JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION cinematography breakdown - interview with John Schwartzman ASC

0:00 this is john schwartzman afc uh the cinematographer on jurassic world dominion and this is the go creative show [Music] hello and welcome to the go creative show a podcast for filmmakers my name is ben consoley and today we speak with john schwartzman asc the director of photography of jurassic world dominion john welcome back to the show thank you very much ben this episode of go creative show is sponsored by shot lister the best shot list creation app for production in the business email them at go creative show at shotlister.com for your free gift we are so happy to have you the film is awesome it's like totally taking over the world right now you

0:45 top gun has been bumped from the top with jurassic world that must make you feel good that's right you know what makes me feel good is that people are going to see both movies exactly uh i i you know in addition to prepping a picture right now i'm color timing at night and i'm with stefan sonnenfeld at company three who color timed both maverick and jurassic so i said to him what does it feel like to have a billion dollars of worldwide gross you know come by next weekend i said you ought to feel good about that exactly and i think he i think he did it's a very impressive thing to have the the top two movies you know in two and a half consecutive weeks oh my god i'm just glad people are going back

1:30 to the theater that's fantastic well i will tell you you know you sort of forget ben we're in a world now where obviously we we go with the ebbs and tides of covid and there are times when it seems like it's going away i did a picture in the fall with john lee hancock who i did the highwayman with who i've done eight pictures with we were in connecticut in the fall and pretty much in that part of the northeast there was no covid to speak up we were actually able to film without wearing masks right for the first time in you know two and a half years by the end of the movie omicron had started to really rear its ugly head and we went back to masking i hadn't been to a movie theater a real

2:18 movie theater uh until actually i went during the week because i knew there'd be no one not as many people in the theater to see maverick on a big screen and then obviously giraffe the jurassic world premiere at uh the grumman's chinese theater or the the chinese theater um was the first time i had really sat and realized oh my god the experience of seeing laura dern in a close-up at 35 feet high is so different than on you know a i look i have a state of the art oled in my house but it's still not the same experience and maybe i've got very good color and i've got a high dynamic range and i've got good contrast but what i don't have is scale and you

3:05 realize that most people most i'm speaking for all probably all cinematographers when we go out and shoot we're thinking about the big screen and we're thinking about scale scale is a part of what what how you choose to frame and shoot a movie right um and it was just really nice to go back to the theater and because remember when i started jurassic no one had heard of covet right it was and then it then came on and hit us really quick and we shut down i think it was march 15th and they flew me home the next day with chris pratt and the american actors because at the time no one knew if the borders were going to be closed right so we all

3:52 were flown from london back to l.a literally within 24 hours and then fortunately for us on this movie we were the first movie back and especially the first big movie back we're talking about you know 800 or 900 people on the crew if you talk about the model makers and the plasterers and the painters and everything else and i will say that pat crowley our producer just did an incredible job of coming up with really the very first protocol on how a movie could go back to work and we did that incredibly successfully not that it wasn't stressful and we did have people testing positive from time to time but we made it through that whole movie with no one actually getting sick so that was a

4:37 that was a great testament to um the producers who were very aware of people's fears but i think the moment you walked onto the set of jurassic world you probably felt like you were in the safest place you could possibly be because you were with a group of people that knew how to sort of isolate although not everyone people did go home to their families but they understood the importance of being able to make this work and i think we all felt that the set was the safest place you could possibly be because where else are people being tested either three or five times a week right so it was about as well um as well done as you possibly

5:22 could especially given at that time ben no one really understood covet at all except that a lot of people were dying i mean we were filming at a time in london when you know 2 000 people a day were dying and we were able to pull it off and i think pull it off in a way that uh did not affect the movie at all i mean the only change we made was rather than first unit going to malta which was going to we were going to go there a second unit was going to film there for a while and then we were going to go and kind of plug in chris and bryce to just certain things for maybe four or five days we decided to build that back at pinewood because the thought of

6:08 traveling 400 people to malta seemed like it was very risky at that time and i think you know every step of the way on this movie and i give them incredible credit now especially as a monday morning quarterback uh they did an incredible job i cannot overstate really what i can only imagine the responsibility that they felt and they they did it just you know you couldn't ask for it i wish the people that ran fema were as talented as these guys yeah we had ben cutchens on the show talking about white lotus around the time of covet and he had i guess its benefit and misfortune of having to film throughout covet but the reason i say benefit is because they started it after covet had

6:54 already begun and they were able to build a little bubble in order to shoot that series and i'm curious like were you able to do something similar on your end to completely lock everybody in well we couldn't lock everybody in like they could so that so he had two advantages one hawaii which at the time had very strict travel restrictions in right so usually you couldn't just go i'm going to go to the kahala hilton and hang out on the beach so they had that going for them and then obviously they were at that resort on the north shore um and they bought the whole thing out because obviously nothing's open right so we did a similar thing with the cast uh the director and all of the hair

7:41 makeup all the vanities that went with them they rented out the langley hotel which was about five minutes from pinewood so the other thing was it meant we had no turnaround issues with the actors at the time i had a house in notting hill my wife had gone back to the states and wasn't going to come out because of covid so i just lived in my house and i felt that was incredibly safe for me i didn't have anybody coming to clean i took care of all that and i had my because i'm an american they don't the studio will not allow me to drive in england so i had my driver who was also in a bubble go and do my shopping so you know obviously with the hods they did that as as well as they could but remember i'm in england i've got an english crew

