American Cinematographer - December 1988 - 66

/

Overcranked
effects shot

featuring double
explosion, shot live
action with the

miniature

building

and radio

con¬

trolled

helicopter.

movies in the

print stage
quite a com¬

answer

and sometimes it's
edown later to
lease

see

that 35mm

re¬

print look."

Some of the most suspen¬
seful moments in Die Hard involve

vertiginous sequences in an eleva¬
tor

shaft. Most of these

were

pro¬
visual effects shots for

duced

as

several

reasons.

"Just looking down the el¬
shaft

provided an incredible
lighting problem, and beyond that
elevators are controlled by codes
and you certainly can't explode
anything in a real elevator shaft,"
evator

Edlund reminded. "The fact is that
lot of

shot the

explosion in the tunnel as a
separate piece. Actually, we shot a
couple of different explosions, then
had to composite them together in
order to get the final push that
knocks Bruce out and kicks out the
windows

-

which is

a

climactic

point in the movie. What we wound
up with is a composited piece with
Bruce in the foreground shot
against a blue screen as he scram¬
bles out of the way, and the two
explosions matted into the tunnel.
It was a lot more complicated than it
appears to be, which is sometimes
the

case

in effects work. I think it is

damage had to be done to
the building in the course of the
story, but none of it could actually
be done to the building. We were
called upon do do all of that. The
elevator shaft we wound up build¬
ing was a forced perspective minia¬
ture about 20 feet high. It was built

really Thaine who deserves the big

like

trous

a

a

funnel,

so

that it

was narrow

at the bottom and wide at the

top. It

provided a good way to avoid hav¬
ing to build a 40-foot tall tube in
order to

shoot the elevator in

miniature.

"This also provided some
problems for Morris, our pyro mas¬
ter, because the explosion in the
shaft has to start small and get larg¬
er until it fills the frame. The
explo¬
sion had to be shot separately. First
shot a plate of the forced per¬
spective miniature with the lights

we

on;

64

turned off all the lights and

era, we

then, without moving the cam¬

American

Cinematographer

hand for this, because he was able

explosions in miniature in
fairly small size that look really
big and amazing." Neil shot this
sequence by ramping down the
camera
speed in order to enhance
the speed of the oncoming disas¬
to create
a

fireball.

grabber
is a sequence in which Willis tries to
climb down to

a

ventilation shaft

which opens into the elevator shaft.
He falls and, unable to grasp hold
of the vent he was attempting to

reach, plunges toward certain
onto a

of that

saves

himself by

hanging

shaft farther down. "Most
was

think if

we

had done it

done live," Edlund

minia¬

as a

ture it would have carried

more

depth and might have looked more
precarious, but the way Bruce play¬
ed the scene and the way John di¬
rected him, I think, pretty much
got the max from it. It was really a
gut-wrenching sequence."
Yet another

scene

guaran¬

teed to induce

acrophobia begins as
a
close-up aiming down at the prin¬
cipal villain, played by Alan Rick¬
man, who is clinging to the edge of
the skyscraper roof and trying to
aim his gun at Willis. Then he loses
his grasp and falls away from the
camera, into a terrifying void back¬
grounded by the street action hun¬
dreds of feet below. Slow motion

photography stretches the sus¬
pense of the moment to the limit. It
is reminiscent of the celebrated
scene

made

by John Fulton, ASC,

for the Alfred Hitchcock

Another audience

death. He

perspective painting or actually
building forced perspective sets. I

picture

Saboteur, in which Norman Lloyd
falls from the torch of the Statue of

Liberty.
"Our villain

actually fell
huge blue back¬
ing on a stage at Fox," Edlund re¬
vealed. "It was a pretty large setup
with a lot of nine-lights illuminat¬
ing the backing. Bill used a followabout 20 feet into

a

focus device which lets you pan a
camera on the actor and
keep

recalled. "Neil, Boates and I were

video

advising John in ways that we felt
would give him the kind of verve

him lined up in the crosshairs, and
it is calibrated to the focus mecha¬

the shot needed

nism in the

December 1988

by using

a

forced

taking lens. Rickman
American Cinematographer - December 1988

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