“[The title sequence] was always supposed to be a very abstract version of key moments in the book and about Lisbeth. It was really supposed to be her nightmare sequence. Being a hacker is such a big part of her personality and who she was, we needed some imagery for that but it’s kind of hard to represent that abstractly. So the ones we came up with were the keyboard elements.” - Tim Miller, title sequence creative director for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

From left: Scorsese and Schoonmaker on 1970’s Woodstock; Schoonmaker’s second Oscar win, for The Aviator; the duo in 3-D glasses on the set of Hugo.

“It’s really Marty’s vision,” she says, using a jog wheel to move the film forward and back like a DJ cueing a record. “Scorsese has very defined ideas about how to shoot a scene, and he’s an editor himself—we cut together. It means he’s constantly thinking about my problems while he’s filming. It’s wonderful to work on footage by someone who understands how to get it to cut right, which a lot of directors don’t.” Schoonmaker feels so strongly about this that she has repeatedly tried to give Scorsese the Oscar she won for Raging Bull, “but he won’t take it,” she says in a resigned tone. (via Thelma Schoonmaker, The Woman Behind Martin Scorsese - Read More on ELLE.com)

(via Art of the Title)

A discussion with Producer Cara McKenny and Creative Directors Steve Fuller and Mark Gardner.

Art of the Title: Tell us about the initial development of this project.

Cara McKenney: This was a new show, and a period drama at that, with no-name actors, on a network with no success in developing original content—wow, it’s so crazy to think that I am talking about AMC, right? But remember, this was in 2007! Mad Men wasn’t on billboards in Times Square and doing multi-million dollar cross-promotions with Banana Republic….

There were tons of red flags in terms of the first information I received about this project and I was wary until, of course, I saw the pilot and read up about Matthew Weiner. The show was gripping and emotional, complex and funny—it took my breath away. By the closing I knew there wasn’t a creative instinct in me that could have turned it down.

Matthew had a distinct point of view and came to us with a compelling brief: A man walks into an office building, enters his office, places his suitcase down and jumps out the window.* But that never makes it simple to push through.

How do you ensure moving the camera is truly part of your storytelling? 

J.J. Abrams: Obviously, the goal is to always to get the coverage that the scene requires. Sometimes the scene requires hyper-kinetic action, and other times it requires absolute stillness.But it’s always about trying to tell the story in the most emotional way possible. So there are some shots where you want to start off with a giant mass of people from 50-feet high, and by the end you want to be right up close with your two leads, moving through a crowd with them. There are other shots where you want to establish the location, and do a medium master before you come in, and by the end of the shot, have a closeup of your hero. These are things that certainly the Technocrane allows.But cutting out of a Technocrane move can feel jarring, unless you’re cutting in to something that has an equal sort of energy, which is what we tried to do. If you can compose and choreograph a shot in such a way that by the time you’re done you’ve done the work of a couple of setups, that’s a great thing.

You introduce energy by moving the camera in different ways. Like pushing the camera in through a busy foreground, right up to your subject. 

J.J. Abrams: The fun of moving through a shot is not just to prove that you got the crane to do it or the dolly track, but that it provides a kind of 3D experience for the audience, without having to do 3D. Having something that is a point of view, and pushing through some foreground to take advantage of the parallax, activates the audience’s brain, because they really feel, “Oh, I’m moving through this space.” And you don’t need glasses for that. It allows you to move through the Z-depth of the shot, not just the X and Y.

The complex set piece was done in two four-day shoots – a “pre-crash,” where the kids can be seen making their own film, and a “post-crash,” after [production designer Martin] Whist re-dressed the set. Production captured many shots, both during and after the crash; for the actual impact, a total of nine cameras were used: four manned, and the remainder unmanned crash cams, such as Eyemos, placed in harm’s way (though all survived undamaged).

The sequence was planned out with Visual Effects Producer Chantal Feghali and Industrial Light Magic Visual Effects Supervisor Kim Libreri (with effects produced under direction of ILM effects legend Dennis Muren). ILM Animation Supervisor Paul Kavanagh created a simple animatic previsualization.

“It was mainly to block out basic action beats,” Libreri explains. “But J.J. had this great idea, given that it was such a large scale environment. Instead of pre-determining everything, he knew what the basic beats were, which he had drawn on little mini-boards. That was our beat sheet, to ensure we were shooting everything in the right order.”

Whist also built a 6-foot by 3-foot model, which enabled the team to envision where things such as cranes, crash cams and explosion events would be set.