8:28 most of them are going home that said kids aren't in school and everybody's terrified so they were making bubbles no matter what yeah you know it was great it was it look we by the time they did white lotus we had wrapped right so we were making it up as we went along but to a high degree of sophistication you know the the choices were always made on behalf of safety because if you didn't and somebody got ill number one we were too we were too high-profile and i think we all realized that we were going to be the tip of the sword to bring the industry back into production yeah and and we did it

9:15 yep jurassic world dominion is the third and final of the jurassic park series um and you shot the first jurassic world and now coming back for the third was there something different on this film that you weren't able to do the first time that just you were granted by more time you know different budget different technology was there anything that you wanted to do but couldn't and now can actually no i mean so remember so so of the three uh i didn't do the second one and colin didn't do the second one because at the time we were prepping star wars which ultimately did not happen for carl right so the plan was colin was gonna write and sort of produce from afar number two while we

10:02 did star wars and it was always his intention to do the third one the star wars story which everyone sort of knows or whatever it just didn't happen they weren't happy with the way his script was going and he was replaced by jj um but we shot the first we shot the first one in the third one on film both 65 millimeter and 35 millimeter and that was partially on the first one because film was still people were still using film and also colin felt like jurassic park movies are shot on film yeah and me being a huge film guy it was music to my ears right so we did the same thing on dominion right

10:48 we shot it on film there's one sequence in the movie that's shot digitally and that was only because colin changed his mind about a light source in the scene in the caves and wanted to use just a flambeau a flaming torch and i said to him i don't think i can use that as a source light for film especially large format film because you need more light for more depth of field i said can we shoot this on large format digital and then we can sam can hold that torch and that'll be the only light source in the scene and i said what we'll do is we'll take the digital material once it's cut i'll color time it then we'll scan it back out to film

11:35 and re-scan it in so that it is film per se and also we'll have a complete cut negative of the movie so other than that we shot 65 for perf35 which is what we did on the on jurassic world and on this one just out of sheer luck uh at pinewood studios i cannot remember the name of the camera company that has a uh office there they had two vista vision bow cam cameras which was a camera that ilm developed developed and it's a very small this division camera and this division is a a medium format uh camera system that does that uses 35 millimeter film but it runs sideways it runs in the same direction that film

12:20 runs through a still camera so you get a very you get a lot of negative and we use we utilize that a lot because it was right there no one was using it because no one was working so we also utilized spokane's because we were one of the things that happened after the pandemic and one of our big discussions were okay we're going to come back do we continue shooting on film will the laboratory even be able to function can they process 65 mil the only place in the world that was processing 65 millimeter film was photocam in los angeles you've got to pan damn it airplanes aren't flying so we sort of thought okay well we may not be able to shoot much more 65 when we get back to england post pandemic

13:06 because of just the infrastructure isn't there for us right the simple solution would have been to go full digital because then we you know you can basically set up a lab anywhere but we chose not to the kodak lab at pinewood stayed open and what happened was they could process 35 mil so that's when we pulled out the vist division camera because it was still 35 millimeter film the only difference was rather than running through the camera vertically it ran through the camera horizontally and that gave us a a sort of a large format or what you want to call medium format image uh on 35 millimeter film and that was that was huge and you see it on the ice lake and you see it in the underground market

13:53 where most of that stuff is all shot vista vision the other nice thing about this division is i don't lose as much depth of field at the same stop so for the technical people out there a 50 millimeter lens in four perf 35 the equivalent field of view is an 80 millimeter lens in 65 now you've got a larger negative area so therefore you have less depth of field so to carry the same depth you need two more stops of light in 65 millimeter now if you're outside during the day that's not an issue right generally speaking when cinematographers go outside during the day they're putting neutral density filters in because there's so much light in a set like the dinosaur market that

14:39 had i think uh [Applause] 1600 park hands pounding down through the ceiling and 28 dino lights and i mean it was a huge lighting setup the idea of being able to get two more stops of light was daunting but then by having the this division camera i didn't really have to be as concerned i was carrying a similar amount of depth that's interesting about the vis division and i'll put a link to this in the show notes too guys so you can check it out as you're listening along but i wasn't terribly familiar with it i mean i've heard of it but i don't really know much about it but that's interesting to hear that it pulls the negative sideways thus giving you kind of the appearance well more than the appearance the actuality of a wider frame yeah and it gives you basically this

15:26 even more negative area than 65 does in a two to one format yeah just how it's the square fits into the the square now this division came out of that 50s when everyone was trying when the studios were afraid that no one was going to go to the movies they were going to watch tv so everybody was fighting for these wide screen formats cinemascope which we now call anamorphic yeah there was a cinerama there this division was another format right that allowed you to use 35 millimeter film but it turned it on its side uh the last time i used the vista vision camera was on the rock for shooting plates it became the go-to plate camera there was a guy a gentleman named greg beaumont who worked at ilm

16:11 realized i can build a small lightweight camera that we can take out to the tunisian desert to shoot plates for star wars if you if you i can't i don't have a photo but i can anybody can look 65 millimeter the 65 millimeter lightweight camera and it's literally called the lightweight camera with a lens in a magazine weighs 90 pounds right whereas the bow cam with a lens and a mag on it maybe weighs 25 pounds so you know the only thing about the bow cam is it's not silent so it's a noisy camera so you use it for the wide shots you use it for the big moves through the dinosaur market where you know there's going to be a lot of sound effects

