American Cinematographer - January 2008 - 50

Blood for Oil “Steve warned us they might not be able to completely extinguish the fire once it got started,” he continues. “The derrick had been treated, but it had been sitting in the hot sun for months, so it was as dry as tinder. Once Steve and his guys started the fire, they couldn’t completely extinguish the top part of the derrick, which was still smoldering. They were afraid it might collapse on its own, so we had to keep going and stage the collapse on the same night. As a result, we ended up not shooting a lot of angles we’d planned to get. It was frustrating, and I was very angry at the time, but Paul is happy with the sequence. The matching became an issue, though — is it magic hour or is it night? Is the sky blue or black? How do we make all of these shots fit together? We didn’t have a lot of time to finish that sequence, so we couldn’t be as careful about what we did and when.” Shaking his head at the memory, Elswit adds, “The next night, we had to shoot the reverses of the actors reacting to the big fire, and Paul didn’t want to use any artificial light.” In fact, these reverses were lit with real fire generated by either the powerful flame jet operated by Cremin and his crew or, for certain shots, flamethrower-like devices. Crewmembers were protected from the heat by flame-resistant suits, but the grimaces on the actors’ faces are genuine. “The flames got very, very hot, but that’s how we did it,” says Elswit. “I could have lit those reverses completely artificially, but Paul often doesn’t trust that kind of approach. He said, ‘Oh, no, it will be a lot better if we just set something on fire.’ So when you look at that scene, the color on the actors’ faces is the color of burning gasoline!” For smaller exterior setups involving campfires, Elswit augmented the look of the real flames with two special flicker units Baumgartner fashioned from aluminum, one measuring roughly Above: The normally guarded Plainview opens his heart to Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor), a drifter who claims to be his long-lost brother. Below: Flame bars lend a demonic glow to a scene in which Plainview exacts murderous revenge for a betrayal. in spots near the derrick that were too hot for the operators. Elswit explains, “The fire was real, and it involved the effects team igniting a mixture of diesel fuel and gasoline that was controlled with a huge pump. The only digital effect, which was handled by ILM, involved the initial explosion at the top of the derrick. Otherwise, it was all pyro.” The filmmakers’ original plan was to shoot the burn over two days; the special-effects crew, led by Steve Cremin, would start the fire, extinguish it and then restage the burn on the following night with at least two more camera operators on hand. “For the first night, we had designed several long shots that would take Plainview from his tented outdoor office to the derrick, where he would cut the ropes that would allow it to fall over,” says Elswit. “We were also planning to shoot another angle of Plainview from the top [of the derrick] that would carry him to another camera. That was as far as we were supposed to go on night one before putting out the flames. Then, on the second night, we were going to shoot a number of other angles to suggest different points of view, including a more controlled view of the fire from over the actors’ shoulders. 50 January 2008

American Cinematographer - January 2008

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