Robert Zemeckis and cinematographer Don Burgess are wizards behind the camera. They’ve captured real magic together with films such as Forrest Gump, Contact, What Lies Beneath, Allied, and now, Here. There’s an infectiousness to their moviemaking, an excitement not just for technology but expressing emotion through dramatic camerawork.
With their latest film, once again the duo leap into the unknown. They tell a story from almost entirely one angle, covering centuries and then different families throughout time in the same home. Even with stillness, Zemeckis and Burgress capture a liveliness in their contained yet epic drama.
With the opening, similar to Contact’s opening scene, you take the intangible and make it tangible. Is that something you and Robert Zemeckis are always talking about?
Well, yes. I mean, fortunately for me, Bob’s been thinking about it for quite a while before I get involved. And so the fun part is that once I read the script, I’ve always got a long list of questions. Of course, after reading the script, then you start figuring out what’s going on in his head. How does this work? And he’s very good at communicating with people about what ultimately a scene is about, breaking it down to, well, what it’s really about is this, and he would call it the red dot.
The red dot of this scene is really about this, and this is where we’ve got to get. And that really helps all of us, I think, do our jobs better when the person making the movie can honestly simplify it and communicate it to his actors, production designer, costume designer, myself, and the editor. So the team just functions better when you have a director like that.
In your previous work, there’s such freedom to the camerawork. Here, there’s one angle, of course. Did it feel restrictive, or in those limitations, did you find a lot of room for creativity as well?
Well, the interesting thing about it is, I think when we started with this, I’ll call it a harebrained idea, because I mean, you want to do what Bob does, which is quite common with every movie that you make with Bob. It’s like he’s got, well, anybody can do it that way, but how about if we do it like this? And you’re kind of like, okay, Bob, explain that to me again. Now, how’s this going to work? So I think when it felt simple in concept, it became one of the most difficult things that we’ve done, quite frankly.
I mean, it was really a challenge to do all of that material and make it work and not move the camera — that adds a whole other dimension that none of us had really thought about before. Because both of us love to move the camera; the camera’s a character in his films. Like Michelle Pfeiffer would say when we were doing What Lies Beneath, she goes, oh, so you want me to dance with the camera, Bob? Yeah, Michelle, that’s what I want you to do. That’s a perfect way to put it. It’s a dance; it’s a choreographed dance. So now, this is a choreographed still frame.
This is telling it all and not moving the camera, letting the camera observe what is going on. So it became far more complicated to make sure that you get all of the drama because there are a lot of tools that we use in cinema to cheat, quite frankly. And there was no cheating or saving the day, in essence, in the editing room. It all had to work on the page, work in the performance, and work in the camera.
So it turned out to be very challenging, and it’s a puzzle just because you can tell how many vignettes, in essence, there are in the movie and how much everything changes every time you cut to the next scene. So yeah, it’s all in the same place, ultimately, on the planet. It’s the same place. And so I think it ultimately became a much bigger challenge than any of us ever thought it could be, but that’s what makes it wonderful.
Is there still a lot of room for spontaneity on the day?
Well, I think that because Bob spent a lot of time rehearsing — much more so than he would on most of his movies — because it’s kind of, in essence, in some ways a hybrid between theater and cinema. And so they did more blocking in the rehearsals, like the entire movie, quite frankly; they went through it. Now, was it in stone? No, it never is. But it gave Bob the confidence that he could, I think, make it work within the frame and make it work for the actors because you think it’s got to work for them too.
They have to feel comfortable doing what they’re doing; otherwise, the false note is going to come out loud and clear. So they have to figure it out, and they have to get a grasp on it, and they have to make it work ultimately. So that would take place in the rehearsals, but on the day, the audibles at the line happen and make it better, make it better.
And sometimes the words change on the day to make it better because it is bringing all those creative minds together and ultimately making what you saw on the screen actually happen. And sometimes I would say, but Bob, wouldn’t it be nice if Tom just kind of turned and was looking over more this way? You think, for whatever reason, my selfish reason of composition, lighting, and I think I might be able to make it a little bit more dramatic. I would throw my little 2 cents in there, and he’d go, I don’t know. Let’s see. Let’s try it. And so those kinds of things do happen on the day. You can always look at it and, at the end of the day, say, can we make it any better?