16:57 and you know then you switch to your silent camera for all the tight close-ups and that's kind of how we did it if we knew we were doing something big and wide and we could get away with a noisy camera we would use the bow cam knowing that when we would go in for bryce or sam neil or laura or jeff goldblum or chris pratt you know we would then switch to the other cameras for all the dialogue it was a clever smart way to do it to maintain the maximum image quality which is what we were always about right it's jurassic it's part of the giraffe it's part of the jurassic park we all pay homage to the first movie and you can't you can't forget that every time you're

17:43 setting up the camera and on this movie we must have had more than 40 animatronic or puppeteered dinosaurs so it wasn't as though you could forget it because i had eight guys under a table puppeteering these things right i mean he was right there it was like the cantina in star wars every day it was it really put everybody on their a-game it's easier to kind of go okay so they're going to put that creature in later and not think about okay maybe i it's okay don't worry about that light over there it doesn't matter when you've got these creatures and you are really paying attention to how the light hits the silicone skin and hey you say to john nolan our creature hey can you put a little more slime on the back

18:29 of their ears it was um it was a it was a lot of work you know versus going oh don't worry about that ilm is going to put them in later well do you prefer to work with the puppets versus visual effects there's no question that it's it's a look it's a double-edged sword you can move faster with visual effects but what i can tell you is the actors prefer to have the puppets the puppets also create shadows and things that are happy accidents so there's no question i prefer working with the puppets especially because all we're really there to do is make sure we can capture the best possible performance right so if if bryce or campbell scott reacts uh and it's a real thing with the frills

19:16 flapping it's it's more dynamic than if he's if you're telling him to look at a laser pointer you know and we realized that on the first movie where uh there was one scene i can't remember what the dinosaur was but uh the the the the sort of modified t-rex had killed all these dinosaurs and they go up and there's one dying in the field and and chris sort of says well he's not eating he's hunting right and that was uh that was stan winston's guys with this 10 foot head and they were puppeteering and it was amazing to see how the performances were just amplified because of that yeah just having it in the room it makes such a difference to performances and also i i imagine that it's helpful for

20:03 you just to get a better sense of scale i mean i know you do it with visual effects but to have the real thing there must be helpful when you're framing your shots and lighting and everything there's no question it's really helpful for camera movement in particular uh and also things happen you know the guys who are puppeteering the giganotosaurus which was 60 feet long you know and it was enormous right you they said it's going to do this but maybe it doesn't quite do it exactly and that creates a a sense of reality you know especially if the operators can't help so yeah it was amazing it was just it was fantastic i mean it does take longer you know your things break or you tear a little bit of skin and they have to fix it you know but that's

20:49 the time that you're spending on the front end is time that they don't have to spend on the back end you know so but at the end of the day everyone was always kind of in a state of complete amazement whenever we saw these things right i mean it just was like oh my god and they looked amazing they looked incredible yeah and you had mentioned earlier that the this all the films in the series but especially this one pays homage to the first i mean we have laura dern sam neil is back i mean the gang is back together the band's back together in jurassic jurassic world dominion what was that experience like for you for the crew oh it was amazing we all look we all i you know i'm not telling you how old i was but i was certainly you know in late teens early 20s when jurassic park came out

21:35 uh so to get to first of all uh i've worked with laura before and i know laura i love laura she's an amazing actress and just a great person uh so just to get to work with her again it's always a privilege i have never met sam or jeff but boy there they were just it was just great i mean it was one of those things like all i could imagine is if we were doing this and there wasn't covid the amount of so the one thing we could not do was you couldn't go hey guys come here come to the camera truck at wrap and we'll all have a glass of wine right now there was no fraternizing right but there were certainly days when you wished you could have all just sat around for an hour after rap and said let's all have a glass of wine and just cherish the moment that we just had today with

22:22 this and think about how exciting it was and how complicated that was the one downside the biggest downside was that sort of the the ability not to be able to sort of you know have that sense of paternity and camaraderie but to get to work with them was amazing and they were all in this bubble at the langley hotel so you know what did they do at night they all played the piano and sang and so by the time they would show up on set every monday they had spent the whole weekend rehearsing so ironically the pandemic did not add any time to our movie we did add a couple of days but that was because a couple of key people who we couldn't shoot without you know tested false

23:08 positive but in england there were no false positives if you tested positive on a monday you were out for 10 days whether you tested negative for the next eight days right you could not test out now you can right now we realize there are there are false positive tests i mean in today's world in hollywood if you test positive and you're asymptomatic you can go back to work in five days right because we we know how to treat the disease we have pax livid people have to be vast and boost boosted so the the fear of oh my god we may have somebody go to the hospital and die is that's that's become something that really doesn't exist anymore um but you know obviously back then we were very cautious and uh and it was just

23:56 amazing it was just it was a great it was great i mean you know just to to the rapport between sam and jeff was cystera you know yeah and and you had mentioned that they what you didn't have the fraternizing like you like you would have had had there been no coven and i find that interesting because your director had been interviewed and was asked about the most memorable day of the entire project um and he had said that it was the the moment where you were all crammed into a helicopter together it was kind of like the last time the whole gang was together i think it might have even been on your last day and it i was curious that sounds like a great memorable day but it made me curious what your most memorable day was if if not the same uh that was certainly one of them

