In Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” a group of scientists, military personnel, and “Junior Stargazer” science students gather in a giant meteor crater for a ceremony honoring children’s inventions, only to see the celebration take an unexpected turn. when an alien arrives. Although the story takes place in 1955 and features elements of science fiction and futuristic technology, the methods used to bring Anderson’s world to life are drawn from even more remote times in the history of cinema. “It was like going back to what the early pioneers of cinema were doing,” cinematographer Robert Yeoman told IndieWire. “They built sets (in sunlight) and just put a diffusion cloth on top.”
For “Asteroid City,” this approach stemmed from the fact that Anderson wanted to use all natural light for the scenes in the desert city after which the film is named. “I knew that interior locations like the diner would need light, so I asked if we could put skylights in the diner and any building where we knew we would be shooting daytime interiors,” Yeoman said. “(Production designer) Adam Stockhausen put in the skylights and we covered them with very soft diffusion material and it worked beautifully. We never used lights and that was Wes’ dream.”
Shooting in natural light was in keeping with Anderson’s streamlined, lo-fi approach. “He likes to keep the set as small as possible,” Yeoman said. “I’ve worked on big studio films where you look around and there’s hundreds of people walking around and five video villages and it’s just a giant apparatus, but Wes likes to move fast and he doesn’t believe in any of those things. Often it’s just him, myself operating, a focus puller, a second AC with a slate, a dolly socket and a boom boy, and that’s it. Wes has a small monitor that he holds and sits by the cart, but he watches the actors. He just checks the monitor because if I’m making a move, he wants to see the move. In his dream world, he would have eight people making the entire film.
Anderson’s desire to strip things down and focus on the actors inspired Yeoman’s approach to another setting in “Asteroid City,” the 1950s live theater setting in which the actors are seemingly putting stage the alien story as a play within the film. For these black-and-white, Elia Kazan-inspired sequences shot in Academy aspect ratio (as opposed to the color and widescreen of the sci-fi story), Yeoman and his camera department pre-lit everything so that when Anderson and his actors stomped on set they “just turned on the lights.”
Taking inspiration from the work of Francis Ford Coppola and Vittorio Storaro in “One From the Heart”, Yeoman allowed himself to play with the world of New York theater, creating expressionistic light changes within the scenes that contrasted with the natural light more direct desert passages. “I love the idea of the lights changing within a shot and coordinating those moves to the actors,” Yeoman said. “We do a lot of blackout, or a spotlight might shine on someone, and it’s a very theatrical way to shoot.”
Yeoman had far less control in the desert, and it was a constant challenge to maintain consistent light over the film’s many day-long exteriors. “In other movies, I’d be tempted to bring in some big elevators and put up giant silks to soften the light, but it was too windy out there in the desert,” Yeoman said. “It would have been dangerous. But also, Wes was really eager to embrace the harsh sunlight. We watched a few movies together, like “Bad Day at Black Rock” and “Paris, Texas,” and they weren’t afraid to shoot at noon so that the light kind of became a character in the movie. Rarely have we used anything other than a bouncy paper to put some light into the actors’ eyes. It goes against my whole background as a cinematographer, where you always want to soften or shape the light in some way, but I’ve finally embraced that approach.
Beyond the lights, Yeoman was faced with his usual challenge in a Wes Anderson film: executing the director’s extremely complicated and precise camera moves, which grew ever more ambitious. It’s not unusual in an Anderson film for the camera to make several 90-degree pivots in a shot combined with dolly and panning movements, all of which must be meticulously coordinated with the director’s penchant for deep, symmetrical compositions.
For Yeoman, the planning begins during pre-production, when he goes through the location with a viewfinder to see if shooting in Anderson’s animation is physically possible. In the case of “Asteroid City”, Stockhausen built an entire city in the desert in forced perspective on the outskirts of Chinchón in Spain, and the location of the buildings was slightly adapted to ensure that the actors and the camera could move from one point to the other. other of the scene. time allotted by Anderson’s dialogue. “If the dialogue takes place in a minute, we have to shoot that shot within a minute, not a minute 10,” Yeoman said.
During production, the camera movements are done through a system created by key boss Sanjay Sami, who Yeoman has worked with since ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ in 2007. ‘It has dolly tracks that go back and forth and sideways that he can change, like a train,” Yeoman said. “Those tracks have to be tightly controlled because they have to be reduced to the millimeter. There’s a little crosshair on the camera and Wes can see when you’re not making it. When you land, it has to be very accurate , and it’s so fast you couldn’t use a Steadicam or a Technocrane.” Add to that the complication of keeping everything in focus: “It’s very complicated because often Wes will have one character in the foreground and someone in the background, and he’ll want both in focus. So it takes three of us – Sanjay pushing the cart, me acting and Vincent (Scotet) on the focus – to make a really difficult move, and when we get that done, I get a great deal of satisfaction.
Yeoman also gets satisfaction from continuing to shoot on film. “I love digital cameras, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “But I think when you’re shooting film everyone is much more focused because they know there’s only a limited amount of film in the camera. When I shoot things digitally, they often just spin the camera as the hair and make-up artists rush in, and it seems to me that the attention spreads. With movies, everyone pays more attention and Wes likes that focus. It may sound strange, but I think somehow the energy finds its way into the negative.
