American Cinematographer - December 1999 - 62

New spherical

Hawk
Rodenstock
150-450mm
T2.8

Head Trip
shot, because it really helped us to
ceilings and create

we'd gotten.

hide the stage

shots,

atmosphere. That was our
biggest nightmare, because smoke

sets

some

be hard to control and it's very

can

unpleasant to have to breathe it in all
the time.

would you compare

How

on the stages with your
location-based sets? Which situation

working
did you

prefer?

Any time you're in
places for enough time,
you start to long for the other one.
When you're stuck in stages for
awhile, you say to yourself, 'God, I
can't wait to get outside,' but once
you get outside you think, 'I'm freez¬
ing my ass off, I can't wait to go inside
again.' [Laughs.]
One of our biggest challenges
Burton:

one

on

of those

quite a bit, was making the

setbound

scenes

match with the

location stuff. In those old Hammer

films, you could really tell when they
were on a stage, and when they were
on

location. We did

our

best

to

kind

of bridge

that gap and blend the sets
and locations into a seamless whole.

Quite often, sets can feel very claus¬
trophobic, and when you're shooting
'exteriors' inside, it's very difficult to
make it seem as if you're someplace
other than a soundstage. In this film,
though, there are many shots set in
the forest that have a sense of sky that
feels real, which is amazing to me.
The scenes breathe, and they have an
openness that's quite effective. Chivo
did a great job on that.
You also shot some complex
action scenes, including horsebound
chases, within the soundstages at
Leavesden. That must have been

a

challenge.
Burton: In

HAWK*
More information:
58

Vantage Film, Germany

Telephone: 49-961-26795 * Fax:49-961-62983

and

it really
helped to have standing sets at
Leavesden, because we didn't have to
strike them immediately. That
allowed us to build upon those
sequences if we had to. We were edit¬
a

way,

ing during production, so we could
look at our action footage to see what

If we needed

any

other

could just go back into the

grab them.

The chase

scenes

defi¬

were

nitely a bit of a challenge, though. We
used a flight shed at Leavesden that
was long and narrow, but it still
didn't give us much of a run. When
you've got to time horses with stunts
and everything else, you're lucky if
you can get three seconds of usable
footage in one go. For those scenes,
we used a Jeep-like [Barbour AllTerrain Tracking truck], which we
nicknamed the 'Batmobile.' It had
Libra 3

remote

head mounted

on

a

its

hydraulic lift to help us control any
jitter. The Batmobile came in quite
handy, because we could get it up to
speed really quickly and maximize
our runs.

What made you

this show, which Chivo and I

discussed

we

choose to use
of

Deluxe's CCE process over some
the other special lab processes?
Burton: We

just felt right
Using that type of process is
like picking out the right colors for
the set, the right costumes, or the
right music. You just treat everything
as if it's part of the fabric of the film.
Chivo and I both agree that you don't
ever want to do
something as a
gimmick, you just want to feel that
it's right. You may do something in
one movie that you'd never do in
another; you just have to deal with
each project on its own.
about it.

Chivo mentioned that you

generally worked in a lens range
between 21mm and 40mm. Did you
simply feel that a wider perspective
right for this project?
Burton: I usually gravitate

was

toward wide lenses, but I'm not

sure

why. Maybe it has something to do
with my background in animation
-

I

just like to

see

things. We also

wanted to make Sleepy Hollow like an

old-fashioned movie,

so that range
right. We didn't necessarily
plan specifically to stay within that

seemed

range, we just wound up doing it. We
did use a couple of longer lenses here
and

there,

but

the

range

you
American Cinematographer - December 1999

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