24:43 i had a lot of them but you have to understand ben colin remembers that day and i remember it's starting to rain and thinking oh my god and we're on a part of the set where i could not get a big a big scrim over the top so colin is reveling with the actors and i'm saying we've got to shoot if the skies are going to open up so i you know i don't get i the best way to describe the job of a cinematographer especially on a very very complicated expensive movie is you're a relief pitcher you're a closer but you're asked to pitch for nine innings right that's a great analogy yes but you're not asked to just come in and pitch the

25:28 three batters and you know and expect it to get out of the inning in 14 pitches it's like asking mariona rivera to come in and pitch for nine innings and it's that way every day so colin may be at the monitor and having a great time i'm standing out there looking at the clouds coming from the north going okay colin we've got to move we got to get going because we're going to be in trouble in an hour right and the one thing is the the sort of on a big movie you've got so many moving parts that things it's very hard to change a shoot day right you you're like an aircraft carrier you can go but you don't turn quickly when you're on a very small movie when i do movies

26:15 with john lee hancock if we get a weather report for the next day that's not good for for what we wanted we're going to be outside and oh we don't want to shoot the funeral scene in the rain those movies are so contained that you can go hey we're going to go into the high school tomorrow this movie you can't do that right so there is an expectation that no matter what the conditions are that i can make sure that we can film that day and sometimes that's a very tall order and that can be very stressful but that that comes with the job that's part of being the the relief pitcher you know um and it's it does so so there i don't have as many times to sit back and go oh i mean i do don't get me wrong we rap

27:01 and i go ah that was fantastic certainly in the moment when i see shots and the camera move and i just go to call and that is that is bitching we nailed it you know but uh i don't get as much time to sort of enjoy those little moments as he does but i certainly remember doing a scene in the cockpit of the plane um and we're all crammed in there and it's right after we've come back from covet so are we allowed to do this but again we're all tested the doors of the stage are open there are fans blowing it's it's windy because we needed some wind and also to make it safe and i just turned to colin and he was in the in the back of the fuselage was a little monitor

27:46 and i said man we're making a movie again and we're making it just like we used to you know we're not in spacesuits i said this is great i know we're going to be able to get through this [Music] let's take a quick break and talk about shot lister we've got the founder here zack lipowski who's also a filmmaker and knows a little bit about production and filmmaking that's for sure so shot lister is obviously a shot list creation app for production but it does so much more and i wanted to give you an opportunity now to tell us about one of the things that you love so much what what is one of the many things that our audience should know about shot lister sure i mean like you said it can build shot lists and you know that's something

28:34 that excel can do and people have been doing for hundreds of years is build a shot list but what it really can do that kind of as a game changer is take those shots and put them into a schedule and that really starts to open up some amazing things where it allows you to realize oh we need to do this shot before this one because we need time to change the camera over and basically allows you to go through a lot of the thinking way before you get to set which can be really helpful lining up and organizing all of your shots and allowing certain allocating certain amounts of time per shot is just such a game changer it makes you look so pro on set yeah that's the name of the game really helpful for talking with your crew you can show your estimates to your dp and you'll go oh no this is going to take an hour not 15 minutes okay well that's good to know while

29:19 you're doing that i'll be doing this and it just sort of really helps communication that way so shot listeners mobile apps are free so you can start using shot lister right now wherever you are but there's also a mac os version and a subscription based shot lister pro that you obviously have to pay for but go creative show listeners get one of them for free simply by just emailing go creative show at shotlister.com and telling them which one you want you can either say i want the mac os version of shot lister or i want a year of shot lister pro whatever you want whatever you ask for you're going to get it for free by emailing them at go creative show at shotlister.com talk about a deal thank you zach for coming on thank you [Music]

30:08 of the biggest differences between you know jurassic world that you shot the first one and you shot this now new one dominion is the dinosaurs are now out in the world the we are we now have dinosaurs among us and because of that you have a lot of action scenes and a lot of just shots in general with these dinosaurs now out in the city running through the streets of malta going all over the place so um i'd love to hear from you what changed in your cinematography or how did you approach things differently now having these giant you know dinosaurs among us in the world well one of the things that was interesting was that you say that part of it was i we gave cameras to people because part of it is it looks like iphone footage it looks like dash cam footage so

30:53 on purpose so there's a great shot of a little girl running around in the in in a field that's colin's daughter right and he shot her so part of it was um for us to not do that stuff and i mean we obviously reviewed it but i just i would say to the loader hey if you're gonna go to hyde park tomorrow do you mind just imagine you know a triceratops is going through just see you know and so and some of it was staged and some of it was um just sort of found footage you know and that's how because at this point i think in colin's mind this has been going on for a couple of years i mean it's a nuisance it's look i live in

31:38 southern california this is going to be the time of year when you're going to hear about mountain lions coming down into people's yards because they need water right so somebody else calls it there's a mountain lion drinking out of my pool uh you know think of it like that but times 10. um so and with respect to the exterior moment of stuff that was all done by patrick loungeway who's been my second unit director of photography on a lot of movies and he was on uh jurassic park jurassic world and jurassic world two and three he's actually done all three um so he knows what to do you know and also we had a device on this movie called ncam so with an ipad pro which i'm plugging now so hopefully

32:23 apple will give me one before we even started the show we were talking about ipad pros you are a man of my heart i'm also a big apple application well but the thing is there's a couple of things one so there's a program i'm going to give a shout out to nick sadler called artemis which is essentially a viewfinder program that allows you to put the type of camera you're using in and pick your lens set and then you can use your ipad as a viewfinder which is easier than having a lens viewfinder for scouting because you're not carrying a box of lenses around plus it will you can take a picture and it will record your gps location time of day direction you're looking so it's a pretty incredible tool with that ilm built this program that

