|
|
MI6 looks back 20 years at the making of A View
To A Kill with American Cinematographer magazine.
|
|
24 Frantic Hours On "A View To A Kill"
21st May 2005
By Russell Ito, from the July 1985 issue of American Cinematographer
Set on the southern anchorage of the Golden Gate Bridge, San
Francisco`s Vista Point is a perennial tourist spot, but Ned Kopp
is not a tourist, and he was not enjoying the view. Kopp, whose
company handled the San Francisco logistics for A
View to a Kill, was alarmed; the equipment hadn`t arrived
at the location. "Well, we`re on a tight schedule,"
a considerably calmer Kopp explained later, "a little bit
because of weather, and a little bit because of the number of
people involved. We had all kinds of maps, schedules, plans -
all colour coded, and the people we probably paid the least attention
to were the US guys - particularly the locals, San Franciscans,
because everybody knows where the Golden Gate Bridge is - I can`t
imagine anyone who wouldn`t. "Now the Golden Gate has a south
end and a north end, which probably most people know. By the dumbest
accident, the equipment ended up on the wrong end. So here`s the
whole crew - all the UK guys, everybody who should not know where
to be - all in exactly the right place, and more than a small
group was at the other parking lot on the north side." Fortunately,
the Golden Gate can be crossed in a matter of minutes, so after
a brief scramble, the trucks were directed to the proper site.
In that time, Kopp wasn`t the only one having anxiety attacks:
"During that short period of time, the fog was coming in,
and the UK people were getting very, very concerned that they
were in the wrong place." Learning fast, he made the incident
and object lesson: "That happened to us on the first day,
and after that, everybody got maps - even if they said they lived
on the Golden Gate Bridge." For Kopp and Nancy Giebink, who
together form the core of Ned Kopp & Co., that was the beginning
of a punishing, 21-day, $5 million dollar shooting schedule that
saw them working around the clock for the entire shoot. The schedule
- including five days of shooting 24 hours a day, with as many
as four units filming at the same time - provided ample proof
of Murphy`s Law. In addition to signing checks, Kopp and company`s
responsibilities lie in the area generally referred to as "below
the line" (i.e., variable with time). These assignments include
below the line producing and packaging (i.e. the gathering of
production personnel, including technicians, location scouts and
managers, unit coordinators, etc), plus production management
- all invisible to the viewer, but indispensable to the producer
and director.
Although A View to a Kill was their first Bond
picture, Kopp and Giebink brought formidable credits with
them, having recently worked on Shoot the Moon, The Right
Stuff, and just having wrapped Birdy, on which Kopp was the
associate producer. Speculating on his involvement, he felt
the two Alan Parker films (Shoot the Moon and Birdy) may have
tipped the scales in his favour since both Parker and Eon
Productions (the Bond Production Company) are based at Pinewood
Studios outside London. In the fall of 1983, a full year before
the San Francisco shooting, Kopp and Giebink held their first
meetings with the Bond company. |
|
Above: Part of the Golden Gate Bridge
is recreated in scale on the Pinewood back lot. |
Heavily involved in preparing Birdy - then only two months from
the start of production - their schedules didn`t permit a great
deal of contact with the UK visitors, leaving much of the location
scouting to associates Rory Enke, and Steph Benseman. After a
week of scouting, and additional meetings, the Bond team left
the Bay Area without having made a firm decision, in part because,
at that time, a finished script didn`t even exist. While some
general story ideas had been agreed upon, the final screenplay
would be tailored to the specific locations selected; as a result,
the location scouting took on far greater importance than in most
other productions. Many months later, it would have a tremendous
effect on Kopp`s work.
Birdy kept them busy well into August, when they moved over to
A View to a Kill. Meanwhile, location scouting for the Bond movie
continued at various sites around the world, the script remaining
changeable. Six months later, a major accident had a huge impact
on the San Franciscans` efforts. On June 27 a disastrous fire
swept through the Bond sound stage at Pinewood, fed by exploding
gas cylinders that had been used to fuel some campfires on a large
forest set for Ridley Scott`s Legend, the blaze leveled the structure.
