For Frankenheimer, helming the chase scenes was as much about storyboarding as shooting from the hip. "I tried to draw it out as much as I could with the storyboard artist, Ted Boontaniquit," the director says. "I've worked with Ted about four times before, so he knows how I shoot. There were hundreds of drawings of what we wanted to do, but once you get to the actual location, you use the drawings as a guide and improvise on them. There was a lot of stuff that I just figured out on the spot. On the other hand, there was a lot of planning. We had tons of camera mounts that had to be prepared for forward, side and three-quarter back angles; we also had a special unit to put them on the cars. There was no process or greenscreen on thi s picture."
The mounts were built by Jean-Pierre Mas, a veteran of French director Luc Besson's films who has collaborated with Fraisse for 10 years. Two-shots of actors conversing in a car, with the camera mounted on the side window or shooting through the front windshield, were shot with the production's Panaflex cameras, just like any other dialogue scene in the film. For all other MOS shots, however, Fraisse used Arri 435 or 35-III cameras. "I used them for the shots that didn't require sound because they are much smaller, lighter and less expensive, so it's easier to put them on a mount. Very often, we put two cameras on a car at the same time: one on the hood or trunk, and one on the side. Because the shots were almost always short, we didn't need a 1,000-foot magazine; a 400-foot magazine was enough."
Cars equipped with camera mounts went barreling through the cobblestoned back streets of Paris, twisting through the winding roads of Nice or careening down a French freeway on the wrong side of the road at rush hour — minus the cinematographer. "The problem with car chases like these," Fraisse laments, "is that most of the time, you are not in the car. You equip the car with cameras and lights and just let it go. When the sky is blue and the sun is bright, it's no problem — you set the f-stop and you know, more or less, that it will be the right one for the whole shot. Sometimes, though, the sun is going in and out of the clouds. In those situations, you set the stop, the car pulls away, the camera is shooting without you, and the sun comes out. You know you're going to be overexposed, but you can't do anything about it."
Even when Fraisse was shooting the cars objectively from a distance, the twisting roads and France's changeable winter light demanded hair-trigger finessing. "Quite often, the cars would go from one street to another, and the light was to tally different from one to the next. I therefore had to change the f-stop while it happened," Fraisse remembers. "Fortunately, the high speeds of the cars helped. When I had a three-stop difference between two streets, I didn't open the iris three stops; I opened it only two stops, so the second street would still look darker than the first, which was better for the ambiance of the movie."
For Frankenheimer, shooting Ronin in France was a welcome return to his adopted country and feature filmmaking. "I've made a lot of movies there: The Train, Grand Prix, The French Connection II, and The Impossible Object [a.k.a. Story of a Love Story]. I also used to live in France, so it's really my second country. That familiarity really paid off on this project; I knew practically every location I wanted to shoot in. I loved doing the picture, and I hope it shows on the screen."
