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“Not Everything Could Have Been IMAX”: DP Andrew Droz Palermo on Thunderbolts*
Andrew Droz Palermo (left) on the set of Thunderbolts* In the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe entry Thunderbolts*, a reluctant squad of antiheroes team up to save New York City. Behind the scenes, another superteam comprised of A24 alumni joined forces. As this trailer breaks down, Thunderbolts* is brought to you by “the writers and director of Beef, the cinematographer of The Green Knight, the production designer of Hereditary, the editor of Minari and the composers of Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
That Green Knight cinematographer would be Andrew Droz Palermo, whose resume includes work for both Marvel (the Disney+ series Moon Knight) and A24 (David Lowery’s A Ghost Story and the upcoming Mother Mary). With Thunderbolts* out in theaters now, Palermo spoke to Filmmaker about the necessity of 1.3x anamorphic for the project, end-of-the-movie confidence on a production and the hill he’s willing to die on when it comes to shooting practically.
Filmmaker: To start, dispel something for me. You shot most of the movie on the Arri Alexa 35, but I’ve read a few times now that you also shot on the Alexa 265—Arri’s new, smaller 65mm digital camera. I didn’t think that camera was even available yet when you shot Thunderbolts*.
Palermo: It’s funny, I’ve had a couple people on Instagram write me about that too. I would say 95 percent of Thunderbolts* was shot on the Alexa 35. There are also a few Red Komodo-X shots and Mini LF shots, but we didn’t use the Alexa 265. I think the confusion comes from the after credits sequence, which was shot on the 265 by Tom Sigel and the Russos [while making Avengers: Doomsday].
Filmmaker: You posted a long list of gear used on the movie on Instagram, including drones, helicopters, night vision systems, low angle-prisms, GoPros and “remote heads galore.” What are these Sirui consumer lenses you have on that list?
Palermo: On a previous movie that I’d done with David Lowery—Mother Mary, which is supposed to come out later this year—we shot on 2x anamorphic, and I found that I really wanted to scout in anamorphic if the movie was going to be shot in anamorphic. So, going into prep for Thunderbolts*, I thought “Finding lenses with a 1.3x squeeze to scout with is going to be tough,” but lo and behold, these Siruis [fit what I needed[. They’re nice lenses but inexpensive compared to a $20,000 lens. I think they were maybe $600 per lens. They’re really characterful and incredibly small. [Director] Jake Schreier and I grew to love them, and we kept saying, “We’ve got to find a place for them to actually go in the movie instead of just using them as a viewfinder occasionally or in a crash cam.” I actually just reached out to them to try out a few of their other lines. It’s nice to have great lenses around even when you’re not shooting a movie. You get so little access to the great optics—Panavision, Cooke or Arri Master Primes. I don’t own those things. They’re so expensive. It’s great that these more consumer lenses are doing interesting things.
Filmmaker: Did you need a lens mount adapter for them?
Palermo: Before the movie I bought a Red Komodo-X with an RF mount, so I got the RF mount version of the Siruis. We actually ended up building a viewfinder [with that combination]. I love looking through a director’s viewfinder with the actual lens on it, but sometimes it’s so time-consuming to say, “This isn’t the right lens. Change to the 75. Actually, no, let’s go back to the 65.” You’re looking through the viewfinder and describing what you’re seeing to the director, who’s right next to you. Or it’s vice versa and the director is like, “Wouldn’t it be better here?,” but I can’t see what they actually see. So, I wanted to try to build a Komodo-X viewfinder that we put a zoom on—a 1.3x squeeze anamorphic zoom—and we had it taped off so that it had the representative prime sizes. The great thing is we could record the shot. So, for example, if we were working through a shot with a punch and a kick, then we wanted to pan over to another character, Jake could try one [on this Komodo-X rig] and say, “What about this?” Then I could try one [and show him]. It was a really great process and I’m glad I spent some time developing it.
Filmmaker: For the action scene in the O.X.E. vault where the Thunderbolts are first pulled together, you shot stunt vis in prep. Did you use that Komodo-X viewfinder system for that?
