American Cinematographer - December 1996 - 46
all of the equipment every time. I
also had to be careful not to over¬
whelm the existing practical fix¬
tures, which would pose a prob¬
lem for any cinematographer
working there."
Ian Kincaid had worked
three
previous films in Las Ve¬
including Casino (see AC Nov.
'95.) "It's always difficult to film
on
gas,
there, but the Luxor was very coop¬
erative," the gaffer says. "It's a very
open,
spread-out space and they
gaming areas avail¬
made several
able to
us.
"We knew
we
weren't go¬
ing to have the kind of control
had
we
Casino [at the
Riviera],
where we brought in two trucks'
worth of lighting, installed it in
ceiling rigs, set up dimmer boards
on
in a fake slot machine and ran
cable. Here, we had to move every¬
thing back out each night. And
Above: On
"l
location at the
Luxor.
Says
Kincaid, "We had
very low ceilings
in there. Our
basic
plan in
wider shots
was
to lock in the
shot and run
sources
-
or
use
Leikos to
pick up
elements of the
ceilings."
Right: A pair of
freedom fighters
(Tom Jones and
Annette
Bening)
confront the
Martians. "The
Young Electric
Sign Company is
the lighting
graveyard,"
enthuses the
gaffer, "full of old
neon
collected
from all
art
over.
we
The
department
handled all of the
electrical work
Invading Vegas
background in wide
As the Martians arrive in
shots. But
Earth's skies, their saucers hover
over such
important cities as
Washington D.C., Paris and... Las
Vegas - which makes perfect
sense, given Mars Attacks' decid¬
edly bent perspective. Yet while
the gambling capital may superfi¬
cially seem to be "ready made" for
the pictures' colorfully cracked aes¬
thetic, this portion of the shoot was
complicated from the beginning.
Recalls Wynn Thomas, "People
usually think there isn't so much
for the production designer to do
on a location, but the job in that
situation is to tie the elements you
find together with the rest of the
picture. You're not just choosing
locations and things at random,
and there has to be a process that
allows you to do that.
"We did a lot of scouting
in Vegas and were much more
because
because there is action
you're go¬
ing to have to do that dictates those
choices. You have to look at how
the actors are going to move, give
the
plan some shape and then pre¬
the space.
"We were going to shoot
pare
at Caesar's
Palace, but
we
weren't
able to
get in there. And the tonal¬
ity of Caesar's is very different
from the Luxor, which is where
we
ended up. I wasn't able to make
any color decisions until we knew
where we were going to be, and
there were a lot of elements im¬
were
death-ray
ironic, because people think Vegas
from 10 o'clock onwards. You have
is the kind of
place where
you can
just turn the
camera on
and it'll
to be out by seven or eight in the
morning, and you have to clear out
then had to
connect them on
cues
at the last
minute to
critical about
'blasters.
44
in
American
our
some
Cinematographer
"In the
great. But you really can't,
coordinate with
signs, but
had to
were
shoot¬
ing anamorphic."
look
choices than we
other places. It's
we
the
we
get the exposure up,
pacting those decisions."
Assessing the degree of
difficulty encountered at the
Luxor, Suschitzky says, "The main
problem with shooting in casinos is
that you can only shoot at night,
on
could often see
200 feet of
across
-
the frame line.
we
lot of cable.
there weren't a lot
of places where we
could bring it in;
low 40s."
Dinos
through
muslin all along
a
Plus, because the
casino area [at the
Luxor] is round,
big
and Maxi-Brutes
Then we'd
had
generally prefer a satu¬
rated look these days, so I made
sure that [the timing lights] were
pretty high on the scale. It's some¬
thing I generally do as a matter of
course. The postproduction stage is
helped if you print in the upper 30s
December 1996
end, I don't think
felt any great restriction,"
Suschitzky says. "We just had to
plan the direction we were going to
shoot in reasonably carefully. We
did manage to swing around and
shoot in the completely opposite
we
direction
quite a few times during
improvised moments. I was able to
use color
boldly because it seemed
appropriate in that location.
"Vegas is a night town, so
most of
our
exteriors there
were
done at
night. We had some quite
large exteriors that had to be lit
every night and cleared away each
morning. Outside, we were prob¬
ably in the f3.5 range on the high¬
speed 98 stock."
For
scenes
in which Mar¬
tians rampage
through Las Vegas,
vaporizing all humans in their
path, Suschitzky and Kincaid de¬
vised a lighting system to add ef¬
fect
lighting supposedly created by
American Cinematographer - December 1996
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