“That was where we discussed the best angles for the camera, and where the kids could run,” Libreri recalls. Abrams still added cameras/moves on the actual day, insisting he didn’t want to bleed the scene of its reality through previz and storyboards. And Muren concurs, noting that a lot more was discovered on the day than VFX had anticipated. “You really want to leave directors and cameramen open to what they feel on the set,” Muren says. “Because the movie’s better that way.”

The crash, filmed on the “post-crash”-dressed set, involved capturing the “locomotive” (a green screen vehicle with a headlight, like that of the CG vehicle that would replace it) acting as a ram and smashing through the depot set. The ram was pulled through at a fairly fast clip (about 40 mph) by a cable attached to a crane.

Stationary cameras, of course, were not a part of the equation. In fact, Carr-Forster, shooting from the 50-foot Technocrane on the Maverick, was able to keep the scene’s focus on the kids, despite all the wild mayhem.

“So many other directors would use the explosion as the primary object,” Anderson says. “But J.J. is the kind of storyteller who uses the people as the primary object, and the explosion is almost secondary to the scene.” Anderson’s B-camera was on Steadicam on a dolly track, following both the train ram and the kids, and being pulled by grips moving at the ram’s speed. Libreri says it was like “a Ben Hur chariot Colin was on, to get some high speed motion, following the kids.”

(via Mystery Train : ICG Magazine / Showcasing the members of the International Cinematographers Guild)

“On Star Trek and MI3, I was A-camera and Phil [Carr-Foster] was B-camera, and on this film, he’s A and I’m B,” [Colin] Anderson explains. “It’s great, because there are no egos with us. We try and stay out of the way, and still get something that’s complementary.”

Adds Carr-Forster, “We know each other well. What we do is try and hide the cameras somewhere and talk to each other – ‘Do you see me here? What about if I’m here?’ It’s all done quickly,” though, as Anderson laughs, “We still shoot each other sometimes.”

Abrams’s energetic visual style added another layer of complexity that inspired a mantra for the entire team: “With J.J., the camera is always moving,” notes Anderson. “Anything that makes the shot feel alive, he wants.”

And at the core of each scene is the A-camera master, which Abrams describes as the “hero camera telling the main story.” A hero-cam, that is, of course, never a static, wide master, augmented by close-ups and cut-ins.

“There is always an effort to make sure every shot – from the beginning to the end of the master shot – is very interesting,” [DP Larry] Fong laughs. “And by ‘interesting,’ I mean elaborate and complicated.”

“[The master] is invariably an intricate move, whether we’re on a Steadicam or a Technocrane or a dolly,” Anderson adds. “That’s because J.J. designs these wonderfully elaborate moves that tell so much in one shot.”

The A-camera on the Technocrane often sat on a Chapman-Leonard Maverick™ Mobile Arm Vehicle (M.A.V.), giving Abrams even more flexibility in his shot designs. The rubber-tired Maverick is capable of moving at high speeds, and as Abrams describes, was something that, “in many cases, proved its value in its flexibility and ease of use.” Operating a Panavision® Millennium XL, usually outfitted with an anamorphic 40mm Primo or 60mm close focus lens, Carr-Forster would descend from high above to a mere foot from one of the child actors in a single move. One such example begins with a vista of the train depot as the kids arrive in a car. The crane pushes in over the tracks and, as the wind picks up and script pages fly from the hands of one of the kids, the camera pushes in on his face.

“These [type of] shots are remarkable,” Carr-Forster relates, “because they bring you from well outside the canvas all the way into the scene.” (via Mystery Train : ICG Magazine)

ICG: What do you remember from your days making Super 8 movies?

J.J. Abrams: It’s all I really did back then. I would go to restaurants, ask if we could shoot scenes, and then bring friends in and shoot stuff. I’d do chase scenes that went all over the place and crazy stunts. Once, my dad came in and was watching something I was editing. He got furious with me, because I had a friend hanging over a 4-story parking structure. It was a dummy that we’d rigged with fishing lines, so the legs would kick. But it looked real! And my dad was enraged that I would risk a friend’s life for a movie. I had to prove to him that I would never do that.

Can you compare the experiences of when you did Thumbsucker to now? What did you learn about filmmaking?

Mike Mills: I learned a ton during Thumbsucker. Maybe the thing I learn the most or the thing I enjoyed the most was the actors, and creating an environment where an actor can do things that surprised themselves and you. Creating an environment that’s inviting and unpredictable, it’s inviting of reactivity to what’s happening in the moment. And that I can do that, I can provide that. Something about me I don’t know why, I just, I can, I’m good at doing that or I can, I like it, put it that way, I like it, and they seem to respond and I love that. I’m formally, I’m a very shy person, you know like very, I’m not shy anymore, but I used to be very shy, and so what an actor does blows me away. When they’re doing it and when they’re really free over there, I’m like probably their best audience in the world, like I am just so impressed, and I, I’m so envious, I wish I could be like that, I wish I could, that seems so fun and free and mind-blowing, how do you do that? And so, creating that environment is maybe what I learned last time.