Palermo: I wish we had, but we shot it on iPhones just for speed and ingestion of the media because Jake was cutting it himself. In the future we might consider shooting something like that on the Red or some other camera that I can manage myself, because what you realize is that when the camera is somewhat the proper size, you can’t get it into the same places the iPhone got [when you shot your previs]. Sometimes you do these moves that are just insanely fast on an iPhone, then you have to backwards-program and say, “How the hell are we going to make a Technocrane do that?” It can be a fun challenge, but sometimes it sets you up for a really difficult shot whereas if you knew from the beginning the proper size and weight of the body and optics, it might change the way you would shoot it.
Filmmaker: In that Instagram post you also mentioned using your personal set of Riedel Boleros. These are some sort of intercom system?
Palermo: It’s an incredible set-up. I know it sounds like I have some gear because I recently bought that Komodo-X, but I actually own very little. One of the things that I did invest in is that system. It’s incredibly robust. You can have six channels that are person to person, or you can make groups. On this walkie system, I can press a button and talk to the entirety of the A Camera team and only the A camera team hears me, or I can press another button and speak to only the B Camera team. It’s incredibly modular. You can make little groups. You can also talk over each other. With traditional analog walkie talkies, I have to press and hold a button, say what I want to say, let go of the button and then wait for the person to respond. It just creates a calmer environment and such fluid communication. I’ve seen really robust systems built out. They do it for the Star Wars TV shows where I think the entire crew is on them, including the AD department. That gets scaled way beyond the system that I have. I just have a 10-walkie system.
Filmmaker: Do you use a regular surveillance earpiece with it?
Palermo: You can use different things. You can use ear pods. I use an open ear bone conduction thing, so my ears are never plugged. I can hear what’s going on around me and the Comtek also pipes into it, so I can hear the production audio without having yet another thing in my ear. It used to be that I would be using a headset to talk to the crane ops, a walkie to talk to the camera team, and then somehow I’d need to manage to get on a Comtek to hear the recorded audio, and it was just a mess. This is a real improvement.
Filmmaker: Let’s talk about the opening shot of Thunderbolts*. You start on a close-up of Yelena (Florence Pugh) and the camera pulls back on a crane to reveal that she’s sitting on the ledge of a 2,000-foot skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur. She stands up and steps off the ledge—a stunt Pugh did herself while cabled to a descender rig on the roof. How are you with heights?
Palermo: I’m pretty good with heights. Actually, once we were on the proper part where we were filming, it felt incredibly safe. There were some places in walking up there [that could make you a little nervous], some small catwalks, but they had railings and met Disney and OSHA safety standards, which are incredibly high. We were also cabled in so were we to fall, you would only fall so far and be stopped by a cable. It was a really challenging shot to achieve. We had to build up a decking system on top of the roof because it was covered in solar panels and we needed to get a crane up there and this massive descender rig.
The weather was also precarious when you’re up that high. You’re in the clouds and also in a rainforest, so it’s raining constantly. Someone from Disney Safety had a lightning meter and it was constantly going off. So, we’d have to walk down three stories after we covered up all the gear and wait until there wasn’t any kind of lightning activity. Then we’d all go back up, uncover the gear, get ready and of course there’d be a lightning strike, and we’d have to do that whole process again. We got lucky on the morning that we intended to shoot that shot. There was a window, and we got it. Florence jumped a few times. I can’t remember exactly how many, but more than once for sure. We felt really good about what we got and even picked up a couple things that we hadn’t intended on shooting. Because we were there, we thought, “We might as well get another shot or two,” even though it wasn’t storyboarded and ultimately wasn’t used.
Filmmaker: For the wide shots where the stunt person comes in and deploys the parachute, how many cameras did you cover with?
Palermo: I can’t recall how many it was. There were two full-sized drones in the air, I think three ground cameras, then there was a helmet cam [on the stunt person]. You couldn’t get a helicopter there legally and the permitting time was too long, so we had to do it with drones rigged so that they could be looking upward.
Filmmaker: Were you able to rig Alexa 35s to the drones?
Palermo: Yes. That was important to me. It was like, “I’m not going to go all the way to Malaysia and do this insane opener and shoot it on a consumer drone.” We had to get the real cameras up there. We knew it was going to be an IMAX shot. It needed to look incredible, and I wasn’t going to cut a corner and say, “Yeah, that thing you can get down at Best Buy is fine,” even though some of those drones look very good.
