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Cinematographer John Schwartzman, ASC reteams with director Michael Bay to expose Earth to a planet-threatening asteroid in ARMAGEDDON.

Despite being a dauntingly complex project budgeted at more than $100 million, the concept for the sci-fi adventure film Armageddon seemingly dropped out of the sky. Director Michael Bay recalls, "After The Rock, I didn't want to do just another action movie, but I couldn't find a story I liked. I was working with [executive producer] Jonathan Hensleigh, trying to come up with an idea, and he said, 'You know those horseshit asteroid-destroys-the-world movies? Well, what if we did a really cool one?'"

Their tale opens as astronomers discover a Texas-sized object hurtling toward Earth: a "global-killer" asteroid like the one which wiped out the dinosaurs. In an early indication of the threat, shards of the stupendous slab rain down to perforate New York City. Mankind's survival strategy is to launch a pair of next-generation space shuttles, land on the planetoid's surface, sink a shaft into its core, and insert a nuclear weapon. The blast is designed to split the asteroid in half, causing the pieces to pass by Earth. Tapped to join the landing team is a crack oil driller (Bruce Willis), who insists on bringing along his band of roughnecks (including characters played by Ben Affleck, Steve Buscemi and Will Patton). The first half of the picture illustrates NASA's attempts to train this motley crew for the mission, while the second witnesses their brave attempt to rise to the momentous occasion.

"The scary thing is that these global killers pass us all the time," Bay says, recalling the worldwide scare this past March over Asteroid XF-11, a two-mile-wide object which was mistakenly projected to hurtle within 30,000 miles of our home world in the year 2028. "That's one of the reasons why I was interested in this story. It's totally heroic these everyday Joes have to save the world, and it depicts the best of the space program. In fact, I kept thinking about The Right Stuff throughout the process of making Armageddon, because I wanted to capture that same heroic spirit I felt as a kid while watching the space race to the moon."

Countdown

Preparations for Armageddon geared up in early 1997 as Bay began working with storyboard artist Robbie Consing (The Game) and production designer Michael White (Crimson Tide, The Jackal), both of whom had worked on The Rock. The director says, "Literally everything had to be designed: state-of-the-art space shuttles, space suits, a Mir-style space station, the asteroid itself."

However, such scope doesn't come cheaply, and as Bay recalls, "The production hinged on NASA giving us full cooperation. We knew we couldn't make the movie without them." Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, whose credits also include such strikingly visual films as Con Air (photographed by David Tattersall, BSC), Crimson Tide (Dariusz Wolski, ASC), and Flashdance (Don Peterman, ASC), was instrumental in earning the trust of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. "We submitted a script very early on," Bruckheimer explains. "If NASA says 'Yes,' then you have to go to the Air Force and the Department of Defense they really control the situation. I had a good relationship with the DOD on Top Gun, so that helped. And even though they didn't sanction us on Crimson Tide, I don't think they were disappointed with the movie because it made the Navy look professional and honest. That's [the image] they're looking for." After some minor script changes for accuracy's sake, the doors to NASA's immense facilities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Texas were opened wide for the filmmakers.

Returning for Armageddon was the core production crew that had tackled The Rock (see ACJune 1996), headed up by director of photography John Schwartzman, ASC, a longtime friend of Bay's and a frequent collaborator on music videos and commercials. "One of the nice things about this film was that getting all of us back together was like getting a bunch of old friends together," the cameraman offers while taking a break from his cinematographic duties on director Ron Howard's upcoming comedy Ed TV. "There was no feeling of 'I've got to learn how to work with these other people.' It was more like, 'Let's get back to work.'"

Analyzing his working relationship with Schwartzman, Bay wryly offers, "John knows what I like, and he can handle it when I say, 'This lighting sucks, let's do something else.'" The director specifically refers to a dramatic night scene in Armageddon featuring actor Billy Bob Thornton: "I was bored with the lighting we were using, he was tired, and I said, 'Let's do something different.' So John shot back, 'Well, what do you want to do?' I then said, 'Well, I don't know, John' and the crew started walking away from us as if we were in a fight. That's just the way we work. I trust his exposures and I think he trusts my eye for camera placement and how things will cut."

The situation in question "was a classic," Schwartzman says with a laugh. "Almost every two weeks we'd have a pushing and shoving match, and the good thing about it was that it was never personal and something great usually came of it. That type of thing clears the air, and Michael is a director who never carries a grudge. If you do something he doesn't like, he'll let you know and then just move on. We can sometimes frustrate each other to no end, but we're both trying to make the best movie possible."

Anamorphic excursion

Following his breakthrough success with The Rock, Schwartzman shot Conspiracy Theory, a big-budget action-thriller directed by Richard Donner. Gaining NASA's cooperation was immensely helpful in shaping Armageddon's content, but the cameraman's successful introduction to the anamorphic format on Conspiracy Theory also greatly affected the making of Armageddon at every level.

Though Schwartzman and Bay expressed enthusiasm for the Super 35 process while shooting The Rock, the theatrical prints were a bit of a letdown for both men. "The drag about Super 35 is the grain and its 'optical' feeling," Bay attests. "We did about 30 ENR-treated prints on The Rock to keep some of the contrast. Those were shown in major cities, but the other prints lost a lot of snap. The film looked good for Super 35, but we were still working with this tiny negative."

