Directing the Camera

by Gil Bettman

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  To energize the frame, she backs herself off perpendicular to their route, puts the long lens on the camera and pans them running, tumbling and sliding across the X-axis of the frame, down the embankment, and over the lip into the creek (Figure 7.076 to 7.101).

  GEOGRAPHY IN CHASE SEQUENCES

  In order to make a chase appear smooth and continuous a director has to:

  1. maintain screen direction; and,

  2. connect the different locations through which the chase passes by maintaining a continuity of landmarks.

  The first of these two tasks was easily achieved in the foot chase in Point Break because Bigelow used Strategy #1 to energize the action through the majority of the chase. She kept the action right in front of the wide-angle lens by either leading or following Swayze and Reeves through narrow spaces. So most of the action is neither right-to-left, nor left-to-right, but neutral — coming straight to the camera or away from the camera, such as in the beginning of the sequence as seen in Figures 7.015 to 7.024.

  As soon as she has to take the chase out into a more open space and use the longer lenses, then all the action must flow either to the right side of the frame — camera right — or to the left side of the frame — camera left. So when Swayze runs across a yard, out into the street, and in front of a garbage truck with Reeves right on his tail, almost all the action is right-to-left (Figure 7.025 to 7.067).

  There is one tricky shot in the middle of this section, which shows how you can smoothly reverse screen direction going from a left-to-right shot to a right-to-left shot, if you go through a neutral shot. In other words, the action goes from flowing camera right to flowing toward the camera (or away from the camera) — the neutral — to flowing camera left. This occurs when Swayze runs into the street and almost collides with a surfer on a bike.

  At first, the camera is in a neutral angle, right behind Swayze as he runs into the street (Figure 7.042 to 7.043). He cuts hard to his right to avoid the surfer, just as the surfer breaks the left side of the frame (Figure 7.044). The camera pans left-to-right as the surfer crosses the frame (Figure 7.045). So at this point all the action is flowing to the right side of the frame (left-to-right). But this left-to-right pan brings the frame back onto Swayze (Figure 7.046 to 7.048) as he runs away from the camera. So now the shot has turned into a neutral. The neutral angle enables Bigelow to reverse her screen direction and cut smoothly to a shot of Swayze running right-to-left in front of the garbage truck that has stopped in the middle of the street (Figures 7.049 to 7.051).

  This series of shots works because it follows the basic rule for maintaining continuity in a chase. You run the action camera left (right-to-left) or camera right (left-to-right) and when you want to switch you go through a neutral.

  Strategy #3 for energizing a chase states:

  3. You isolate each participant in the chase in separate setups and quick cut between them.

  This can disorient the audience, if in each of the separate setups, the background and foreground keep changing. This can result in a chase that seems to start nowhere in particular and then progresses through as many different locations as there are setups, none of which seem to be interconnected. This is not good visual storytelling. It takes the audience out of the chase and out of the story.

  When reduced to the basics, the all-important story of a chase is that it goes from A to B to C when A, B, and C are each approximately the length of a football field, in the case of a foot chase, or the length of a couple of city blocks, in the case of a car chase. To tell the story there has to be continuity in the landmarks seen behind or in front of the chasers, so the audience can assemble in their mind’s eye a picture of the location through which the chase is passing.

  In some cases this continuity is real. For example, in Figure 7.049 to Figure 7.064 of the foot chase from Point Break both Swayze and Reeves clearly run past a large white garbage truck. The garbage truck becomes a landmark that orients the audience.

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  But in many other instances this continuity of landmarks must be skillfully faked. For example at the very beginning of the chase, in Figure 7.011 to 7.014 (p. 136) Bigelow pans first, Swayze, and then Reeves, up to, and then, past a scuba shop in a white brick building. The next series of shots show Reeves chasing Swayze down an extremely narrow passageway with a white brick building on one side of the frame (Figure 7.015 to 7.024). The “landmark” of the white brick wall that appears on both the A and B side of the cut between Figure 7.014 and Figure 7.015 gives the audience the impression that this narrow passageway ran alongside the scuba shop. In all likelihood, it did not. The scuba shop was probably miles away from the narrow passageway. The narrow passageway, like the other narrow passageways in the chase, was picked from all over the neighborhoods of Culver City and Venice, because it enabled Bigelow to energize the frame using the wide-angle lens. But it is made to seem adjacent to the scuba shop because they both have white walls. The white wall, like the garbage truck, provides a landmark that helps the audience to mentally reassemble the continuous progress of the chase from A to B.