33:09 would couple with that so if i sat in malta and i said okay this is the scene where this dinosaur where the raptors running through the square i could pan the camera and the raptor would be animated in it wow and this is the end cam that you're talking about so so when they were lining this step up they would go and if we weren't shooting film but if we were shooting digital ilm could have plugged that in to the monitor that the operator was working off of that he could have like and i think it was jim cameron that invented this technology on avatar and it's only gotten better and better and better as as memory has gotten bigger and as computer chips have gotten faster but we would sit there with david vickery and

33:55 i'd say i think i think the dinosaur is going to be over there right and he'd go nope a little more like this and you know because he had animated the whole sequence yeah so it was a very very very handy tool now it didn't mean we had to stick to it because he could also change the path but it gave us a place to go and and for when we didn't have uh animatronic dinosaurs which first unit pretty much only shot animatronic dinosaurs it gave second unit a real advantage to to your set which is scale because i can remember on the first one what we used was a giant cutout on a very long pool cleaning pole to approximate the height right and we

34:41 had picked this beautiful lychee nut forest in kauai for the scene where the gyro ball comes to a rest and gets bounced around only to realize that the the t-rex the modified t-rex wouldn't fit in there it was too big right but we didn't want to lose location so we went to tim alexander and said can you scale it down for this and he's like of course i can't so you know you're trying to maintain as much reality as you can but we weren't going to let that leaching up forth go you know make can you make them four feet shorter no one will know one of those one of those kind of almost looks like found footage kind of scenes and perhaps this may not be the one of those moments but is that um scooter guy kill scene that

35:27 has somehow taken on a life of its own and social media people are obsessed with the scooter guy kill scene first of all what's your reaction to the whole world kind of becoming obsessed with the scooter guy now i think it's hysterical and god knows i'm there's enough scooter guys who've almost crashed into me on sidewalks it's a shout out to to you know watch where you're going buddy yes and i mean again but you know that's a complicated stunt i believe that he was on a ratchet i mean that's not you know that's patrick loungeway and dan bradley who was our second unit director for the multiportion you know coming up with these beats that are just both you know terrifying and hysterical same time and i think that's where these movies have such a

36:14 good balance just just when you're about to go like i'm exhausted somebody kind of cracks a joke i love that let's talk about a couple of specific scenes in the film that are really getting a lot of buzz on social media and ever since the trailer honestly people have been loving some of these clips the first one i want to talk about is where claire is sort of just under the surface of the water where the dinosaur's coming right up to the to the surface there it's in the trailer everybody loves it it's really beautifully shot um i'd love to hear from you the way that you achieve that okay so that was you know again i've been doing this for a long time and i i knew technically how to do it so first of all that's at a that location is called black park it's right behind

37:00 pinewood studios back before pinewood was pinewood it used to be a big what they call an estate it was like a big farm and it got converted and split up so black park is still a park where people go it's huge uh and star wars shoots there and we shot there and it's it's very convenient you could literally there's a gate that you can walk out the back of pinewood and be in black park so wow that's so crazy we picked where we were going to be based on the sunlight travel and then i knew that colin wanted her to climb into this pond so we excavated that and you know and like in everything in hollywood we dug it out we lined it with three mil plastic

37:45 we treated the water so it was safe and we filled it up and then i designed the length of the pond so that we could start with the camera on a techno crane which is a telescoping crane arm essentially it's an arm that can extend or retract it it's got about 37 feet the 50-foot crane has 37 feet of movement so i we designed where the base of the crane was gonna go knowing that we could get all the way over the water and five or six feet up the path and be able to go with bryce as she crawled then pull back over the water and then when she went underwater we would dip the camera down and then when she came back up we would come up with her all in one shot now the only tricky thing is

38:30 cameras you can't put a camera in the water right cameras and water are that's no bueno um and so the panavision makes a lens system that's kind of like a what would be the right word a periscope right it it it it comes out straight and then it makes you can turn the end of it so that it's it's 90 degrees so basically what you're now doing is pointing the camera straight down the lens extends about two and a half feet below the front of the camera and then then the end of the lens turns so it's pointed straight again and then panovision for lack of a better term makes what's called a condom for it that's made out of neoprene rubber with a glass filter that you can slip over it

39:16 so you can put that in the water you i'm sure people have seen commercials with michael phelps swimming where they go from above to below and that's the device you use so that's essentially how we did it and uh and bryce god love her she is game for everything right she the the harder and the more physical it is the more she wants to do it she doesn't want anybody doing anything for her unless it's yes they say to her look you we can't have you jump off of one rooftop to the other because of insurance she'll do everything uh and it's i love that shot i mean look it's a bit of a shout out to apocalypse now um but my only thing i would say is

40:02 and i know it's uh it's one of those things like what i almost think it's too cosmetically pretty i mean bryce has the most incredible skin and i've known her for a long time i've known her since she was like 13 years old when i shot a movie for her father so not that i don't take care of all of the actors but i you know when she's in front of the camera i'm always gonna make sure that there's not a shadow where i don't want it and on that shot when she comes up i almost worry god does she look too pretty with those green eyes but i do love the shot i love i love her intensity you know i mean it's not just the camera it's the camera and her doing a dance

