between Grace, Bobby and Jake. By pushing the [5298] one to two stops, I required very little light to get to that point. Once we exited the house, the atmosphere would be hot and burning in places which made no sense. When we hit the desert, I intended to use large lighting rigs that would explode the flat landscape to almost five stops over in the foreground, and then let the background slide off into deep black. I was attempting to create a pseudo-5239 effect in terms of contrast, knowing that I could maintain the color rendering you'd get from the 98 if we used the ENR process later."
In offering advice to other directors of photography interested in employing 5239 on a project, Richardson notes that the cross-processing procedure requires a separate bath that includes formaldehyde. Due to the hazards entailed with the disposal of this toxic chemical, its use is restricted by California state regulations and the Environmental Protection Agency. Processing of the stock was therefore handled out of state.
Ultimately, Richardson was unable to complete the final photography on U-Turn due to a prior commitment to director Barry Levinson's project Wag the Dog. When shooting resumed in the desert outside of Los Angeles after the winter holidays, cinematographic chores were assumed by Jeff Kimball. Richardson was also unavailable to supervise the timing process after going on location in Montana to shoot The Horse Whisperer for director Robert Redford. Although he said that he would have a chance to make a quick pass at U-Turn upon completion of this latest project, the cinematographer had to rely primarily upon the assistance of Bob Kaiser, head timer of Technicolor Los Angeles, and associate producer Bill Brown. Also of concern to Richardson is the longevity of the camera negative itself, since the reversal stock was not designed with archival concerns in mind. Brown explains, "5239 was designed for VNF processing, which has formaldehyde in the stabilization bath, and because we are cross-processing it and treating it as a normal negative, it's going through the ENC process, which doesn't have any formaldehyde. The stabilization of the negative is therefore a concern. To help alleviate this problem, we processed the footage normally [as neg] and then subsequently fixed it in formaldehyde. But the scary thing about it is that there isn't any solid knowledge about what will happen to this stock over the long term.
"We did a series of tests, because the filmmakers were worried about a quick fade 24 to 48 hours after it was shot and developed and found that the negative was probably within a couple of points [of their original intent]. But we're more concerned about what will happen 15 years down the road. I'll feel a lot better when we have IPs and YCM separations of this footage."
Kaiser, who is timing 5239 for the first time, adds, "It's hard to control; it puts us at a really high scale that most laboratories probably couldn't reach. We've noticed a difference between where it printed when they were shooting, and where it is now [in early August], after it's all been cut and we're starting to time it. The magenta lights were in the 40s, and now they're in the 70s."
Regardless of these technical hurdles, Stone and Richardson both feel that they achieved their goals for the picture. Notes the director, "In spite of all the difficulties we went through at the beginning of the shoot, primarily the concerns regarding this reversal stock, Mike Medavoy at Phoenix Pictures really got behind us, and Technicolor was wonderful in working out the problems with our answer print. At the end of the day, I can say that I'm pleased with the way that U-Turn turned out."