Asked to recount the lessons he learned on Conspiracy Theory, Schwartzman relates, "What became very apparent to me was that Super 35 is not just an optical process that makes the grain more apparent; the grain is also bigger because it's enlarged so much during projection. You're getting boned on both ends. The beauty of anamorphic is that there is no intermediate optical process. If you like your dailies, you're going to love your release print. The larger negative also gives you greater shadow detail and greater latitude, so even though I was shooting deeper stops in 'Scope, I felt I was using [relatively] less light to get more image.

"On Conspiracy Theory, I was doing very large night exteriors in New York City, and I needed to be working at least a T4 or 4.5 for them to look good. But that didn't mean I had to light everything to that exposure. If I could get the lenses to that range, I found that the level of shadow detail I could get in the darker areas was quite extraordinary. One of the things I explained to Michael on Armageddon was that for shuttle interior scenes, I was going to be shooting at a T4.5. I might only have a T2.8 on the actors' faces, but he'd be able to read them beautifully even though they would underexposed by a stop-and-a-half. The faces wouldn't be muddy, just dark. I was able to do that simply because of the resolving power you get with anamorphic's big negative."

However, Schwartzman also found that it was essential to use the proper stop in anamorphic, since the poor performance of the lenses in wide-open conditions can not simply be compensated with fine-grain stocks. He explains, "Let's put it this way: I would rather be shooting at a T4.5 on [Kodak Vision 500T] 5279 than at a T2.5 on [200 ASA EXR] 5293. The difference in the quality of the lens within this one-stop range far outweighs the difference between 93 and 79, in terms of saturation, grain structure and black densities. Whatever you gain from the 93 will be lost, because at low stops, the lenses have a lot of chromatic aberration and won't perform. As soon as you get a T4, though, they magically transform into gems made of glass."

Other specific production needs also made Schwartzman lean toward the use of anamorphic. "In Super 35, any smoke or other atmospheric diffusion is going to make the image fall apart in your release print," he says, "If you stood back and looked at our asteroid set [built and housed at Disney Studios], you'd say, 'Those are Plaster of Paris rocks.' I knew that shooting on the asteroid set would involve putting a lot of debris in the air to cut down the clarity between the subject, the camera, and the set. If I'd shot in Super 35, by the time we got to a release print we would have lost the image's high end and low end, and been stuck with just the mid-ranges.

"Discussing this issue with Michael, I suggested that we should have as much control over the image as possible. If we wanted to flatten it out, we should. But we should have the choice, as opposed to the lab creating that effect with some intermediate optical step. As soon as he saw the detail and richness that anamorphic offered, Michael fell in love with the format."

A devout convert, Bay enthuses, "You just have so much more resolution in anamorphic, and the dupes look great. That's why I wanted to use it even though I had to give something up in the lenses. I like the depth and close-focus effects you can get with spherical lenses, but the sacrifice was well worth it."

Schwartzman points out, however, that Bay's definition of "close-focus" is an extreme one: "What he means is that he can't take a 75mm anamorphic lens and focus it down to 11 inches. He considers the 17.5mm close-focus Primo to be a 'normal' lens. On The Rock, when Ed Harris was giving his speeches, the camera was literally 11 inches from his face. Most cinematographers would consider the 180mm anamorphic lens at seven feet to be close we were routinely working where there were no more measurement markings, at about 41/2 to 5 feet. And that is where camera assistants do not want to live."

Optics engineer Dan Sasaki, who works at Panavision's corporate headquarters located in Woodland Hills, California, modified Schwartzman's E- and C-series anamorphic lenses to focus much closer than they normally would. The camerman contends, "Many American Cinematographer readers probably don't realize that you can't just put any lens on any camera and expect it to work flawlessly at all focus distances and f-stops. Each one has its own sweet spot, and you not only have to know where that spot is, but that you can move it around; it's not set in stone. Richard Mosier, my first A.C., spent three weeks with Dan working on the astigmatizers and the front anamorphasizers on these lenses, optimizing each and every lens for our use. For example, we thought we'd be generally using our 135mm E-series lens at about 8 feet, so why not maximize the performance of the lens at that distance with a stop of T4.5? Dan is a genius with lenses, and he kept us up and running throughout the shoot."

Schwartzman reports that his camera of choice was the Panavision Platinum, since its viewfinder offers his operators the brightest image possible. The show carried two Platinums, as well as a Platinum Panastar and a Panaflex Lightweight for Steadicam work.

Interestingly, anamorphic's inherent lens-flare effect which some argue is a prime reason not to use the format actually became an encouraged style element on Armageddon. "Some people hate flares and some people love them," Schwartzman says. "I tend to fall into the Jan De Bont [ASC] school: I find them interesting and beautiful depending on the source of light giving you the flare. A fluorescent light burn obviously isn't as interesting as a very small, hot specular kick, but I like to use flares to transition in or out of a scene, or to heighten the sense of energy in a shot. It's something to be used as a tool, and either added or taken away depending on your needs."

Bay agrees, adding, "Flares are so cool that we even imitated them in some of our visual effects sequences, like when the shuttles fly past the camera on their way to the asteroid. There are lights flaring out all over the place in those shots."

To retain full control over their negative, the filmmakers plan to utilize Technicolor's new dye-transfer process on a number of Armageddon's theatrical prints, making it the first anamorphic-shot feature to benefit from this technology. (It was recently used on the Super 35-shot Godzilla.) They may also employ Kodak's new Estar-based "Clipper" print stock, which creates a ENR-like effect without requiring any special processing. The cameraman has run some tests with Clipper on his Ed TV dailies, and believes it could add an extra degree of contrast to Armageddon's images. "They're holding about 20 million feet of this stock for our normal release prints," he says.

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