American Cinematographer - June 2004 - 16

Kinetic Moves Enhance Martial-Arts Adventure
by Jean Oppenheimer
With the Duke
of the North's
men

in hot

pursuit, Gen.
Guangming
(Hiroyuki
Sanada)races
to the rescue

the

in

Long Hall in

a scene

from

The Promise.

Grouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (see
AC Jan. '01) gave many Americans
their first taste of Hong Kong

martial-arts films, and its

Academy
Award-winning director of photography,
Peter Pau, HKSC, is considered one of
the masters of the genre. His feature
credits include The Bride With White

Hair, The Phantom Lover, The Killer and
Swordsman. "What made

Crouching
accessible to Western audi¬
ences was that [director] Ang Lee made
storytelling the priority, even as the
action sequences remained wildly imag¬
inative," says Pau.
Pau's latest picture, the martialarts fantasy The Promise, adheres to
that same philosophy. The movie takes
place in a timeless, mythic netherworld
where passion and desire find them¬
selves on a collision course with duty
and destiny. The story involves a
general, the duke who opposes him, a
Tiger

so

slave who
14 June 2006

can run as

fast

as

the wind,

and the beautiful

woman

who touches

all of their lives.
When Pau began to prep the
picture with director Chen Kaige, with
whom he was working for the first time,
he was struck by the number of camera
movements the director had in mind.

"Kaige wanted camera movement to
suggest every subtlety," says Pau. "We
shot a full 80 percent of the film with a
Power Pod [remote head] on a Tulip
Crane." He chose the Power Pod, he
adds, because "for dramatic purposes I
like the camera passing very close to
actors and objects. I don't want anything
way, and with the
Power Pod you can get within 2 inches
of the subject on the left side [of the

bulky getting in the

device]."
When the Power Pod wasn't

on

Egripment's Tulip Crane (which was
often augmented with a 23' Skymote or
30' Super Skymote extension), it was
mounted on a jib arm. The most ambi¬

tious shots involved

simultaneously
swinging the camera through the air,
pushing the crane on the track, manu¬
ally raising and lowering the crane arm,
and zooming and panning the camera
via remote. As an example, Pau points
to a scene in which Gen. Guangming
(Hiroyuki Sanada) leads his men into
battle against local barbarians. The
soldiers, hiding amid limestone peaks
that surround a valley, charge suddenly,
taking the enemy by surprise. At one
point the camera seems to fly across
the gorge from one spire to another,
revealing the valley and the battle
below. It's a completely practical shot:
no CGI, no special effects.
The ridge and two peaks form a
"U," and the crew positioned the Tulip
30' from the edge of the ridge. "We had
to position the crane at an angle to
make the movements look like what

a

telescopic crane could have done,"
recounts Pau. "That was a big challenge

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byPhots
American Cinematographer - June 2004

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