Filmmaker: Since you mentioned IMAX, the Alexa 35 sensor is around 1.5:1, then with your 1.3x anamorphic squeeze you’re basically capturing a 1.9 frame, which is the ratio of most IMAX theatrical presentations. Most times the IMAX sequences have to be predetermined because they’re often shot with different set-ups than the rest of the movie, but since you were capturing everything in 1.9 and then cropping to 2.39 for non-IMAX deliverables, could you essentially determine later which scenes would ultimately play in the IMAX ratio?
Palermo: You could somewhat decide later, and I think Jake would’ve loved it if I would’ve said, “Yeah, we can just decide all of it later,” but that letterboxing area [above and below the frame in 2.39] is a valuable space for gear. If I want to bring a light just a little closer or lower, it saves you time because you’ve got that little bit of padding [on the top and bottom of the shot]. So, not everything could have been IMAX. However, I think quite a bit of the effects were finished in IMAX just in case we changed our mind on anything. A huge thing for me was that I wanted to make sure that it felt like the same film when we went to IMAX because sometimes I’ve noticed in movies that you’ll feel the switch in format in a way that I bump against. They may be shooting film and amorphic for the majority, but then they switch to a digital spherical to do the IMAX portions and it can feel quite jarring. For me, when the movie lives on for people at home in one format—only in 2.39 or whatever it may be—I want it to feel like a cohesive thing. That’s why using the 1.3x squeeze lenses really drove the whole thing because we could either choose to letterbox or not, and it would always look the same. You wouldn’t feel an optical shift. You wouldn’t feel a camera shift.
Filmmaker: The Ultra Panatar IIs that you used for most of the shoot also cover large format sensors, though the aspect ratio would’ve been different with a different sensor size. Did you ever consider going large format?
Palermo: Before Thunderbolts* I had just shot on the Alexa 35 for Mother Mary and really liked it. I’m at a point right now where I’m not as into the shallower depth of field that you sometimes see with larger sensors and the longer lenses that you use as a result. I really like to see backgrounds, to see the environments. I like to feel people within their spaces. I just like the smaller sensor feel. I liked also the high ISO on the Alexa 35. I was happy with the 1600, which is quite clean. Because we were using the small sensor I was able to have Panavision speed up the lenses because it doesn’t need to cover as wide. So, the aperture can be smaller and thus brighter. I think you gain almost a whole stop, which is the same thing I had them do on Mother Mary, where I had them speed up the ALFAs I shot that movie on.
Filmmaker: You shot that high rise jump on one of the last days of production, then the same day you did the explosion shot where Yelena is in the foreground and the lab blows up in a building behind her. That’s a big day.
Palermo: Yeah, insane day—I believe the second-to-last of principal photography. The very final day is the stuff with Yelena landing on the rooftop with the parachute and having that brief fight with the security guard. Florence jumped off the building in the morning and then we company-moved across town and set up a street market that Yelena is walking along. We rehearsed it a bunch of times with the camera move and someone saying “bang” [to simulate the timing of the explosion]. When we were ready and felt confident—or as confident as one could be when you’re about to do an explosion that would take an hour or more to reload—we went for a take. The glass was removed for that floor of the building, and they had cannons pointing out of the windows. They hit the trigger and all this fire and some debris came out. We were happy with that one take. We said, “That’s a great day, everybody. Let’s go home.”
Filmmaker: Would a second take have been possible or was it all-or-nothing?
Palermo: We were prepared to reload, but I loved Jake’s confidence in that moment. I think a lot of directors would have an issue walking away with one take and saying, “Yeah, we got it.” It was sort of end-of-the-movie confidence. Maybe at the beginning of a shoot you might say, “We better get a second take.” But by the end of the movie Jake was just like, “That’s the shot,” and we all basically went back to the hotel pool.
Filmmaker: In between the building jump and that market explosion, Yelena breaks into a top-secret lab. There’s an overhead shot tracking with her as she takes out a hallway of guards and you’ve backlit it, casting these long shadows on the ground. I enjoyed that one.