And this time I think it’s being braver about trusting that you can tell a story that’s really concrete and specific in that it will be shareable. And trusting that it could be funny. Like, I feel in this one I embrace that my family’s funny, I can be funny and like trying to just be more comfortable about that.

What was the rehearsal process like?

MIKE MILLS: I do one scene, at the end of the day, and we just do it once, especially with actors like Christopher and Ewan. I don’t want them to get used to it or develop a set idea of how the scene is going to be. So, we had lunch and then I said, “You’re going to go to Barney’s.” I do all of these improvisational experiential things that are wild and nutty, but it gets a good vibe going. So I said, “Ewan, you take Christopher to Barney’s, and Christopher, you’re gay now and you want to make yourself attractive to younger men.” I made a mistake and said, “Ewan, here’s 300 bucks, get a scarf or something small.” They were alone. That was the key thing. They were having their own time together.

On the way over there, Ewan had on skinny jeans, and Christopher was like, “What are those? They’re awfully skinny and they’re awfully tight.” And, Ewan was like, “Well, Christopher, they’re called skinny jeans.” So, they entered Barney’s, and Ewan headed over to the scarf department and Christopher was off in the jean department, and Ewan can’t wrangle him. I only gave them 45 minutes, but Christopher ended up staying at the jean department for over an hour, trying on every kind of pair, and Ewan was getting pairs and bringing them to the dressing room. He spent over $1,000 that Ewan had to pay for, but he wears all the jeans in the movie. Those kinds of messes end up being really great bonding experiences. I was trying to create a situation that would be very much like the experiences that the characters have in the movie. Hal is always going off shopping or living his life, and Oliver is often in tow, trying to help or keep up or make sure he’s okay. (via Mike Mills Interview BEGINNERS)

How did this whole thing start for you, as far as opening yourself up to telling something so personal?

MIKE MILLS: For me, I love so many other artists that do this. I love being the audience when people are doing this. The radio show This American Life was a huge thing for me, with how honest, open and revealing people are on that. Leonard Cohen was really writing about his life, in many ways. I like Woody Allen when he was more real, from Annie Hall to Manhattan. That’s really him trying to figure out relationships. Fellini’s 8 ½ is a real personal story, or [Allen] Ginsberg’s Howl. I’ve always loved this terrain, or people who do this. In lots of ways, their bravery before me made it easy for me to say, “I want to be like that.”

I love the autobiographical quality of that. It makes it more communicable to me. It doesn’t make it smaller, it makes it easier to grab onto and relate to, and it makes it more true-feeling. There’s another amazing film, called Lovefilm, by István Szabó. It’s a Hungarian film from 1970, and it’s all about memory. That was a big influence on me. You just know it’s real. You can just tell this stuff happened to this person, but it’s a story and you can also totally enjoy it as a story. So, I had a lot of models. And then, it was when my dad was dying that I was like, “There’s something here. The story of my parents’ marriage is so weird, wild and confusing, and there’s all the bravery that my dad is expressing right now. He’s willing to risk so much and make himself so vulnerable.” I knew I wanted to talk about that, somehow.

This film was born out of grief, but is ultimately a very hopeful and sweet story. Was it important for you to convey that?

MILLS: Well, to me, that is grief. My experience, with both my parents, is that grief has a lot of down, sad things, but I was also really emotionally raw, in the first year after each of them past. Flowers smelled more intensely, my relationships were hotter, and I was more willing to risk. I was going for it a lot more. I was “unsober” and I wasn’t playing by my rules.

There is a magical quality to that. There is a drunkenness to grief, which is good. I feel like the humor in the film, the whimsicalness, the hopefulness and the positivity were really part of my real experience. It wasn’t like my dad was mowed over by a car, by surprise when he was 50. That would be such a different experience and maybe a different grief. I don’t know. The first thing I did when I started writing this was that I started studying a lot of rag piano, which comes from New Orleans, and all those funeral marches. They’re these really jubilant songs with people screaming and hollering, and that felt really right to me. That felt not forced, at all. Yeah, there’s great sadness and life doesn’t work out like you would want, on a lot of levels, but there’s no need to feel all alone. This happens to everybody, so there’s no self-pity. This is the ride that humans are on, and all of it is essential for our natural part of it. (Mike Mills Interview BEGINNERS)