Even though the Bond company had not actually planned to use the
stage, the repercussions for A View to a Kill were enormous. Because
the labor force at Pinewood is a permanent fixture that isn`t
normally expanded with freelancers, the workers who otherwise
would have been available to the Bond movie were withheld for
the completion of Legend. Along with the shortage of labor, the
designers now found themselves also confronted with a shortage
of stage space of the planning and building of sets, putting a
further crimp into the schedule of a picture that still did not
have a locked down script.
|
|
Just over a month later, with Birdy wrapped, Kopp flew
to London for a week of meetings on the Bond picture. Based
on the scripts he had been sent and conversations with the
principals involved, he had a general idea of the schedule
that would be required. "Originally, they were going
to shoot in the US and London at the same time," he
said.
"They would shoot their first unit in London and they
would have a second unit shooting plates, establishing shots,
and things here. That second unit would then shoot dialog
here with Roger Moore, Tanya Roberts and a few other people,
then the principals would go back and the second unit would
complete the chase. "So they`d send one foreign crew
here, we would then hire another crew - or two, as necessary
- and that group would then do everything. "At that
time, we were planning on normal days.
Left: Roger Moore was in San Francisco
for only 8 days of shooting.
|
Normal being maybe 12-hour shoot days with an hour to get there,
and an hour to get away - roughly 14 hours. That would be a week
or so of first unit and a couple of weeks of second unit - chase
stuff. It was about 15 days, and then probably a week or so of
plates, backgrounds, pass-bys, and establishing shots - nothing
with people, just all pretty pictures of the Bay Area. "That
would all start around the end of September and go for three to
five weeks. As it turned out, we went three weeks, because we
went around the clock."
Arriving in London in the first week of August, Kopp visited
the production in progress. "They were already shooting first
unit on the stage at Pinewood, so they`d been building sets for
that for about a month or so. They were also shooting in Paris
and they were either finishing up or still shooting in Iceland.
"As I understand it, they`d started shooting in Iceland before
they even had a finished script, but they had to do it, because
that was the time of year when the glacier was going to do this,
and the snow was going to do that... a lot of things were going
to happen that they had to get going on." Although some script
changes were still being made by this time, the story was - more
or less - settled, but unlike most projects, Kopp found more information
in the storyboards, since they contained the action sequences
that would not be changed.
Reading the script and looking at drawings, he realized that
his work would play a major part in shaping the picture itself.
"When I first read the script it said "a cable car chase,""
he remembered. "Well, the only time you could clear a cable
car run - that is, shooting on the tracks - would be once the
cable cars closed down. "You wouldn`t have a prayer of going
to Muni (S.F. public transit) and saying, "Hi, we want to
shoot on a Saturday afternoon, at the height of the tourist season,
and we`ll just shut down your cable cars, and we`re going to control
them for two or three days." "But you do have a chance
if you go to them and say, "We would like to do a cable car
chase. It feels like it`s prestigious for San Francisco, and it`s
going to show the cable cars in their best light. It`s going to
show San Francisco in a very positive way, and we shoot it after
you close down at night, from 12:30-1am to 4:30-5am, in the timespan
of four or five hours, and instead of shooting it all in a day
or two, we shoot it over three or four nights, do you see any
problems with that?" Well, then the resistance is far less
than even suggesting shooting it during the day." Because
of the logistics involved, Kopp made it clear that the stunt work
- the bulk of the San Francisco shooting - would have to be filmed
at night. This then had a "trickle down" effect that
limited where the shooting could take place. "At one time
- I wasn`t involved in it - Remy Julienne, the French stunt coordinator;
Arthur Wooster, the second unit director; and Peter Lamont, the
designer, came to San Francisco - on their own - and scouted,
and they found places that they really loved for doing the chase.
They found Broadway Hill, Divisadero, Filbert - all in Pacific
Heights, where the Bullitt chase happened." In addition to
being one of the hilliest areas in San Francisco, Pacific Heights
is one of the wealthiest and most established, with wide avenues
and stately mansions. "When I went to Paris, and Remy showed
me the photos of where they talked about a chase, I said, "well,
you won`t have a prayer. We couldn`t possibly use that area. I
think we could get you some pass-bys. I think you could get the
fire engine coming down some of the hills and some police cars
following it, but we`re not going to be able to block that off
and tie up the area crashing cars." "Then they asked
when and what we could do, and I said, "we can control this
at night, and do that at night..." which immediately ruled
out Pacific Heights, because you can`t control it during the day,
plus it`s residential, and you can`t be there after ten at night.