Palermo: That actually predated my time on the film. It was something that Jake wanted to do. I think it may have even been in the screenplay. Jake and [frequent Rian Johnson cinematographer] Steve Yedlin had started work on that shot together, but then I took over for Steve after the strikes. I’m sure in executing the shot I changed the methodology a bit, but the same concept held true. It was going to be an overhead where we followed the shadows. One thing that I might not have figured out on my own—and this is the brilliance of Steve, who is very technically minded and a really gifted cinematographer—is to have the light follow the action a bit because [if we had not done so] as Yelena got to the end of the hallway the shadows would’ve been so much longer [than when the shot started]. So, the light was put on a Technocrane and moved to keep a somewhat similar distance over the course of the hallway.
Filmmaker: What unit did you use?
Palermo: If I’m not mistaken it was a Fiilex Q10, which is an LED hard light I actually use quite often. I like to use them in bounce situations where I just need a little more fill in a room. I’ll bounce them off a little muslin.
Filmmaker: Let’s go from the first scene in the movie to the first thing you actually shot, the O.X.E vault sequence. This set was built before the strike, so it basically sat dormant for a year before it was used.
Palermo: That’s right, though I wouldn’t say it was entirely complete yet. Of course, the materials aren’t meant to sit that long, so by the time we started shooting the floor in the vault, which looks kind of like steel grates, had become quite flexible and loud. It was breaking in places, and we had to bring Technocranes onto that. When we picked photography back up, I went back through and did most of the finessing of the lighting. There were no lights still in there. They ripped all that out because they didn’t want to have that on rental [during the break]. One of my very first days I walked through with the gaffer Rafael Sánchez and talked about what I was expecting and how I was planning on approaching things. I don’t think it was probably massively different from what Steve Yedlin might have imagined, but we all have our go-to fixtures and placements. Any two different artists are going to have different approaches.
Filmmaker: What are some of your go-to fixtures?
Palermo: The thing that I say often with gaffers is, “If I call for a fixture and you can tell me your reasons why it should be X, Y, Z fixture instead, I’m totally game.” I may sometimes say, “I totally get what you’re saying, but I just don’t like that lamp.” The thing that I bump on most, without naming names, is sometimes the color and chromatic aberration in harder LED lights. For the most part there’s good and bad things about every fixture. I love the Vortexes, all the SkyPanels, the Fiilex10s, which I mentioned earlier. I use a lot of different stuff. I’m not a one-brand-only person. This film was a lot of soft light and very little hard light. We used very few tungsten sources. There were HMIs when we were outside in the New York City street sets, but outside of that very little hard light, which was fitting for the mood of this movie and its overcast feel. It never felt right to blast in sun very much.
Filmmaker: How did you go about lighting that lab? It’s a gigantic set with a ceiling piece.
Palermo: Getting light into the center of the room was a challenge while not making it look too much like a studio. That’s the thing that Jake, in particular, was very sensitive about and I really appreciated his eye for that. He just really didn’t want it to feel too manipulated. He wanted it to feel like a basement of a basement. It should a forgotten space and when it starts to get too designed, it cuts against that. So, in addition to the big bars of light on the wall, I hung some softer, bigger sources adding a bit more soft back light. There’s some SkyPanel 360s ringing the set in all directions. Then, from the floor, the lighting team would drag around two S360s with eight-foot OctaDomes and those would be going through Magic Cloth. That was basically my key, almost always. I would jockey those two lights around—one for front fill, which would be at a lower level, then one for a little more side-y key. The channel along the wall I could dim down if it felt too heavy on the hair light. I also would play with the left and right side a bit. The off-camera side would be a bit more down than the on-camera side. One thing they invested in for the first iteration of the movie is they actually put light in the floor. The set was built a bit raised and there’s light ribbon under that floor, and Steve was going to have an under-light coming through the grates. I didn’t end up using that in the way that I think he was planning on using it, but I did use it to light the backgrounds for a bit of cool light. It gave us some color contrast because everything else was just rust. Usually, I like a bit more monochromatic image if I’m going warm. I want everything to be somewhat warm, but within varying degrees. I don’t like a daylight hit and a warm hit at the same time, at least not for this movie.
Filmmaker: In some of the behind-the-scenes photos from the film I see silver lenses on the camera. I thought the Ultra Panatar IIs were black. What are those silver lenses?