40:47 and that's the part of cinematography that's so exciting the moment you really noticed the shot you've taken yourself out of the movie for that five seconds when it all comes together and you think about it afterward you go that was really cool that means you've done something right i i can certainly make shots all day long with shafts of light coming through windows and silhouettes walking in the foreground where you go that's really beautiful but the moment you say that's really beautiful you've suddenly lost the narrative right so you you're trying to walk that line every cinematographer does that does it bot does that bother you like when you're i mean when you're doing something giant like this you know you

41:33 have big celebrities you want to make everybody look amazing that's that's all good um but do you ever feel like you're kind of you know there's a battle between what you want to do or what you should do in a situation like that no i it's one of those where that was just a perfect storm and she happened to look so great that day because i wasn't i didn't do anything i think i was in the water next to the camera because i i tend to be next to the camera especially the film camera because it was how i was trained and i look i stand next to the lens and look at the actors with my eyes right i don't sit at the monitor especially because the monitor on a film camera is an old school low resolution video assist on digital cameras i will go look at the monitor to make sure everything's right but then

42:18 once we're rolling i don't ever stay at the monitor right i stand if donald sutherland is five feet in front of me why do i want to watch him on tv that's donald sutherland right so you're not monitored like when you're watching takes you're not you're watching them just looking at the actual take not a monitor correct i stand right next to the camera on every take and generally i'm holding a little piece of white styrofoam we call it a bounce board and i'm just manipulating it to see if i want to get an extra sparkle in their eyes now part of that comes from the my experience of doing this forever and on all all the movies all the day movies everything else the other thing is that um you know my stepmother is an academy award-nominated actress my brother jason

43:05 is an actor i my cousin nicholas cage is an actor i come from a world with a lot of actors and i understand their insecurities as well and i know that it gives them a lot of they feel more secure if i if somebody if i'm right there with them they know that i'm really paying attention and obviously the more comfortable the actors feel the better they're going to be and the bottom line is i don't know when i'm going to get to work with jeff goldblum again i want to be right next to jeff goldblum i can remember as an aside i was doing a picture with rob reiner with jack nicholson and morgan freeman and rob reiner said to me why aren't you back here at the monitor and i said and jack was right there in the bed i said because rob when am i ever going to get to be five feet away from jack nicholson i can go

43:52 watch it on tv when i do the dvd i said i want the experience of being right here and it's just one of those things it's one of the great privileges of my job is that i get to do that and and i don't want to miss out on that opportunity you watching are you watching playbacks or before you move to the next shot yes of course i'll look and say hey how was take four let me go yeah but for the first three or four takes i'm not you know and and ian fox my camera operator and i have done 20 some odd movies together he's operated on all the jurassics he operated on jurassic two as well so he knows colin he knows me if he's not happy he's going to be the first one to say i need another so

44:38 you know um there's a lot of familiarity we're a big family we know each other we've all worked together we know what the mission is and i know that i want to be out front i just that is how i work i i don't want to be in a tent or behind a floppy flag if i can avoid it yeah because like you said it's playback i can always go back and check it but i want to be there in the moment i want to talk about biozen and the look of that sort of white interior that i i know you're you know i'm sure you were involved in some of the production design or at least collaborated with them but can you talk to me about the way that you approached that white interior of biozan and also

45:23 are the rumors true that it's taking nods from apple park is this like the evil apple is that i mean it really it looks like it well there's no question that um the cupertino facility the headquarters is a gorgeous building right i mean johnny ivey designed it and i don't think anybody would argue that johnny ivey is the uh raymond loewy of our time in terms of an industrial designer right i mean raymond lloyd was the great industrial designer who designed the coke bottle and the toastmaster toaster and a bunch of things uh johnny ivy isn't it i mean all you have to do is hold an apple product right uh so i don't look they had designed that before i started the movie but it's an obvious

46:09 uh nod to apple in terms of that you know their design the issue again so the funny thing is like a biosin that the sets which were beautiful and call in one of them because look it's a laboratory it's going to be very clean he wanted the lines clean we all like one of the things that's really nice ben is circles and curves camera lenses love that right so all the hallways had kind of a curve radius on it the other thing is if you put a radius on a hallway you you tend not to see where the end of it is so the audience's mind imagines it goes a lot farther as opposed to just having double doors at the end yeah uh it's just and circles just frame up nicely because they become kind of elliptical

46:54 um but one of the challenges again was we were shooting film so again film versus digital um requires at the same again i'm not gonna get technical you're shooting at a 284 split which is kind of a common interior stop it has it has enough depth of field but not too much and it's not wide open where only someone's face is in focus and everything else turns the mush and obviously we're spending a lot of money on these sets so we want to see them right exactly so the part of it is you want to carry some depth so i think colin kept saying to me no no i want more depth of field so okay let's shoot we'll shoot these interiors at a four five six split

47:40 a four or five six split on a digital camera that's rated at iso 1600 or at 800 is significantly less light than a film camera that i rate at 320. it's literally half the amount of light and also one of the things was i knew the way we were going to shoot that all the lighting had to be built in it had to be what we called in the business practical lighting you can see the light sources but you know it's 2020 2019 2020 britain is still part of the eu i believe they haven't left yet so incandescent light bulbs regular light bulbs are outlawed in europe right so everything has gone led you can't even get them i didn't know that

48:27 oh yeah so part of one of the reasons why britain wanted to leave was they were tired of brussels telling them what they could and couldn't do so so now we're using led lights which don't get me wrong are a wonderful thing but they don't have the same amount of brightness or punch i can't replace a i can go from a 75 watt bulb to 150 watt bulb in 10 seconds hey lee can you take the 211 out and put a 212 in um the leds only go to a certain wattage so part of the concern was okay so let's put the brightest led ribbon and whatever we're coming up with in and let's pray we get there you know and we did but you know the world is moving towards digital

49:13 the way productions are mounted with led lighting is moving towards digital uh i don't have an issue with that but certainly certain sets that are lit all with led lighting become more complex uh with a film camera you know the big sets are easy i'm lighting them the way i would have lit the rock you know if you had seen if you'd walked up in the grid on top of the dyno market set you know it was it was a lot of light it was very warm up there because of the heat um but it was classic old school movie lighting uh but the sets where it's a laboratory where you where there's no place to hide a light and also the way that colin loves to do what cinematographers hate to do which is to start looking in one

49:59 direction and then turn and look the other yeah i was going to say 360 sets he loves it and he loves to do it and because he knows that i go oh god but i pull it off he likes to do it even more and he especially likes to do it at night which is where it's really difficult um but so i knew that i had to prepare myself for all those inevitabilities so with kevin jenkins the production designer who did a brilliant job we figured out ways to kind of build the lighting in that would work for film because i kept saying to these guys i understand you know the concept art but you what you have to understand is this is not a car this is not a this is not a tesla this is a 1963 cadillac el dorado that

50:45 gets seven miles to the gallon right i mean we are using very old-school technology that is still the most beautiful technology out there but it requires more stuff you know and they everybody rose to the challenge i mean look going to the beginning going to canada out there in northern british columbia with film cameras the only issue was the cold right we had plenty of light so that was great now we come back to london we're building small sets and things like that uh we're utilizing the the uh the resources that are available and just crossing our fingers that i don't have to hide an inky or a tweeny somewhere in a set that i can that i can let the set light itself

51:31 now i know we started a little bit late today do you have a heart out or can can we keep you for another five minutes or so yeah okay awesome awesome i mean i i would like to say the one set that was really cool to do was the locust uh room set ah why well because what we needed to do was create the sense of shadows that would come from when the locusts murmurated colin kept sending us all these pictures of i think it's swallows that murmurate now they fly around so once they get upset and they fly around with um with sam and laura in that room i needed to create the interactive lighting so ultimately what we did was we hid a bunch of rock and roll what they call movers

52:17 up above the top of the set and then we had specific what they call gobos shadow patterns made up and we went through a whole bunch of testing to figure out what would look the most like uh locust the size of air jordans flying in front of a light source and you know that came on on cue the other thing was because the the locusts change color as they get agitated colin wanted a color change in there as well as the light would bounce off of their off of their exoskeletons which was would have been reality so it was really fun it was a really complicated thing to kind of figure out how to do and then once we did it was a case of just hitting the button you know but that there's a lot

53:04 that goes on in a scene like that you sort of don't realize yeah were there any practical effects in the space with them flying around to give them to give you some realistic shadows or or just no no none of them there was nothing flying but certainly the when they go to pull the giant bug out that's an animatronic bug yeah right i mean they were creepy they were you know they were the size of a god rest this whole kobe bryant's tennis shoe you know yeah yeah they were big it's interesting to me to i mean watching that scene you really don't as crazy as it is you don't feel the cgi in that scene like you do with the dinosaur scenes for some reason you just are like you just accept it i don't know maybe it's because they're moving so fast or something but it's so realistic looking

53:51 i think so but so the thing is it would have been i wouldn't say impossible because nothing's impossible but when you see the shadow patterns moving around in there that would be a very challenging thing for a visual effects company to do especially with actors moving through the space yeah so the fact that i could do that gave david vickery a background to kind of animate off of you know and i felt like now we again no one realizes how much work goes into things that you think are so simple uh and that's the beauty of it when no one really notices it um so that was one scene that i think we were all particularly proud of um it worked out really well and then

54:38 obviously we we walked away from that set and they basically repurposed a car wash uh machine that you know washes cars with uh propane jets in it and we mounted cameras and fireboxes for that whole sequence where dodson burns it yeah i wanted to talk about that because not only do you have the fire coming into the room and and you know getting all over them but they now once they escape are flying fireballs all over the place and i i wanted to learn more about the way that you affected that in the lighting like you must have had something floating around to kind of give off that light well we did a bunch of things we we had these things which were called sun strips which were basically

55:25 these lights that lee walters my gaffer built that we would put into a flicker generator to create a fire effect and then i had the effects guys setting duraflame logs on fire and dropping them down on wires no literally way they're flame logs i love when it's the sim when it when it's an unusually simple fix to a problem like that it wasn't duraflame because they don't have those in england but it was the english equivalent and they would take the you know they'd cut the dura flame log into pieces and we would they would be up on a lift and they would literally puppeteer them down oh hey make them drop faster and they just they were like on a fishing rod and they would you know so if we had a few that were in the foreground that were interactive

56:11 uh david vickery and ilm would put the rest in the background oh that's so cool i mean look it's the simplest things and when you've done 40 some odd movies like i have all of which are or most of which are very big you get the i come in with the advantage of having worked with a lot of really great people all over the world right great effects people whether it's the uh john fraser and jim schwarm or the corvalds here who are probably i think the best that i've ever worked with um but what you do is you kind of you're always keeping your peripheral vision open going that's a great idea i'm gonna have to remember that and sometimes i would go to them and i think i was the one that said to them