If you got a waiver of any kind, then you could maybe be there
to 10:30 or 11 o`clock - but then you`re dead. The police department
stays pretty tight to that curfew - you can`t be in those neighbourhoods
before seven in the morning. So as we saw what they said they
wanted to do, we then tried to direct them toward the times of
day and areas we felt we could clear."
Above: San Francisco City Hall |
|
As scripted, the fire engine-led car chase began near
city hall, further supporting the argument for night shooting.
"You can never close Market Street (the main thoroughfare
through downtown San Francisco)," Kopp explained. "City
policy is you can never block streets. But if you go there
at 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 o`clock in the morning, the buses are
no longer running like they were - there`s one every half-hour
or 45 minutes; the taxi-cabs are not busy. There`s much
less traffic.
"Downtown San Francisco is not a residential area,
so if you stay away from the hotels then you can pretty
well smash and crash and bang cars all night long and never
interfere with the police or the fire department or whatever,"
Kopp says. By the middle of September, matters had become
so impacted that 24-hour shooting was the only solution.
Still feeling the consequences of the fire, the production
was forced into shuttling between the stages in London and
various international locations just to keep shooting. "They
went from Paris to Chantilly," Kopp explained. "They
then went back to London for two weeks, and then they came
to the us. While they were in London, they had to shoot
those particular sets - and finish with them, so that they
could take them down. Then, during the San Francisco shooting,
they`d build more sets." |
What made the marathon approach acceptable was that it had little
impact on the budget. "These were always separate units,"
Kopp said. "Now whether the separate units were in a line,
or whether they all happened to be at the same time, 24 hours,
didn`t really affect the numbers an awful lot. The day crews shooting
the plates were going to cost so much, and the fact that we had
a day crew shooting dialog at the same time we had a day crew
shooting plates, at the same time we had a night crew shooting
chase... all of those were budgeted by themselves, so it really
didn`t change the cost." What it did change, though, was
the entire preparation for the movie. "What we did that first
week is in effect, three different movies. It would be like you
were prepping for three separate, complete, totally different
operations. Three different crews, three different packages of
equipment, three different cameras - each unit had two or three
cameras in their unit, so we had nine to twelve cameras with VistaVision
and separate odd pieces of equipment." But while the budget
may not have been affected, the production office, which had been
set up in whirlwind fashion in early August, was. (In fact, the
Bond office went up in less than two days. Kopp returned from
London on a Saturday, joined Giebink and their staff in closing
Birdy`s San Jose office on Sunday, and Monday morning they were
already answering the Bond phone calls in San Francisco.)
Shooting around the clock meant the production office had to
follow suit, as Giebink explained: "To keep the office open
24 hours a day, there were three production coordinators, and
one of them would come in at 6 am, and work say, 6-6; the next
one would come in around noon - it varied, 10 to noon, and then
work `til 10 PM or midnight; and then the night shift would come
in around 6 PM and go `til 6 am so that provided office coverage
with the most people there during the late day, which is when
most of the activity was going on." Having begun compiling
the shooting schedule from the multi-colored screenplay and the
storyboards, an even more complete picture began to emerge after
they received an early schedule from Waye. This too presented
new challenges, for not only was it in a format neither Kopp or
Giebink had ever worked with before it also covered the whole
movie. "We spent quite a bit of time going through their
schedule just trying to pull out of it what pieces were going
to be shot over here, because it was for the entire picture,"
Giebink related. "So that was a little confused, but eventually
we took all the information and started stripping it out, and
the way we boarded it was to take the three basic units and keep
them on separate schedules."