Palermo: Those are actually Ultra Panatar IIs, but ones that were created for us. Panavision made a couple new ones for me in addition to speeding them up. During my initial scouting with Jake, he kept going to the wide side with the director’s viewfinder and I thought, “Oh, we’re going to need some wider ones.” He really likes to be more wide and tight than on a longer lens, so Panavision made us a 21mm, 24mm and 27mm. I think there may have even been a 19mm. At some point [when we got too wide] we had to switch entirely to a spherical. We carried a 16mm spherical and maybe even a 14mm spherical. At certain points—starting with the 24mm, if I’m not mistaken—the Panatars became a rear anamorphic element and not a front anamorphic element. So, they definitely looked distinctly different than the focal lengths down the line.
Filmmaker: That Ultra Panatar II set only has seven focal lengths. Are they going to add your wide lenses to the offerings for the next show that wants to use those?
Palermo: For the most part with Panavision, when you get a custom set, the second it leaves your hands you should just assume it’s been disassembled for its glass and its parts. Even when we came back for pickups, they were like, “Which ones of those do you need us to make again?”
Filmmaker: We’ve talked about some of the bigger set pieces, so let’s go with a smaller scene when Yelena goes to visit her father (David Harbour) at his apartment. It’s lit very low key. Outside of the practicals we see in frame, what are you using there?
Palermo: For the tighter shots we made a custom LED light, which we called “the Bomba” after the electrician that helped build it. I really like the quality of bi-color LiteTile quite a bit and Rafael [E. Sánchez], the gaffer, wanted to make something similar of his own that was RGB and put Magic Cloth in front of it. They made a few different ones. So, for those close-ups [in the apartment], the key light is just this kiss of a custom RGB LED. If there’s anything else in her eyes it might have been a paper lantern that we would put either a one-foot Aputure Infinity Bar or an Aputure MC Pro inside. It’s a great way to get a little soft fill quite close to the actors. I like to hold it next to the actor and look at their eyes to try to find where I would actually want this little catch light to. So, I’d find the spot and a grip would be right there with a stand and lock it in where I found it.
Filmmaker: Did you approach lighting close-ups differently for Florence Pugh versus David Harbour?
Palermo: Not necessarily. I tend to light everyone more or less the same. The only thing I do differently is that the height of the light can change based on someone’s facial features. If you have an actor whose eyes are a bit more sunken in, that light might need to be a bit more eye level, or even a tiny bit lower than eye level. Florence has a really stunning face and can handle light from most directions.
Filmmaker: You get to do your version of the Stark Tower penthouse. Did you go back and look at it in previous Marvel movies?
Palermo: Yeah, I looked at some of the older films. I wanted to stand on their shoulders a bit because it’s a big space and tough space to make look real. I started to look at photography from skyscrapers just try to refamiliarize myself with what the contrast ratio between the inside and outside should be. In actuality, it probably would be another stop up or maybe even two stops hotter outside, but it’s supposed to be a gray, cloudy, overcast day, so we found this sort of in-between which I think is quite nice. I also looked at some stuff from Christopher Nolan, who does that [scenario] quite well. From my understanding, he sometimes just goes into real spaces and shoots quickly enough that they don’t feel the necessity to chase the light. I think in The Dark Knight and even the first Batman there’s some scenes in real skyscrapers in Chicago and you really see that contrast ratio.
Filmmaker: Tell me about this giant New York cityscape translight you used outside the tower set’s windows. Why did you go that direction instead of a greenscreen or bluescreen?
Palermo: I think if we didn’t do the printed backing, we would’ve probably gone with white [outside the windows]. Jake Morrison, the VFX supervisor, and I were very aligned in using colors that were close to what the final image should look like. So, if we were shooting at night and felt that the desert was supposed to fall off into black, we should just use black [instead of greenscreen or bluescreen]. If we were out in Utah in the desert in the day and needed just a little bit of key, we would bring out some sort of sand-colored screen. I think that really helped the comps quite a bit. When you first meet a VFX supervisor, you want to feel each other out. So, I was like, “Could we do gray, black and white?” I love gray because it doesn’t bounce a lot. Jake was willing to go even further. I think there are maybe two bluescreens in the whole movie. There’s one shot when Bob is first introduced and behind him the door drops down really quickly, and we just couldn’t get a good separation from the key screen and his hair. So, for that we brought out a 4’ x 4’ bluescreen. We all felt horrible bringing it out because we were so drinking our own Kool-Aid [with using these other colors].