  If A is miles away from B and no “landmark” can be found to seemingly unite them, then the director must find a way to have the chasers exit cleanly from location A and reappear in location B. The simplest way to do this is to have them go around a corner or disappear into a dark passageway. If Reeves were to chase Swayze around a corner in location A, they could come around a corner in location B, miles away, and it would appear adjacent, provided the general surroundings were the same. They could not go around a corner in the neighborhood of one-story buildings used in Point Break and appear around a corner in a neighborhood of skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan and create the impression that the two locations were adjacent.

  Bigelow resorted to such a disappearing act at the end of the chase. In order to make it believable that Swayze could get away from supermacho Reeves, Bigelow had to end the chase in Bollona Creek, where Reeves blows out his knee in a fall. But the location they were chasing through right before the story required them to be in Ballona Creek was probably nowhere near Bollona Creek. So she has them disappear out of Location A, miles from Bollona Creek, and then reappear cleanly in Location B, immediately adjacent to Bollona Creek.

  The shot that they disappear out is one of the rare tie-in shots in the chase. (Figure 7.068 to 7.075). This shot was made with an extreme telephoto lens, probably a 300mm. The shot looks straight into a narrow passageway bordered by a high wooden fence. Swayze comes around a corner into the passageway and runs straight at the camera. Since it is an extreme telephoto lens, he seems to hang in space running forward (Figure 7.068 to 7.070). Reeves can be seen for an instant breaking frame left and turning into the passageway behind Swayze (Figure 7.069), after which he is blocked by Swayze. But then, first Swayze, and then Reeves suddenly drop out of the bottom of the frame (Figure 7.071 to 7.075). There were obviously steps at the near end of this passageway. The steps enabled Bigelow to disappear both Swayze and Reeves out of the bottom of the frame.

  A tall wooden fence on the edge of Location B, immediately adjacent to Bollona Creek, permits Bigelow to have Swayze and Reeves reappear on the B side of the cut. Immediately after Reeves’ head disappears out of the bottom of the frame on the A side of the
cut (Figure 7.075), Swayze’s head and then his body pop up and over the fence on the B side of cut (Figure 7.076 to 7.077) followed by Reeves in Figures 7.083 to 7.084. Coming over the fence works the same way as coming around a corner or coming out of a dark doorway. The connection between A and B is convincingly implied without being explicitly shown. Swayze runs down the steep embankment that leads to the lip of the wall that drops down into Bollona Creek. Reeves follows, and Bigelow has arrived at the location where she can believably put Reeves out of commission.

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  HUMOR

  There is one additional tool Bigelow used to elevate this chase to legendary stature — humor. In the second half of this chase Swayze tries to evade Reeves by running in and out of two Venice Beach bungalows, each containing a single, startled housewife. When Swayze storms past housewife #1 she is so shocked she chucks her load of folded laundry into the lens (Figure 7.102 to 7.111). Since it is an extreme wide-angle lens, this gives extra energy to the shot.

  There is humor in repetition (think of Dr. Strangelove’s reflexive “Heil Hitler!” salute) so Bigelow routes the chase through a second bungalow, past a second housewife. In this instance, we never see Swayze pass the housewife. What Bigelow shows us is Swayze slipping through the sliding-glass back door of a house, and then flipping the latch and locking Reeves out (Figure 7.117 to 7.121). Reeves must stay right on Swayze’s tail or he will lose him. So, exhibiting action-hero fast thinking, as he crosses the back porch, he picks up a big potted plant and uses it as a battering ram to break through the glass door. (Figure 7.122 to 7.131) This lands him in a pile of broken glass and potting soil at the feet of housewife #2, who, judging from the vacuum cleaner wand in her hands, was in the midst of vacuuming her carpet. Housewife #2 expresses her displeasure at the mess Reeves has made by smacking him on the head with the wand of the vacuum cleaner and cussing him out (Figure 7.132 to 7.134).

  I have shown this chase sequence more than a hundred times to different classes throughout my teaching career and this gag never fails to get a laugh. Point Break is an action film, not a comedy. This chase is almost a matter of life and death. If Reeves catches Swayze, Swayze’s thrill-seeking life of crime is over and he goes to prison, which would amount to a spiritual execution. So, logically speaking, this is not the right time for a laugh. Producers and studio executives, out of caution, tend to overthink scripts and use logic and reason when they should be thinking intuitively and creatively. They are prone to talking a director out of trying to get a laugh in the middle of a serious action sequence. But they are dead wrong. Never let them talk you out of going for a gag in a life-and-death situation.