56:57 because i think we had used dura frying logs a lot on pearl harbor you know for like fire stuff and i said hey can we just use those you know like i don't know what they're made out of anymore but and they're like oh i think they make them out of coffee grinds here with everything with fire gel on them and so essentially you know it was guys fishing with flaming logs that's awesome i'd love to see a picture of that hopefully there's something in the behind the scenes that we can see i'm sure there is i mean the reality is so one of the big difference has been and this is not a i'm not whinging about this but when you do these big movies uh i don't have like somebody said can i send you i have no behind the scenes footage of myself at some point maybe universal will send me a file with pictures of me standing

57:42 next to colin but i don't have anything i i mean i there are i have storyboards but if i send them to you to look at they they'd say oh you broke your nba yeah yeah yeah we're now in a world in which we're both good and bad i i can't you know i can't show i have do i have photos on my iphone of me on the set yes but they're not i can't distribute them you know whereas back in the day of the rock i could have sent anybody anything no one really no one cared as much yeah it's certainly different now in our last couple minutes i just want to um bring up a question from someone in our audience capture video productions on instagram wanted to know the lens choices that you made and if that decision uh relied heavily on visual

58:29 effects or not what were your lenses how did you get to that decision so the lenses ironically were the same lenses i used on the first jurassic world which were a set of primo lenses from panavision which was a very popular set of lenses the primo lenses were made out of out of leica glass but they were panavision lenses and then i had dan sasaki the chief lens designer at panavision um tweak them in a certain way and they were tweaked originally because i had shot pearl harbor in hawaii and i knew that in hawaii you have a lot of contrast you have dark jungles and very bright clouds and believe it or not lens designers can change the amount of contrast that lenses have there's a lot you can do to sort of sweeten the lens for

59:16 whatever your application is and the thing is we love the way those lenses look so much sorry ben um that um i said to dan i want those same sets of lenses with respect to visual effects the answer was no david vickery always said tell the story oh worry about the visual effects now that doesn't mean that oh as the dinosaurs walking forward we didn't boom down to make sure that he left the frame and certainly when we have the real dinosaurs the real animal drawing dinosaurs we use them to frame on so yes they did they did influence the lens races but really and the lens choices were made were decided by how to best tell the story yeah yeah well the film is out now

1:00:03 jurassic world dominion i mean it has like we said at the beginning taking over the top spot i mean it's such a fun movie it looks amazing you guys did such an incredible job it must feel nice to just not only have this be one of the big features that bring people back to the theater um but also just to you know put a nice cap on such an incredible franchise it's great look it's a it's an honor to have been a part of the franchise uh you know i i am i've had a very blessed career ben and don't think for a moment i take anything for granted you know it's a privilege it's a privilege to get to go to work and stand in the rain until four o'clock in the morning sometimes right i mean there's not there are times when you just want to go home but then you think oh my god look what

1:00:49 i'm getting to do right i'm getting to tell colin to hurry up get those actors in that helicopter because it's about to pour and this is the last shot of the movie you know and uh it's it's a look it's an incredible i've had an incredible ride i've been very very blessed to be as successful as i have and i really still love the job you know and i think it probably comes through in the way we chat you know i mean i really have a passion for it i love the idea of a group of people at village coming together to do this it's an incredible you build incredibly close relationships the pandemic certainly changed the dynamic but like i said it didn't break it right people still have the same passion

1:01:35 and they still go to work wanting to do the best they can do i mean one of the things about people working in the motion picture industry is you get the best of the best whether it's a guy who's painting uh scales on a therizinosaurus or it's the guy holding the boom pole who never seems to get in the shot right and you'd be a fool if he didn't stop at least once a day and look around and just admire the skill level around you and the privilege that it is to get to go to work with people like that every day what a great place to end and your enthusiasm is infectious and i really appreciate you coming back on the show john schwartzman of course we'll put a link to everything in the show notes so

1:02:21 you guys can check it out but uh we are already excited for your next appearance so whatever your next project is we want you back that's the school for good and evil there you go charlize thrawn i don't know when it comes out but i think in the fall well hopefully right around that time you'll be back on you'll be back on this show we really appreciate it john thank you so much alrighty ben [Music] i want to give a huge thank you to john schwartzman asc for coming back on the show to talk to us all about jurassic world dominion this guy's work is amazing he's been doing it forever and we are so lucky to have him so thank you john for coming on we're also lucky to have shot lister as a sponsor of go creative show we love

1:03:08 those guys shot lister is the best shot listing application for production hands down there's just that's it that that's what it is and if you email them at gocreativeshow at shotlister.com you can get a free one-year subscription to shot lister pro so please take advantage of that i also want to encourage you to subscribe subscribe to us on youtube where we post our full interviews as well as show shorts that are enhanced with behind the scenes photos and videos so it's a great way to experience all that is go creative show i want to thank connor crosby for producing the show you can find him at ignitionvisuals.com and of course dave siegel over at seagull sound for mixing and mastering and making the show sound so good

1:03:55 you can find us on facebook instagram twitter and of course youtube all things go creative show at gocreativeshow.com and if you want to follow me you can find me on instagram at ben console thank you guys for joining us today and we'll see you next week on another episode of the go creative show podcast for filmmakers