DGA Monthly

6 I D G A M O N T H L Y How to Shoot a Nightmare DGA Board member Nicole Kassell's 2019 DGA Award-winning pilot of the series Watchmen, "It's Summer and We're Running Out of Ice," reenvisions a dark story from America's past — the 1921 Tulsa Massacre where mobs of white supremacists attacked black residents in one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history. In this article, Kassell reveals how she created the stunning sequence. | by Rob Feld 1 Will watches with adoration for the sheriff character Bass Reeves, who is performing justice. We shot the silent movie on a hand-cranked 35mm Arriflex 435 camera, with Super Baltar lenses we chose because they were the oldest reliable glass we could find. It was inspired by the films of Oscar Micheaux. We projected it in the theater so Danny could really respond to the movie. The location was a historic theater in Georgia, intended to stand in for the real Dreamland Theater in Greenwood. We wanted it to feel like the movie had been playing for weeks, with that wonderful scratched, dust-in-the-gate feeling. Then we hear a siren and transition with an elegant pan from screen to boy. When we cut to his mother, accompanying the film on piano with music composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, we're handheld from then on inside the theater, adding to the verisimilitude and visceral nature of the sequence. 1 The blazing title contrasts with the period and announces this historic moment. It says right off the bat: this is inspired by an iconic graphic novel and will be more than a period piece, setting the stage for the mixed-genre, dystopian alternate reality to come. We mixed lenses in this scene — from across the street, long lenses shoot through foreground elements, while we used wider lenses to stay tight to the characters, connecting you to them. We built the buildings to the first-floor level, but anything above that was VFX. The plane and smoke were VFX, too. We were precise with the color palette throughout the show, limiting yellows and reds so they really pop when revealed — for example, in the masks the cops wear. We wanted the world to feel gritty, lived-in, real, and period-accurate. Here, it's sepia and brown earth tones. This was a huge art department event. 2 Nicole Kassell's opening scene to HBO's Watchmen — inspired by the original graphic novel — places within its dystopia a deeply researched recreation of the historical 1921 white supremacist massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma's affluent Black Greenwood neighborhood known as Black Wall Street. The sequence opens with a young Will Reeves (Danny Boyd) — who later in the story becomes the world's first masked vigilante — in the Dreamland movie theater with his piano-accompanist mother, as the horrific events rage outside. His father (Steven Norfleet), a WWI veteran, bursts in to lead them to a garage, where they intend to escape with another family. To do so, they must make it through a chaotic gauntlet of horrors, establishing indelible memories for young Will that will launch his character journey and the series as a whole. To establish from its first moments Watchmen's take on an alternate American history, Kassell and the series' creators blended aesthetic elements from multiple genres and time periods, including heightened and controlled color palettes, score, and titles. "When I read the script," says Kassell, "I felt like I was reading a movie version of the song Bohemian Rhapsody; an opera that goes through all these musical genres. It makes no sense and shouldn't work, but somehow, you're catapulted through time and it ends with this gut punch." To accomplish the complex street scene, which included a biplane dropping pipe bombs, looting, murder, and various Kafkaesque moments, the production recreated the storefronts of historic North Greenwood Avenue in a town outside Atlanta. Shot over a day and a half, the sequence absorbed more than a quarter of the pilot's entire pre-production effort. Kassell, working with her AD and stunt teams, mapped the scene and designed hero vignettes for each cluster of street activity, dividing it into four stretches they could shoot as the family runs from the Dreamland to the garage around the corner. 1st AD Keri Bruno and 2nd AD Lisa Zugschwerdt conducted pre-production rehearsals on the lot with key background actors, who then took point on the day of shooting, guiding those in their vignettes who hadn't attended rehearsal. "This was for performance," says Kassell, "but also to take care of people emotionally. It was our first day of shooting and what we were asking them to perform was so intense. We started the day gathering the company for a blessing by a pastor, to honor and pay respect to our ancestors." Collaborating with DP Andrij Parekh, Kassell says, "We staged it like a play. We would go live with four cameras and follow the primary story of the family's journey, capturing them and their points of view, with the other cameras free to capture events. Some were dedicated to wide shots, some to tight. It was so important that we handle the scene with the utmost reverence — we happened to be shooting on the anniversary of the actual massacre. I get choked up when I think about all the performers who gave it their all, every take. And every time I watch this scene, I see yet another action that I didn't even know was happening. I focused on the primary vignettes, and my ADs and stunt coordinators brought all the layers in between to life and to a whole other level."

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