Deep focus, like high-contrast lighting, was a technique that largely had fallen out of favor in the realist aesthetic of the art-genre period. Those who contin-ued to use it (or to approximate it with split-field diopters, like Brian De Palma) largely did so for the sake of stylistic and dramatic emphasis verging on hyper-bole. That deep focus began to be favored once again during the 1980s underlines the extent to which documentary-style realism had ceased to be quite so central for Hollywood cinematographers.
Wide-angle lenses, which facilitate deep-focus photography, became some-thing of a signature for cinematographer-turned-director Barry Sonnenfeld.
Shooting Throw Momma from the Train (1987) for Danny DeVito, Sonnenfeld stated, “The joke was that I would always call for a 21mm about a foot off the ground. It’s a nutty way of shooting.” In fact, for that film he claimed to have used a 21mm lens for “about one half of the shots.”32 This would remain a preference for Sonnenfeld when he turned to directing. As Don Peterman, Sonnenfeld’s cin-ematographer on Men in Black (1997), put it, “He is very hands-off as far as the lighting, angles, or anything else is concerned, but he does like to pick the lenses,
Figure 5.3: director oliver stone and cinematographer robert richardson mix film stocks and treatments for a hallucinogenic collage effect in Natural Born Killers (1994).
Figure 5.4: wide-angle lenses, a signature of both the coen brothers and cinematographer Barry sonnenfeld, in Raising Arizona (1987).
and they’re going to be wide lenses. Barry always used wide lenses on the movies he shot, such as Raising Arizona [Joel Coen, 1987] and Blood Simple [Coen, 1984].
He’ll usually choose a 10mm, 14mm or 21mm, and he likes to shoot close-ups with a 27mm,”33 the smaller numbers indicating a wider angle of view and an increase in depth of field. Figure 5.4, from Raising Arizona, shows the wide-angle lens producing a comic contrast in scale, exaggerating the size of the baby.
In some filming situations, wide-angle lenses had specific practical advan-tages: 17–24mm lenses were used for the cramped interiors of Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant, 1989, d.p. Robert Yeoman); 25–35mm lenses were used for the automobile interiors on Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991, d.p. Elmes); 20 and 35mm lenses to film the astronauts in their capsule in Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995, d.p. Dean Cundey); and wide-angle lenses, verging on fish-eye, were used for the hidden cameras in Truman’s car in The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998, d.p. Biziou).34 But just as often, it was a choice determined by style for its own sake, or as a vehicle for authorship. Wide-angle lenses were a signature device for Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. For the Coen brothers, as they commenced their long-running collaboration with Roger Deakins, wide-angle lenses were a bone of contention.
They had begun their careers working with Sonnenfeld and shared his taste for short lenses, which Deakins resisted, preferring longer lenses. The result was compromise: 40mm instead of 25mm lenses on Fargo (1996).35 Conversely, long telephoto lenses could be used as much for visual effect as for storytelling utility:
for instance, Canon 600, 800, and 1000mm lenses on Point Break (Kathryn Bige-low, 1991, d.p. Peterman) to enhance the vastness of the waves and the ocean, as in figure 5.5.36 Michael Bay’s films nicely exemplify the extremes of lens length
Figure 5.4: wide-angle lenses, a signature of both the coen brothers and cinematographer Barry sonnenfeld, in Raising Arizona (1987).
that characterize the era in general, alternating between wide angle lenses used to exaggerate movement and long lenses used to compress space for dramatic and graphic effects.
Another factor must be accounted for in the breadth of cinematographers’
lens choices in this period: a resurgence in the use of multiple-camera shooting, using two or more cameras running simultaneously to record a scene. Multiple- camera shooting was nothing new, of course; it had been used extensively in the early talkie period to compensate for limitations in sound editing, and had been a characteristic practice of Kurosawa Akira from the mid-1960s. But by the early 1990s, the ever-rising costs of filming big-budget action blockbusters had made it an attractive option for stunts, explosions, and similar scenes that were prohib-itively expensive to restage for the camera. At the same time, the use of multiple cameras meant a profusion of shots, and thus of shot choices for the editing suite, while the rise of nonlinear editing made it easier to use a greater number of shots shaved to shorter lengths.
