Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/618780
dga quarterly 29 Christopher Nolan | Batman Begins (2005) >We wanted to give the audience the appropriately large-scale action finale without losing sight of the characters and narrative thread. We wanted a sense of Batman diving down into this apocalyptic scenario. We had two cable rigs, one for the stunt guy and one for the cable camera that would move independently. They would launch in concert and track above Batman as he went down. The visual effects guys said they could have the wings open more effectively, so I said, 'When it's indistinguishable in terms of reality from what we have on the in-camera shot, we'll swap it out.' In the end, it was well worth our while to shoot things in camera as much as possible, because even where we replaced what we had shot with CG, the CG only worked because we had something in camera we could hold to. Mike Nichols | The Graduate (1967) >Dustin [Hoffman] and I understood each other about Ben's inex- pressiveness. He was good at the depersonalization of the charac- ter, he knew about it. We did a lot of fancy camera shit, but nobody has ever mentioned it in 40 years because if you have events that are compelling you're completely unaware of what the camera is doing. In this shot, we panned and tracked to get him to the bed. We're still fairly far back on the set with the zoom. Basically the look of the picture is that zoom. I think we used it on almost everything. I wanted to express the despair of an affair that is just below the waist and he has no real connection to it, so the montage is how it goes on once conversation fails. It's quite extreme but it needs to be. There is no interpersonal interaction. It's not just for good taste that we skipped the sex. Norman Jewison | In the Heat of the Night (1967) >These shots in the car were all handheld, I think. [Cinematographer] Haskell [Wexler] was essentially a documentary filmmaker, ahead of his time. We were working with old Bolex cameras. This was no camera mount, he'd just get in the car. In those days, we never thought of using process shots. We did everything physically. We timed this [reaction] to music that hadn't been written yet, which would eventually play over this. 'In the Heat of the Night,' the song sung by Ray Charles on the soundtrack, wasn't written at this point, but at least I could time things to a rhythm. We did a lot of that kind of shoot- ing. In other words, I just hummed the music and snapped my fingers, and got the rhythm of the shot.