  There are two reasons for this.

  First, if the audience laughs, they are entertained and this adds to their overall enjoyment of a film. They are predisposed to laugh in the middle of life-and-death action sequences, because, if you have made the sequence suspenseful, then they are tense, and a laugh comes easy when one is tense.

  Second, and, more importantly, humor is unique. Your gags in your stunt sequences will distinguish them from the stunts of other action directors. This is the principle upon which Jackie Chan has built a monumental career. There is not a stunt in existence that has not been done a hundred, if not ten thousand, times before. Unless you are making a Bond film, or a film with a comparable budget, you will not have the time and money to run your foot chase onto the end of a construction crane thirty stories above the ground and have the leader and the chaser jump off the end of the crane and, miraculously, land on another crane twenty feet below, as was done in Casino Royale. But if your hero, in pursuit of the villain, does the breaking through a sliding-glass-door stunt (which has been done ten thousand times before) and this lands him at the feet of an irate housewife who takes out her anger at the mess he has made by whacking him on the head with her vacuum cleaner wand, the addition of the humor makes the stunt unique.

  Therefore, humor is a very cheap way to make your stunt sequences fresh and memorable. This is more clearly illustrated by what happens to Reeves as soon as he has scrambled away from the vacuum-cleaner-wand-wielding housewife and run out of the front door of her house (Figure 7.135 to 7.139). Swayze is waiting for him just outside the front door with a big, brown pit bull in his arms. As soon as Reeves emerges from the house, Swayze hurls the dog at him, hoping the obstacle of having to contend with the dog will put Reeves out of the race (Figure 7.140 to 7.142). Instead, Reeves sheds the dog like Emmitt Smith shed tacklers, and then drop-kicks the beast out of his path (Figure 7.143 to 7.147).

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  Like the irate, vacuum-cleaner-wand-wielding-housewife gag, which immediately precedes it, and tees it up, this pit-bull-hurl-and-drop-kick gag always gets a good laugh when I screen it for a class. It is very much the kind of gag with which Jackie Chan peppers his movies and thereby makes his stunt sequences seem uniquely entertaining. I have seen thousands of chase sequences, but I have never seen somebody try to get away from somebody else by throwing a dog, much less a pit bull, at him. If you asked every audience member to tell you what made this chase sequence entertaining, nine out of ten of them would cite the pit-bull-hurl-and-drop-kick gag. And it cost Bigelow almost nothing — just the price of the dog and the dog wrangler and the hour it took to shoot the gag. And yet I would contend that this gag adds as much in entertainment value to Point Break as the crane-to-crane jump added to Casino Royale. Therefore, be creative and load your action sequences with humor. This will give you more entertainment bang for your buck.

  SHOOTING ACTION/CHASES WITH THE WIDE LENS VERSUS SHOOTING ACTION/CHASES WITH THE LONG LENS

  Bigelow used Strategy #1 and the wide-angle lens to elevate the foot chase in Point Break to legendary stature. But this is not the way most big-name directors shoot action. Look at any action sequence shot by Spielberg, Cameron, Ridley Scott, John Woo, Michael Bay, Christopher Nolan, Paul Greengrass and the like, any action sequence from the recent Raiders, Bond, Dark Knight, Spider-Man, Bourne, or MI franchises and at least 95% of the time everything is shot with the telephoto or long lenses. Why? Strategy #2, which prescribes using the telephoto lens, is more effective at energizing action. It pumps more eye candy into the frame. As in
designing a moving master shot (See page 14, Chapter 2 and pages 39 and 40, Chapter 3) it is all a question of blurry frames. Modern movie audiences have become addicted to blurry frames. Starting back with the way Spielberg started moving the camera all the time when he made Jaws in 1974, and running up to the present day, the Holy Grail of action directors has been blurry frames. The more contemporary the film, the more blurry frames, the more eye candy. Now with CGI and motion capture, the quantities of eye candy are limitless.

  To clarify a bit, blurry fames are technically called motion blur. Motion blur is how cinema creates the illusion of motion by projecting twenty-four static images a second onto a screen. (Ask a DP you know to explain the details.) You get blurry frames and eye candy when you move the camera past a static object or past an object moving in a different direction or at a different speed. The telephoto lenses generate more blurry frames and more eye candy than the wide-angle lenses for three reasons: