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Shutter Angles
Conversations with DPs, directors and below-the-line crew by Matt Mulcahey
“We Needed Crazier Ideas”: DP Mihai Malaimare Jr. on Megalopolis
Giancarlo Esposito in Megalopolis During his storied career, Francis Ford Coppola forged relationships with some of film’s most renowned cinematographers: Gordon Willis, Vittorio Storaro, Bill Butler, John Toll and Jordan Cronenweth all shot multiple projects for him. But with Megalopolis, Mihai Malaimare Jr. becomes Coppola’s most frequent collaborator behind the camera. They first met when Coppola came to Malaimare’s native Romania to shoot 2007’s Youth Without Youth, the beginning of a low-budget experimental phase for Coppola that included the Malaimare-shot Tetro and Twixt.
Even then, Coppola was already dreaming of his quixotic passion project Megalopolis, showing Malaimare concept art and B-roll of New York City shot by Ron Fricke. With Megalopolis finally coming to fruition, Malaimare spoke to Filmmaker about the evolution of digital cameras, using linoleum for green screen and living/working with Coppola at an Atlanta Days Inn.
Filmmaker: Tell me about how you first met Francis Ford Coppola. He comes to Romania to make Youth Without Youth (2007) and having different DPs shoot actor auditions for him. You were one of those DPs. Were you aware that this was essentially an “audition” for you as well to potentially shoot the movie?
Malaimare Jr.: We all knew it was definitely an audition for the job. I heard about a few of the other DPs that were interviewing and in my mind—I was just 29 years old then—there was no way I was getting the job. The others had so much more experience than me. So, I went into it with the idea that it’s just great that I get the opportunity to work eight hours with Francis. I was completely shocked when I got an email a few months later from him [telling me I’d gotten the job].
Filmmaker: What were you actually shooting for those tests?
Malaimare Jr.: It was a little set on an improvised stage, and if I remember correctly we were shooting two or three pages from the actual script. The main reason Francis wanted to do it that way was because the script had so many parts and instead of going through a normal casting process, he really wanted to see the actors playing different parts. He chose a scene in a hospital. We had props, a little bit of everything, so it was like a real shooting day.
Filmmaker: This was right at the dawn of digital cameras being used in feature work. After you were hired Francis sent you to Sony for a digital bootcamp to learn about their cameras.
Malaimare Jr.: It was quite amazing. He told me from the beginning that he didn’t want to hire a DIT, and the reason was very valid: The Sony F900 was a camera where you would do all the DIT settings in the camera, and because I was operating it would be very useful for me to become my own DIT. So, he sent me to a class called Advanced Digital Cinematography in Burbank for 11 days, which was pretty amazing. At that time there was no Red camera yet and definitely no Alexa. It was just the Sony F900 and 950, a VariCam and the Viper. That was about it. It was so early on that everybody was still trying to understand how to actually shoot a movie on these cameras.
Filmmaker: What do you remember about that generation of digital camera? Were there accepted rules for shooting digital in that era that are now completely obsolete?
Malaimare Jr.: Definitely. It was a very interesting process. With modern digital cameras, you can see so much more in the highlights and the shadows. Those early digital cameras were kind of like shooting reversal film, but with this huge advantage that you could see the image right away. You could alter it to your liking on the fly. Even though I had some experience with shooting some music videos on digital, it wasn’t until I actually did the class that I understood that you could do so much more on those cameras if you did some very basic color grading on the fly in the camera. The main reason was that there was so much compression that if you did all those settings before the image was recorded, you would do it at a higher bitrate.
Filmmaker: Let’s get into Megalopolis. On a typical shoot day, there’s a call sheet in the morning that lists the order of the scenes. You’d start each scene by doing a blocking rehearsal often based on some sort of previs or shot list, then you begin shooting. So, if that’s a normal day on most movies, what was a day on Megalopolis like?
Malaimare Jr.: There were certainly days like that, but there were times when Francis would get an idea overnight or that morning or just by watching the actors rehearsing. The blocking process generated so many ideas where things could shift 180-degrees, and you realized whatever you had planned for doesn’t work anymore. Most of the time I found myself craving for that to happen because everything becomes much better than what you could plan for.
Filmmaker: You are a DP that typically likes to carry a huge assortment of different lenses, but when you’re working in the way you described, do you ever end up not having what you need on hand to fulfill whatever Francis wants? What if overnight he decides a big Technocrane shot would be perfect for the first shot up the next morning, but you don’t have the crane that day? It’s a substantially budgeted film, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t items that you’re only day playing that need to be scheduled out ahead of time.
Malaimare Jr.: That’s true, and even on a big budget you want to make sure that you have the tools you need, but you don’t want to overdo it to where you’re carrying tools that you don’t need. No matter how much he likes to improvise, Francis is aware of that because he’s also his own producer. He’s paying for it. (laughs) So, I don’t think we ever had a Technocrane that we didn’t use. Talking about the script in prep, it became apparent that we would need 30something crane days. What’s great about having a really good grip and camera department is that they can improvise on the fly. If we needed a little bit of a crane move and didn’t have a Technocrane that day, we would definitely have a jib arm and come up with a solution.
Francis and I had established a certain visual style on Youth Without Youth and kept that for [Tetro and Twixt]. A part of that style was not moving the camera. It was a tribute to Yasujirō Ozu. But from the first conversations about Megalopolis, Francis told me that he would like to move the camera a little more while still keeping a lot of our visual style intact. For example, we [still] wouldn’t pan and tilt just to follow the actors, but once in a while we would have a crane shot.
Filmmaker: Tell me about this complex where you stayed in Atlanta while you were shooting. Francis bought an old Days Inn and converted it to have not only crew quarters but screening rooms and an insert studio. After production wrapped, it became a hotel that’s open to the public.
Malaimare Jr.: That’s something that he’s done before. Right after Youth Without Youth, he told me that he had this other project in Argentina [which became Tetro] and said, “We’ll just go there and see how the local crews are, how the locations are and figure out if we can actually make the movie there.” Instead of going and paying for a hotel—we were just five people to begin with—he bought a small house, which became a boutique hotel after the production [wrapped]. That was our headquarters. There’s something amazing about just cooking together. When you do that and you’re living in the same space, even a nice dinner becomes more or less a production meeting. For Megalopolis, it was definitely a much bigger scale because it was a whole hotel, but there was something amazing about having the editorial team right there and having a screening room with a projector where you could watch dailies, and could do all that in the same place you’re staying.
Filmmaker: Roughly how much of the film was shot at Trilith either on stages or the backlot compared to practical spots around Atlanta?
Malaimare Jr.: We actually had a lot of real locations. I would say probably 30 percent was on the stage. This is, I think, my fourth movie I’ve shot in Atlanta. At some point you get used to seeing the same locations and it gets repetitive. It’s hard to find a location that has not been used in so many other movies that were shot there, but amazingly we were able to find things like that. For example, Crassus’s villa was an amazing find, and I think we were the first to shoot there.
Filmmaker: Before you started shooting there were stories out there about this being the first production to use Trilith’s new Prysm virtual production stage. In the end, it doesn’t sound like that was used as much as initially planned.
Malaimare Jr.: It’s interesting because Francis is so into new technology. He’s not the type of director who runs away from that. At the same time, he loves doing things in camera and doing things the old way. I think the Volume is an amazing tool. There’s so many advantages to it, like the fact that the actors can see the environment. That’s a huge help for everybody. But you have to be aware that, first, it won’t solve all your problems and, second, it’s not as easy as being on location or using greenscreen, where you can change your mind and decide you want to look the other way and expect that it will happen in a reasonable amount of time. We did shoot three amazing scenes in there and the fact that the actors could see the scenery, and we could light it with the environment and do video mapping on things like the clouds going in front of the sun, were all huge advantages. It’s just a matter of waiting for the technology to become better and faster at changes. I think that was one of the main reasons we shot less than we thought we would.
Filmmaker: The opening scene with Adam Driver on top of the Chrysler Building is shot on the Volume?
Malaimare Jr.: It is. With the Volume, it’s very important to have some real set pieces. For this scene, the whole ledge that Adam was standing on and the center window were real. They did a pretty good job, with VFX as well, blending everything together, but, again, just for Adam and for us to be able to see the actual image that will be in the background was a huge advantage.
Filmmaker: What did you use for your sunlight source?
Malaimare Jr.: We had a light that is fairly new that I really liked, the R15 from Cineo. It’s a 10K LED and you can video map, so when Cesar (Driver) is stopping time the clouds would stop, and you could see that in real time, and it was also translated in our light. So, all the reflections and the light that was hitting him would change and stop, then start again. But in a situation like that, where we had such a big set piece that couldn’t be moved, we were locked into all those shots.
Filmmaker: That’s a good point. If you want to flip the camera 180 degrees to get a shot in the other direction, that’s going to be difficult.
