American Cinematographer - August 1995 - 49

bounce around on the damn
thing. So Bear Paul and our rigging
grip, Levon Besnelian, built dozens
of amazing platforms for the

you

trimaran out of

steel, aluminum

and timber - so that we could sur¬
round the boat at any time with

space to work. We probably built
too many of them, but we wouldn't
have been able to shoot the picture
without them. It was impossible."
"It

tough," agrees
Reynolds. "But another problem
was that
you could only put the
platforms on or take them off at
dock. So in the morning we would
have to meticulously plan so we
was

could shoot as much coverage as
could from any given mounting

we

configuration before making a
change. We even had two different
trimarans. Depending on the shots
we were
doing, we would some¬
times be rigging two boats simulta¬
neously."
Because the trimaran

was

under sail in most of its scenes,
with its necessary crew of five

tucked inside the hulls looking at
video monitors, it could not be sim¬

ply anchored or even towed, as the
camera was
panning around fore
and aft for 100 degrees. The
trimaran was followed, just out of
camera
range, by what Semler de¬

You can't have that

scribes as a "bloody Spanish Ar¬
mada" of chase and support boats,
which supplied the crew with nec¬

sea.

essary equipment. "Sometimes the
Zodiacs couldn't come in to the
trimaran because it was too

constantly com¬
ing up over the boat, we were all
getting wet and it was too danger¬
ous to have
unprotected lights. I
also couldn't use anything too big,
because we couldn't get the neces¬
sary generator on a fast-enough

rough," Semler says. "So we had
some storage containers designed
for camera equipment built into the
trimaran and dressed to look like

boxes."
Regardless of the inven¬
tive use of platforms used to rig the
trimaran, the lighting situation also
proved relentlessly problematic. "I
had to get some light on these ac¬
tors," Semler says. "That's why I'm
cargo

there, to make them look like Hol¬

lywood movie stars. It doesn't hap¬
pen naturally, so we would have
very large 12' by 12' or 20' by 20'
scrims hauled up into the rigging
so we could silk
everything out -
unless, of course, they got in the
way of the sails or the wind blew

a take, so we needed lights
mounted on the trimaran. But be¬
cause waves were

boat. The trimaran has

for its

own

run an

a
generator
functions, but we had to

umbilical

tor boat

across

to

a

genera¬

which

kept sinking, or
trying to - equipped with our 5K
Honda crystal generators. Fortu¬
nately, Pete Romano had all these
underwater HMI lights, 1200-watt
-

Pars. Waves could hit them and

there

was no

hurt.

They
daylight."

danger of getting
fantastic, straight

were

However,

as one

might

suspect, such lightweight (how¬
ever

safe)

sources

did little to

coun¬

teract the brilliant Hawaiian

them around.
"For

happen

during

fill,

we

first tried to

have

sun

and the blinding Pacific glare. Con¬
firms Semler, "Normally when

big lights on a barge running
along side the trimaran: four 12Ks
and maybe six 4K Pars, punched
through a 12' by 12' scrim hot as
hell. Halfway through one of the

you're creating fill on land in day¬
light - for glamour, for overriding
sun, or for re-creating the sun if
you've lost it - you can always

first

cheat the

rehearsals, I noticed that the

lighting barge had drifted and all
the lights were just pointed out to

sun

in with 12Ks

or

18Ks

during the medium shots and
close-ups. But with three 1200-watt

The trimaran
escapes the
atoll as the

Smokers attack.
While

some

might expect
Waterworld's

epic scope in
anamorphic, the
boat's vertical

shape
convinced

Reynolds and
Semler to
instead opt for
1.85:1. "In order
to frame the

trimaran in its

entirety you
would have to
have these

really awkward
compositions,"
says Reynolds.
The pair briefly
fantasized
about going full
Academy, with

"Kevin Costner

looking heroic
as

all hell in

a

big square
frame," reports
Semler, but

ultimately
reasoned that
most theaters

can't

even

pull

the 1.85 masks
from their

projection
gates. "That
was one more

headache

we

didn't need,"
admits the
director.

August 1995

American

Cinematographer

47
American Cinematographer - August 1995

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