And that’s when you’ve got to speak up. You’ve got to say, I think it could be a little better if we try this. And he’s always working with his actors, and those actors love him to death. And so they’re like, sure, Bob, let’s try that. And they’ll say, hey, Bob, how about this? I think I’ve got to do this. And they’re all such special actors. They go, yeah, let’s see it. Let’s give it a go. They’re going to come up with some gold and some magic that actually makes it more human, more realistic, more dramatic, and ultimately more entertaining, more connecting the audience to the image.
Like you said earlier, when you read the script, of course you have questions for Mr. Zemeckis. I also imagine you had a lot of questions for the VFX supervisor. When did it start, what was it for you? What is the best way to light them for the post-production process?
And so you are always trying to sort out the technical details of what’s going to actually really happen. There’s an LED wall out the window, so that’s going to have its limitations of what you can do with it. And the box that the movie is in, what format is that? What lens is it going to be? What is the tilt angle? So you experiment until you get to a place where you all feel comfortable that, yeah, this is the best spot, this is where we can make all this work, and these are the little tricks we’re going to do to make somebody walk into a close-up. And that was one of the technical things we had to sort out.
Paul Bettany is very tall, and Tom’s tall, and then the girls are shorter, but at every moment they all have to walk into that perfect close-up. Now, in a traditional movie, the camera’s going to boom up or down to stop in that close-up at the perfect shot. In this case, we had to come up with another way to do that.
I believe it was Bob’s idea because ultimately it’s like, well, we’re going to start with Tom and see where everything ends up. So that’s where it all started. And then we made it work for everybody else, just using kind of old tricks. It’s nothing new. But the way we did it was, I called it the Bettany box. So when Paul would walk forward, he’d actually walk into a trench.
If Tom walked forward, he would stay on the actual stage or the set floor. And then as all the ladies walked towards the camera, we built them little ramps so that they would just, in essence — and you can’t detect it when you’re watching the frame — that they’re going up or down, right, because it’s very subtle. But that’s what you need. You need inches here and there to make that frame perfect so that when they stop in that close-up, it’s going to work.
So little technical details like that we had to work out so that we had it all worked out for every shot in the movie before we ever started. We couldn’t get halfway through the movie and say, how are we going to get this shot? So we had to kind of work through everything that we thought we were going to do when we started. Now there were surprises along the way, and we were able to deal with them, as you do in all filmmaking. But we had a really good, solid plan, I think, ultimately, when we were done with the prep time to kind of organize and think and sort out how we were going to make the movie.
For you and Robert Zemeckis, is there always the desire to push the envelope?
Yes. I think for Bob, it has always been, what really gets him going is figuring out a way to do something in traditional storytelling. Perhaps it can turn into making Fords and Chevys. You can be on the factory line, and you can make a hit movie. But to get him going, to get him excited about a project, I think he has to see something in it that pushes him and what he does to another level.
He’s always searching for this way to communicate an idea and tell a story that, in essence, perhaps just hasn’t been done before, quite frankly, hasn’t been done. We haven’t. We haven’t invented that technology yet, Bob. He says, come on, Don, when are we going to shoot one digitally? We’re still shooting on film. What’s going on here? It’s not ready for us, Bob. It’s not ready. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
It’s not ready yet. But he would push me for years to move beyond sprocket holes, as he called it, in a gate, 24 frames per second. Come on. Aren’t we past this yet? So he pushes, I think, because the way his mind works, he can see it all from the beginning to the end of the movie. He just sees it all, and he’s worked it out in a lot of ways that he can communicate with everybody.
At the end of a shot, he’ll just get out of his chair and casually say to me, I think it’d be better if the camera left a little bit later on that line. And then he’ll turn to the prop guy, you know what, the prop, do we have a bigger one? And the wardrobe — the shirt seems a little too bright. Do you have a darker one? And Tom, could you say that line just maybe… And then all these thoughts are going on while the rest of us are looking at the shot going, okay.
Yet he can see that and everything else that’s going on in that frame at the same time. So he’s just working at a wonderful level that sees, sees so much. And you can see it in his filmmaking.
Here is now playing in theaters.