Malaimare Jr.: We did do that, but we planned for it, and it took four hours not only to change the environment [on the Volume panels], but to flip the set around.
Filmmaker: There’s a high angle shot in that Chrysler sequence looking down on Driver and the city street below. The Volume has panels on the walls and ceiling, but not the floor. Did you just use green screen on the ground?
Malaimare Jr.: Exactly. Actually, our key grip Mackie Roberts had a brilliant idea that instead of just doing fabric green screen, he did big strips of linoleum that were painted green. Those were so easy to roll in and out. That was our quick solution for green screen inside the Volume for shots like that.
Filmmaker: Do you have issues with reflections with the linoleum or is there a type of finish that negates it?
Malaimare Jr.: You do need to use a special paint, but it blew my mind how great and how easy it was. With fabric, it can be so hard to stretch it, and you don’t want people to step on it, but linoleum is so cheap and worked perfectly.
Filmmaker: I’m assuming the scene with Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel above the city standing on a giant clock face was also on the Volume. Coppola actually showed you concept art for that all the back on Youth Without You.
Malaimare Jr.: Yeah, an image that stayed with me for so long. It was such an amazing feeling to be able to replicate it and do that wide shot with the clock face 20 years after I first saw the image. The only difference, if I remember correctly, is the original art piece was more tinted blue, and we decided to go warmer for ours. The whole clock face was a real set piece, and the actors were pretty high up, maybe 10 feet in the air.
Filmmaker: One of the non-Volume sets that seemed like it would be an interesting challenge to shoot is the hanging catwalks where Driver comes in and pitches his dream of Megalopolis being built on a recently demolished site. Was it difficult just to get the gear, crew and camera in the positions they needed to be in?
Malaimare Jr.: There was quite a large steel deck around that set so that we would have stairs and access everywhere. So, I couldn’t put a dolly [on one of the catwalks] but I could use the dolly on the steel deck right next to it. They really carefully calculated the weight of all the people that needed to be on there. What was interesting actually is that they made [those hanging catwalks] somehow a little too [sturdy], so they weren’t really swinging and moving as much as Francis wanted. So, without making things unsafe, they adjusted them to get them to move a little more.
Filmmaker: Another funny story I read about that scene is that the Hamlet speech that Driver delivers was just an actor warm-up exercise Francis asked him to do. Then it ends up in the movie.
Malaimare Jr.: Yeah, and it was one of those things where a lot of times Francis won’t say action or cut. He likes to keep things simpler, and he will just tell the actors “begin.” That was one of those moments where we didn’t even know, like, “Oh, maybe we should roll on this.”
Filmmaker: The circus scene at Madison Square Garden kind of encapsulates all the craziness of the movie. You have a Ben-Hur-esque chariot race, wrestlers, trapeze artists and an Adam Driver drug-induced hallucination binge, all in a five-minute span.
Malaimare Jr.: Francis was telling everybody, “You remember the helicopter scene in Apocalypse Now? This is it for Megalopolis. It’s the Madison Square Garden arena.”
Filmmaker: What are the practical elements for the wide shots, where you see all three rings of this circus?
Malaimare Jr.: [The practical pieces are] just a little bit of the ceiling that was almost entirely replaced and the arena itself. We did some crowd tiling. We had a few hundred extras that we moved around.
Filmmaker: Going back to mixing the old school and the new, is there a story behind that shot where a giant hand comes out of the clouds and grabs the moon?
Malaimare Jr.: Our second unit director and cinematographer was Roman Coppola and he’s so good at in-camera effects. He used a cloud tank for part of that shot and for the moon we had a bunch of elements. We had a glass moon gobo that was looking pretty good, then he found a miniature glowing moon that had a light inside. All those were elements that he shot with second unit.
Filmmaker: Any scenes you haven’t gotten to talk about yet that you’d like to dig into?
Malaimare Jr.: One scene I really love just because of the way we arrived at it is the scene where Cesar is driving, and he’s being followed by Julia [Emmanuel]. Shooting car scenes on LED walls can be amazing, but the problem with that is that most of those scenes tend to look the same because it comes with certain restrictions, and we were definitely trying to avoid that. We started with two days on a stage and treated it like a poor man’s process, just rain and some moving lights. After those two days, we realized that we needed more out-of-it. We needed crazier ideas. Between our main unit and Roman’s unit, Francis started throwing ideas at us, like “Let’s add some small, moving set pieces” or “Let’s add some humans where they’re wearing makeup like statues, then we’ll find a miniature car that will match that proportion.” It grew and evolved into this amazing scene.