Although the Bond movies are noted for their
gadgetry, the making of the San Francisco schedule was accomplished
in the same manner that has been the backbone of production
scheduling for decades: carefully transferring the information
- by hand - to thin, colored strips of cardboard and then
arranging them on large production boards. But even with the
London schedule and the script in hand, Giebink found the
storyboards far more useful. "Although we all read the
script diligently," she said, "in the end, all the
shooting was based on the `boards. The first unit stuff was
based on the script, because very little of that was `boarded
out. But the second unit, the aerial unit, and the Golden
Gate Bridge unit were all based on the storyboards, and so
instead of numbering to the script, like we`d normally do,
we numbered everything to the `boards. "Most heads of
departments had sets of storyboards, and in a lot of ways
it`s really very easy, because you make copies of them and
do one frame per page, and you cross them off as you do them,
instead of marking the script and keeping track of it that
way. It`s almost like shooting a commercial. "Now for
the second unit - and the third, aerial and plates - the directors
of both of those had very specific shot lists as well. So
first the "boards, and that`s how we did all the breakdown
and the scheduling, and then the shot lists, which were even
more detailed than the storyboards." |
|
Above: Christopher Walken played the
villain Max Zorin. |
No matter how careful the preparation, though, reality has a
way of ruining even the very best planning, and given the first
unit`s dramatically shortened availability, complications increased.
Having a rough idea of the shooting schedule since spring, Kopp
now began the laborious task of finalizing dates and locations.
"So it`s now the first week or two in September," he
related, "and you go to City Hall, and you start trying to
make your arrangements. They are as accommodating as possible,
but as careful as possible. And they say, "Okay, you can
use City Hall," then they go and look at their calender,
and you find out that the ninth, which is Tuesday, they have a
reception in the rotunda for six or eight hundred people, and
you`ve got it scheduled for Monday and Tuesday. ""You
cannot use City Hall on Tuesday, the ninth." ""But
Mr Moore is only going to be in California for eight days..."
"Not only that, the crew is only going to be here for a certain
amount of time, and you`ve got that schedule pretty absolute on
that Monday and Tuesday, and they say you can`t shoot there on
Tuesday. So now you have to move things around. We ended up shooting
there on Monday and Wednesday. "Now it also got involved
because another location said that we could only shoot there on
Sunday - that was the mine over in Marin. Another location said
we could only shoot there on Saturday - that was the interior
of City Hall. So that took care of those days. Then the only day
we could shoot at Japantown was on a Friday, so we really didn`t
have a lot of choices as to how we could flop things around on
the schedule."
Above: On June 27 a disastrous fire
swept through the Bond sound stage at Pinewood. |
Even while Kopp stood waiting for the equipment at the south
end of the Golden Gate Bridge things were still changing. "The
jetty in Richmond was supposed to be later," Giebink remembered,
"but a ship was due to come in, so we had to flop the whole
schedule. I think we flopped it the night before we were going
to shoot it. That was supposed to be on Wednesday, but we couldn`t
have it Wednesday, so we brought it up to Monday, and then moved
everything else. It just sort of dominoed back from there."
Shooting with a firm schedule - without room for contingencies
- is the cinematic equivalent of working without a net, and it
was the cause for more than a small amount of stress. "We
could only be at certain places on certain days," Kopp said.
"Had we missed on some of those, had we had a camera malfunction,
or an actor`s problem, or something, some of those locations we
could not go back to until maybe a week later - which Roger Moore
and the first unit couldn`t do. For instance, if we hadn`t finished
at the mine on that Sunday, we couldn`t have been back on Monday,
Tuesday, or Wednesday; we`d have had to wait another whole week.
"Now that would mean we`d have had to keep all those people
here with nothing for them to do for a week, so we had to hire
enough crew to make sure we finished. This caused tremendous pressure
on John Glen, the director."
A reflection of how frantic the pace became after shooting began
was reflected in the UK crew`s timetable. Arriving from London
on a Saturday, their second unit was shooting on Sunday. After
a day`s rest, the first unit also began shooting, and Kopp and
Giebink now found themselves not only dividing their time between
the production office and the locations, but among the crews as
well. In general, Kopp stayed with the first unit, while Giebink
remained with the third unit (aerials), which was shooting at
the same time. With the start of night stuntwork on the third
day, the schedule became a full, twenty-four hour circus. After
monitoring all the daylight filming, Kopp and Giebink would then
make their way out to the second unit, shooting the chase that
night. Giebink described their work schedule: "There would
sometimes be a period of time from 2 to 4 in the morning when
neither Ned nor I were in the office, because maybe one of us
was taking a nap, and the other was on the set. Ideally, both
of us would be around, because different problems come up, and
one set of problems needs him and another set of problems needs
me. So there was a period when we were only getting two or three
hours of sleep in twenty-four." Keeping to the frantic schedule,
the first unit and cast left San Francisco on a Tuesday afternoon
and began shooting on the Pinewood stages the following Monday.
