American Cinematographer - September 2008 - 20

Petit confronted the real possibility of a terrible death before stepping onto the high wire 1,350' above street level. His experience and showmanship helped him overcome his fear, and he eventually traversed the wire eight times. costs and avoid frequent mag changes, the filmmakers opted to shoot on highdefinition (HD) video instead of film. For their first interview at Petit’s farm in the Catskills, they brought a Panasonic VariCam AJ-HDC27H, a Pro35 adapter and 35mm film lenses; the plan was to mount the camera on a tripod for a conventional interview setup. That plan died when it became evident that Petit simply couldn’t sit still — he was constantly popping out of his chair to grab props and enact what he was discussing. When asked to stay put, he fizzled. “Philippe is always performing, and we wanted to give him as much flexibility as possible so he could be himself,” says Martinovic, who soon opted to shoot handheld with a Canon HJ21x7.5 Cine Style zoom lens. “We just lit the space and let Philippe walk anywhere he wished and do his magic.” To light Petit’s interview in a 20 September 2008 small barn, “we lit through windows using 1.2K HMIs gelled with No-Color Straw, and the fill was provided by a diffused 4-bank Kino Flo,” continues the cinematographer. The film’s simpler sitdown interviews were lit with a book light comprising a 1.2K HMI through a layer of gridcloth, as well as a background light to help separate the subject from his or her surroundings.) This HD footage, recorded at standard 720/24p, “is the present-tense texture in the film,” explains Marsh. The past appears in archival footage, most of which was shot on 16mm reversal stock. Fortunately, both Petit and the Port Authority of New York thoroughly documented their projects in the 1970s; the images of the World Trade Center’s construction were critical in establishing the optimistic tone of Man on Wire. “It’s not about the towers coming down; it’s about the towers going up,” says Marsh. But the Port Authority’s archive was housed in the World Trade Center, and all originals were destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001. Nonetheless, Marsh managed to piece together copies from other sources, “mostly low-rent Betacam versions.” In contrast to these faded, lowresolution images, Petit’s 16mm archive was pristine. “We managed to get our hands on the negative, so that footage is immaculate,” says Marsh. Petit had hired film crews to shoot his high-wire acts in Sydney and Paris, and another team had begun filming the preparatory stages of the New York project. “It looks like a Truffaut film,” says Marsh. “The sun is shining, the birds are twittering, and they’re capering in the French countryside. It’s this soft, lovely center of a film that switches timelines a lot.” The interviews and archival material could take the story only so far, however. No footage existed of Petit and company sneaking around the guards, hauling up their gear, or stringing the wire in the middle of the night. “From the beginning,” says Martinovic, “we approached these [re-enactments] as a narrative film.” After completing the interviews, production stopped so Marsh could create a script and shot list. “Then we analyzed the storyline by defining the genre for each segment and finding the most efficient way to represent it,” says Martinovic. Multiple genres were referenced, including heist films and fairytales. “For each genre, we developed a visual language that could enhance the storyline,” says Martinovic. Though diverse in tone, the re-enactments were visually unified by format, black-andwhite Super 16mm. “We were thinking about desaturated color,” says Martinovic, “but wound up using black-andwhite just to simplify things. The archival material was on so many different formats we thought it would be good to go with simple, graphic imagery.” Using an Arri 16SR-3 with Zeiss Super Speed primes, and often working with a T1.3 aperture, Martinovic shot on Eastman Double-X 200T 7222. His chief concern was grain. “Black-and-white

American Cinematographer - September 2008

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