Filmmaker: The city out the window looks pretty convincing.
Palermo: A lot of it is replaced [with VFX]. For the wides in particular it’s probably fully replaced. I’m sure they rotoscoped every little bit of that room at times, but on a longer lens I wouldn’t be surprised if there were shots where very little was done. When you’re shooting on a translight, the make-believe is much easier to do. When you’re lighting, it feels much more intuitive because you’re not looking at this bright, blazing blue thing. The other cool thing is the reflections [it casts] on all the surfaces and on the glass. It breaks, though, when you’ve got parallax. So, if you’re dollying across the set it can all fall apart.
Filmmaker: How translucent is the material? Are you pushing light through behind it?
Palermo: They can be frontlit or backlit. We backlit this one. It’s slightly perforated, but you cannot see through it. If someone was walking behind it, you wouldn’t see them. There are all kinds of different ones and this one more or less felt like a big, printed canvas. We were just pumping a huge amount of [SkyPanel] S60s from behind in addition to some soft boxes up higher, pushing in more of a sky color.
Filmmaker: Let’s finish up with your New York City street sets. I know you shot a lot at Atlanta Metro Studios, but I read this was shot at OFS Atlanta. What is that? Do they have soundstages or just exterior space?
Palermo: It’s just a giant parking lot. It’s a company that has a massive factory there, but they also have this big parking lot they rent out [for film production]. Some of the Fast and Furious movies have shot there and put up big bluescreens. People have built water tanks out there. We built our New York City street there. We diffused that entire 680,000 square feet. We put up full grid overhead over the entirety of the backlot. It’s something that I had seen done in westerns before, where you just diffuse the main thoroughfare in the town.
Filmmaker: How do you logistically do that? How big are these pieces of diffusion?
Palermo: It was 12 big pieces of cloth on pulleys attached to an exterior truss structure. If I’m not mistaken each one was something like 60 feet wide, but I can’t remember the exact dimensions. It was a crazy idea, but it was story-essential in my opinion as we were exploring Void’s powers and this effect of [people disappearing into] these two-dimensional shadows. Jake referenced some images from the bombing of Hiroshima where people’s bodies left these shadows of ash and these silhouettes that remained on sidewalks and were cast upon buildings. It was terribly haunting imagery. So, my thinking was if there was already a shadow [cast by the actual sun and you’re trying to do this effect on top of it, the illusion isn’t going to work.
I felt it fit the mood of the movie and where we were in the movie for it to be an overcast day, which is not really where these types of movies normally live, in this gray, overcast world. But I really like that we got to go there and that our story allowed for that. So, then it was a question of, how do we do that on this scale? One way would’ve been to bring in four massive construction cranes. They would’ve been there for months on end and those things can rent at something like $20,000 a week each. When you tally that up over the many weeks that we’d be out there prepping, shooting and then doing second unit, it became so expensive that it was clear that my dream of just diffusing the whole thing was actually maybe the most financially responsible option. Thankfully the producing team were down to do it, and we had an incredible grip rigging team and engineers who helped us tackle that approach.
Photo #6
Filmmaker: I think that ought to do it. Anything we didn’t get to?
Palermo: The only other thing I would mention is that one of the things that makes this movie feel different to me is that we went to the places and did the things. That even included the long driving dialogue scene in the desert. It’s a small thing, but a hill that I intend to die on is that I just don’t believe driving scenes (done on stage with LED screens). It was very time consuming for us (to do those scenes practically and on location). It was very hot. It was very uncomfortable. It would’ve been much nicer to be on a stage, but the vibrations you get and the feeling of the camera being on a hard mount and not sliding and panning around was what we were after. It was an approach that speaks to our approach for the broader movie. Yes, it’s harder. Yes, it probably costs a little more money and takes more time, but this is how it’s been done forever and just because there’s new technologies doesn’t mean we have to buy into them. We certainly do use a lot of new technology on the film, but I really appreciated that the whole creative team and the producing team was down for that sort of approach for this film.