At times, coverage of productions using multiple-camera shooting reads like a kind of cinematographic arms race. Backdraft (Ron Howard, 1991, d.p. Mikael Salomon) used as many as nine cameras at once. The camera truck on True Lies (Cameron, 1994, d.p. Russell Carpenter) carried nearly a dozen cameras, while First Knight (Jerry Zucker, 1995, d.p. Adam Greenberg) only managed eight, and Braveheart (1995, d.p. John Toll) used a paltry four, three to film action during battle scenes and one to stay on director-star Mel Gibson in those scenes. On Con Air (1997), Simon West and David Tattersall used a full fifteen to film the plane crashing into the Sands hotel.37 As the practice became more widespread, it often would be used for the aesthetic advantages of having extensive coverage. Spike Lee consistently used two cameras to film dialogue scenes, as in Clockers, to max-imize performance (eliminating offscreen line-reading, speeding up production, facilitating dramatic continuity).38
Figure 5.5: in Point Break (1991), long lenses enhance a sense of the vastness of the ocean.
Despite the importance of the home video market, the majority of block-busters were shot in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and increasingly it was the format of choice across genres. As Lisa Dombrowski has explained, this ratio originally was associated with CinemaScope, the widescreen technology introduced by Twentieth Century–Fox in 1953. The format relied on “anamorphic” lenses to squeeze the image onto a regular piece of 35mm film. By the 1990s, however, many filmmakers began to appreciate the advantages of Super-35 over anamor-phic lenses to film in that ratio. Simply put, Super-35 is a widescreen format shot with non-anamorphic spherical lenses, achieving a larger image frame by using part of the negative normally reserved for the optical sound track. Part of the image area (top and bottom) is then matted when theatrical prints are struck to achieve a wide frame comparable to anamorphic widescreen. That Super-35 utilizes more of the negative points to one of its principal advantages in a period when studios became more keenly aware of the importance of home video as a distribution platform, as it is essentially shot full-frame, such that the image does not need to be cropped for 4:3 presentation. While Super-35 had been in use in Hollywood since Greystoke in 1984, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that it began to be taken up more widely. Its chief advantage was flexi-bility in lens choices, and specifically its aflexi-bility to capture a greater depth of field than anamorphic lenses while using less light than necessary in anamor-phic formats. The shallowness of anamoranamor-phic lenses had presented limitations throughout the history of widescreen cinema—for instance, it was one factor driving the use of the split-field diopter, noted in the previous chapter. The use of spherical lenses removed this barrier to depth of field. The option of using a greater variety of lenses drove the adoption of Super-35 on films like The Age of Innocence (Scorsese, 1993, d.p. Michael Ballhaus), L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hansen, 1997, d.p. Dante Spinotti), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Gil-liam, 1998, d.p. Nicola Pecorini).
Still, some filmmakers grew dissatisfied with the format. Michael Bay, for instance, was persuaded to use Super-35 on The Rock (1996) after seeing what Fincher and Khondji achieved with the format on Se7en,39 but returned to anamorphic for Armageddon (1998), reporting that The Rock appeared too grainy in theatrical projection. For Bay, shooting anamorphically meant less dependence on the lab, and therefore more control over the image.40 Similarly, Terrence Malick and John Toll opted for anamorphic over Super-35 on The Thin Red Line (1998) to avoid a separate optical step at the stage of making answer prints, so that they could work with a greater knowledge of how the negative would translate to prints.41 The ease and flexibility of Super-35 none-theless meant that it remained a widely chosen option, and its use to create depth in moving shots speaks not only to a concern with achieving significant depth of field, but also Hollywood cinematography’s increasing reliance on mobile camerawork.