You're supposed to say that when you read a script, visualize it,
you see it all in your mind.
The first time I go through a script, I'm really reading a story.
Following this thread of character, suspense, drama, conflict,
and how real it feels to me.
And then it's formulating and translating it into pictures.
When Joe and Anthony Russo
first talk to me about sharing
they expressed the desire to really use the episodic quality of the story
to find different recipes, a visualization
that would express these different phases of the character's experience.
The early part of the film where Cherry meets Emily was always referred to as magical realism.
In that chapter, we found that these Todd AO lenses gave us some of this feel.
That's a very soft lens, optical imperfections,
but it has a very creamy-dreamy kind of quality to it
as it falls out of focus toward the background and toward the edges
that colors and shapes in the background
take on this very odd bokeh.
It's almost like an impressionistic painting
when you have a character like in a close-up or a medium close-up,
it puts you into this dream state.
"- Hey, where are you from? - Elba, New York."
- The most extreme example of the more circular type of swirling
comes from the Petzval lens.
It creates this swirl of the edges of the frame.
There's a moment where he first had seen Emily.
Now, she's come up to talk to him and it goes from Todd AO coverage...
"- Called your name like ten times."
- ... to these straight-on close-ups.
And when it goes into the straight-on close-up of her,
that's when we switched to this lens
and took that dreamy quality of the Todd AO and went one step farther.
That's what we used for that portion of the film.
"- Really? Sweet.
- Are we shooting?
Are we shooting people or what?"
- The "Three Kings" begins with a skip bleach process.
I wanted this to create a feeling of these guys being in this desert
in this bubble of the military base.
The skip bleach provided a wasteland of the desert that the US soldiers found themselves
in the First Iraq War.
"- Watch this!
- What was that?
- I rigged the football C4, sir."
- When they leave the military base,
four guys are for the first time in the real world of Iraq, amongst the people.
As soon as they leave the base, I want it to go to cross-process.
The cross-process is taking this slide film
and then we went to develop it as if it was a negative.
So you're basically developing it wrong.
It was a really risky process, but to me, it expressed what
was going on in this story.
In "Cherry", the beginning you're going from this fairy tale, then there's a shock.
And that shock is basic training.
We look for a way to represent this feeling of being boxed in.
So our solution was we went to a 14mm Sigma.
We brought the aspect ratio in
so that it was 1.66:1.
So that was that feeling of being boxed in.
First and foremost it's the emotion of the military
and this choice to be in the military was going to be right in his face.
And there was not going to be any way out of it.
"- Do I make myself clear? - Yes, Drill Sergeant!
- Do I make myself clear? - Yes, Drill Sergeant!"
- And then when he goes to Iraq, it's time to get real because it's no longer absurd
it's life and death and boom, the frame widens back out to its original
shape, which is 2.39 a widescreen.
It goes to much more journalistic than either the fairytale of the beginning
or the absurdism of basic training.
So we've gone from one extreme to another, and then to another
so these shifts are not subtle little,
"- Oh, I think it's getting a wider lens now."
They're like, "Boom"! Right in your face.
"- Hey, look at me! Breathe."
- After Cherry first sees Emily and he runs into these kids who
offer him ecstasy for his Xanax
that he takes as medication.
They take him to this party.
When Cherry first comes to the party, he's totally bunked up.
He's having this outer body experience on drugs and it's full out infrared.
"- Is that you?
- Hey. - Hey."
- As he sees her and she sort of grounds him and brings him to earth
the color becomes more normal.
And if anything, slightly romantic.
"- What? - You know Maggie?
- Yeah, sort of. - Small world.
"- Holy sh*t. - What?
- Your pupils are huge.
- Yeah, I just did some ecstasy.
- How is it? - It's actually really good."
- We used a 3D rig
so we had two cameras.
One of them was a normal color camera
and the second one was a camera that was set up for infrared.
Now we had these two images were the exact same composition and frame,
but one was infrared and one was normal color.
Ordinarily, they would be offset slightly,
but our two cameras were lined up to create the exact same frame.
What it did was by choosing shot to shot
how much of the infrared you used and how much of the color you used,
you could change the tonality of the image.
There was a lot of discussion about how much to use it.
How long do you use it?
It's as always very often less is more.
I probably would've liked to have used it a little more, but
I thought it was very effective.
"- Wanna go for a walk?"
- "Usual Suspects" was a huge challenge
because I wanted to keep a certain nervousness intention about the film
without being overt about it.
"- Move!"
- We had some of these very long dialogue scenes in Chazz Palminteri's office.
When you physically have eight feet to move and you have three minutes
of dialogue and you want to have this feeling of closing in on the truth
how do you make that last for three minutes?
And so I developed this technique where I would be on the zoom,
just going literally slow as it goes without stopping
and a dolly grip going in perceptively slow.
"- Dean Keaton was dead.
Did you know that? He died in a fire two years ago
during an investigation into the murder of a witness who was going to testify against him.
Two people saw Dean Keaton walk into a warehouse he owned just before it blew up.
They said he went in to check a leaking gas main.
It blew up.
And took all of Dean Keaton with it.
Within three months of the explosion, the two witnesses they were dead.
One killed himself in his car.
The other fell down an open elevator shaft."
- When you see it on film, it's hopefully one of those things where,
as the characters speaking, you're getting closer and closer to them,
but you don't even realize it until you're at the end of the monologue.
And you go, wait a minute, we're in a close-up now.
And we were at a wide shot.
"- You don't think I know you held out on the DA?
What did you leave out of that testimony?
I could be on the phone to Ruby in 10 minutes.
- The DA gave me immunity. - Not from me.
You get no immunity from me, you piece of sh*t."
- I think I've evolved a lot in my relationship with directors.
What I've really learned is to suss out what they're struggling with.
That's really about listening and perceiving where they're coming from.
Your job is to help them get there.