Director Paul Greengrass Enjoyed recreating real crisis, whether it is to put the audience aboard a commercial aircraft that was cut on 9/11 (“United 93”) or a container ship exceeded by Somali pirates (“Captain Phillips”). But his journey to discover how to recreate 2018 Camp Fire that engulfed paradise, California for “The lost bus“Filled with detours.
“The truth is that I went in one direction as I prepared the movie and then went radically opposite way,” Greengrass said Filmmaker tolkit podcast.
“I wanted to (Ville) make a movie about a wildfire that is the best it can be done, so far, with the available technology,” he said. “And the reason for this is that the world is burning, the fires are getting worse and more (often), so I wanted to find a way to convey the intensity from how these things feel and how it can feel to be in one.”
But he had found the answer when he participated in U2’s engrossing concert at The sphere In Las Vegas, which used the unique arena’s 160,000 square meters in size, Wraparound management display to transport the audience to the desert.
“It is completely extraordinary how realistic it is. The technology has come to the point where you really think you are there. It is eerie and unpleasant, even if you know you are sitting in a place in a theater, you feel you are in the desert,” Greengrass said. “So I was very much taken with it and thought,” Ok, what we have to do is have an experience of sphere type around the bus. “
This meant embrace the LED virtual stages that were pioneers of the Star Wars series “The Mandolorian.” Greengrass and his team got to work and spent pre -production dollars on feasibility studies and tests. But for the director who cut his teeth and made documentaries, he could never make the technique work for him.
“I didn’t come to believe it because my soul as a filmmaker was not really in a real world,” Greengrass said to shoot at virtual stages. “So we then went in the opposite direction.”
“The lost bus“The place team found an abandoned campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The huge area delivered production with different terrain, several winding tree -lined roads and free fabric to shoot with moving vehicles and to light their own controlled fires.
“It made it possible for us to have a bedrock of reality,” Greengrass said. “We could put gas pipes so we could have controlled flames that were safe. We didn’t burn things like (sent) particles in the atmosphere that could create a forest fire, and we could control all dangers.”
The production lit in the foreground and around the bus that could be reinforced by visual effects. Greengrass claimed that these were as real as the flames on the set.
“People talk about CGI as in computer -generated images, but the truth is now some of them not,” Greengrass said. “In this case, we went and shot a thousand pieces for different fires that worked in different ways, different smokes that work in different ways.”
Visual Effects Supervisor Charlie Nobles Team created their own controlled burns to film In an attempt to capture the wild and wide range of the unpredictable behavior of the fire. Paradise Inferno’s movement, color, power can change in a second.
“It was a real image poison with real image via a computer to create a seamless whole,” Greengrass said. “It was the most accurate work I have seen. We would try a few pieces and then say,” It’s not right “and (noble would) have to go and shoot other pieces.”
Perhaps the most accurate adjustment that Greengrass felt compelled to make came in the form of light. Specifically, what happens when a fire produces so much smoke that it blocks daylight.
“You block the sun, but you have the flames,” Greengrass said. “It’s a very strange light. It’s both dark and light at the same time. You can see, and yet there is no light.”
Greengrass said that the only direct comparison is the rare, volatile moments of a solar eclipse, but the closest analog is the 45-minute window before sunset-aka, “Magic Hour.”
“It made me think that the only way we could successfully make this movie (excluding the beginning and end of taking place in the non-smoked daylight) was that it had to be shot at Magic Hour,” he said. “It’s only 45 minutes at the end of the day, but that’s what we did: we actually shot the majority of this movie on a small part of the time.”
This meant a much different way to approach the shooting day. The rollist and crew would arrive late in the morning and spend six to seven hours repeating all vehicle movements, stunts, gas burns and actors staging (including the child actors on the school bus with Matthew McConaughey and American Ferrera). Then, rather than dividing the action into different camera settings or images, Greengrass would strive to get two or three longer shoots of the day’s action, which could later be cut together with additional, tighter coverage of the roll shot on a sound step.
“It gave the film its dramatic emotional intensity in terms of performance because it was a kind of once and only once the type of experience, in the light, rather than,” shot four, now we continue to shoot seven, “and the orthodox way you can do it, so that is the elements,” Greengrass said.
“The Lost Bus” is now available on Apple TV+. To hear Paul Greengrass’s full interview, subscribe to filmmaker Toolkit podcast on AppleThe SpotifyOr your favorite podcast platform.