Meanwhile, the second unit, which was shooting all the chase footage,
was still in the US, facing 12 more nights of San Francisco filming.
Still to be shot were the remainder of the City Hall fire, Bond
(now a stunt double) hanging from a fire engine ladder and swinging
through traffic, the engine being chased among the cable cars,
and Bond`s escape by jumping the engine across a drawbridge. "We
couldn`t go onto California Street with the cable cars until 1
am," Giebink explained. "So on those nights, we had
to shoot other things, and then do the move. We tried hard to
get onto California lots earlier than 1 am but in the end, the
schedules couldn`t be changed.
Above: Tanya Roberts played the Bond
girl Stacey Sutton. |
|
"We had a scheme," she laughed, "where
we were going to hire motorized cable cars and have them run
Sacramento Street for the general public, and we could have
California street, but the authorities didn`t think that was
such a good idea. "That was probably the biggest scheduling
restriction: how to get to and from California Street, because
you didn`t want to be on the far side of two the night you
had to make that move. So we shot around China Basin (about
a mile and a half away), and then moved to the cable cars.
We did that four nights. It`s a tough move, because you lose
- you really lose - a couple of hours." In other situations,
those few hours might not have mattered, but once again; the
production was racing the clock. "We could only shoot
the cable cars from one in the morning to five in the morning
- four hours," Kopp said. "So that meant we had
to find something to shoot at the beginning of the night,
for four hours, make our move, somewhere in between there
eat, shoot for four hours, and then get off the street before
morning traffic started. So we shot other places in town the
first part of the night. For instance, we shot up on Potero
Hill a little bit - just some pass-bys, and some vistas of
the bridge in the background and the fire truck going by,
but those are residentials, and you can only be in those areas
until ten o`clock at night. So we`d shoot those the first
part of the night, then we`d shoot the cable cars. |
"The choice ended up being: did I want one crew to work
an awful lot of overtime, or did I want a couple of crews to work
pretty much straight time, and we ended up somewhere in the middle
of that split. I had a crew coming in early and going home early,
and a crew coming in later and going home late. We had to do that
for four nights. The crew saved us; they were fantastic. "Now,
not only does that involve personnel, but we had to find additional
equipment: lighting, cranes, and cherry pickers. All the same
cameras worked and some of the same lights; the same generators
worked, because you just unplug them, drag them to the next place
and plug them in again. But the lights are way up there on cranes
and on roofs. People let us leave lights out on balconies, on
fire escapes, and on rooftops, without much concern."
While all the shooting was being done at night, Kopp and Giebink`s
work hours were not significantly reduced. "Even when it
was just down to the second unit, shooting nights, we wound up
doing the same thing in hours, because a lot of the problems will
happen at night, but all their solutions happen in the daytime,
during business hours." Giebink said. "It`s tough to
do all your business at 2 o`clock in the morning, so you`ve got
to be up during the daytime. "But I don`t think physically
you could do that schedule for more than the time we did it. Three
or four weeks... it`s pretty tough on you physically." Kopp
agreed, and said that the keys to surviving the ordeal were keeping
the wrap date in sight, and having the right people. "I think
it`s fairly easy if you can see the end, if it`s going to stop
in a week," he said. "I think it`d be tougher if you
think you might have to do that for three or four months, then
I`m sure there would be a stress point, or give-up point, or a
point where you couldn`t muddle through a plan. "When you
have a group of people, you have to be able to yell at those people
and have them yell back. And if they - or you - get too nervous
because someone`s yelling, you`ve got the wrong group of people.
Your success or failure is with each other." After shooting
21 days and spending $5 million dollars, the production wrapped.
While openly admitting that luck played a factor in his company`s
success, Kopp was justifiably proud of the job his group had done,
and he summed everything up in seven magic words: "We finished
on time, and on budget." Russell Ito is a free lance writer
based in San Mateo, California. His other skills include production
stills photography.
With permission from American Cinematographer
magazine www.theasc.com
www.cinematographer.com is no longer the official site of
the American Society of Cinematographer or American Cinematographer
magazine.
Related Articles
"A View To A Kill" Movie
Coverage