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4 - Production of the Movie/Scenario (Part 2)
(1885 total words in this text)
(410 reads) 
Capturing the Rollerball
Working with an anamorphic lens and varying angles, Steve Mason's cinematography transformed the undulating Rollerball track into a brutal, massive course. He and McTiernan wanted to capture something not seen before, something grittier and as close as possible to the players, but to achieve this took some experimentation. Mason buried lipstick cameras into players' skates and placed cameras on cranes in the bleachers, jutting over the playing field and into the stands. Primarily, he and McTiernan wanted the feel of hand-held cameras, but it was a challenge to get them onto the track and into the game. They fastened a Steadicam to camera operator Mike O'Shea and strapped him to the back of a motorcycle as it spun around the track.
McTiernan adopted an unconventional shooting style during production in that he shot coverage of the games before he shot the traditional masters. In effect, he was the coach, and the cast and crew were the team. Every day, the assistant directors distributed that day's plays, i.e., the shot list to be accomplished. These plays were listed on a board that featured a hand-drawn mock-up of the track, with descriptions and simple drawings illustrating the shot. After about a month of shooting these "pieces," McTiernan treated the cast and crew to a short montage of the shots that his editor John Wright had put together. After all their hard work, they were thrilled with the results.
Mason worked closely with gaffer Mo Flam on lighting the track. Essentially, the track didn't change for the different games - the art department painted it different hues to indicate another location. The lighting underscored various aspects of the games.
"We lit the track for three different states, using low lights, spotlights and flickering lights for the pre-game atmosphere to emphasize the players' state of tension. We generally lit the track very brightly and the audience fell away to black, like a rock-and-roll show," Mason says.
In fact, Flam adds, the immense lighting rig his crew erected was modeled on rock-and-roll shows. "It was very theatrical, extravagant lighting with various color schemes," he says. "We used lighting instruments that are fairly atypical for movies, and we used a lot of them."
The track was built on the grounds of a former cement factory, which was a boon for Flam in terms of energy. "Because it was an old factory, we could use the existing power. We had 14 lighting transformers and 16,000 amps of power, which is more than any other Hollywood production I've ever worked on. It would have required 14 generators to sustain that kind of energy."
The sprawling cement factory also became home to team locker rooms, tunnels teaming with eager fans, and a decadent, Dionysian haunt known as Club Galore. This factory complex was located in Blainville, Quebec, a bleak stretch of strip malls and car dealerships about a half hour's drive outside of Montreal. The task of transforming the compound into this strange new world fell to production designer Norman Garwood.
"In the beginning it was nerve-wracking because it was all about defining this unknown world," Garwood says. "By setting it in Kazakhstan, the game and all the money involved with it, there was a coming together of all these very different cultures. It was like Cadillacs and camels all in the same place. You've got this kind of Mafia-based power structure in the game, but the people who pay the money to come see the game are the poor. On their way to the arean, I wanted the mass of poor people to pass these great billboards for perfume or clothes or other kinds of upscale products, stuff they could never even think of owning."
Garwood adds that some of his inspiration came from the exterior locations used for the film when they weren't shooting at the factory. These included various places in Old Montreal, a motley restored area of the city on the St. Lawrence River. Cobblestone streets lined with stately 19th century buildings and the famed neoclassic Notre-Dame Cathedral abut glass office buildings and refurbished lofts. In particular the production utilized the old port's towering grain silos, whose stark, industrial presence impressed such luminaries as Bauhaus leader Walter Gropius and the influential architect Le Corbusier. The Montreal Casino and the city's storied Rue St. Jacques, with its rich architectural and financial history, also served as some of the film's outdoor locales.
The company also filmed at an airport in the town of St. Jean sur Richelieu. The production decorated it with a huge, snub-nosed Hercules cargo plane, an equally massive Convair aircraft, and the sleek deluxe passenger jet, the Citation III. All were emblazoned with the Horsemen logo, designed to carry the team and their gear to and from games.
Team Uniforms
Each of the team members developed a theatrical personality for their characters, like the stars of the WWF. Dobo, for instance, a lithe beauty with distinctive red mane, had an even larger crimson "stunt wig" attached to her helmet, part of her character's game persona. Rijker, who the New York Times called "the world's best woman in the ring," whore a dominatrix mask and a fluffy red tutu.
In general, McTierman adds, and the key players' costumes grew out of their own personas. Klein's Jonathan, the team's American poster boy, donned a ripped t-shirt emblazoned with a Statue of Liberty silhouette. LL Coll J's Ridley, flashy and menacing, wore huge chrome gloves with dangling skulls and a prize-fighter's belt emblazoned with the initials H.H. for head hunter.
The costumes were designed by Kate Harrington, who worked closely with McTierman to help create the film's overall look. For the uniforms, the idea was to invent something credibly athletic and practical, but also as striking and dramatic as the game itself.,br>
"We tried not to design the costumes only for sport," says Harrington. "We wanted them to be more sexy and edgy. McT initially came up with the idea of the characters as chess players, which evolved into archetypal figures like the Jester and the Temptress. Additionally we always had to consider the reality of making the actors safe, so we ended up putting much of the characterization in the helmets."
The base of the uniform took its inspiration from a leather motocross outfit. The teams were differentiated by color - red for the Horsemen, gold for the Horde, etc. McTierman shot the games in order as scripted, and for each new game the wardrobe department added or removed colors accordingly, using sticky vinyl for the color bars that denote the different teams - the same vinyl tape used as lines on a basketball court. It stuck through the stunts but peeled off easily to be swapped for another team color.
Fast and Furious: The Cars of Rollerball
Of course speed-loving Rollerballers need fast ground transportation when not on the court. Rollerball features a fleet of shiny, expensive sport cars, the preferred wheels of the Horsemen's star players. The cars are supreme examples of automobile - a blue Audi, a deep purple Lotus, a yellow Mangoosta, a red Ferrari and red Corvette. Then there's the piece de resistance: an azure and silver 1964 Shelby Daytona Cobra.
The Cobra, a bona fide racecar, flew to the production straight from a competition in England. Its deep rumble immediately alerted the cast and crew to its arrival. The Cobra, a groundbreaking vehicle when it debuted in '64, came to its maker, the maverick automobile designer/racecar driver Carroll Shelby, in a dream. As Shelby's bio points out, the Cobra was 'the fastest car on the planet, and Shelby's group of tinkerers started to make them even faster. They won the FIA Manufacturers Grand Touring World Championship, the only American car company ever to do so." Shelby himself visited the Rollerball set and makes a cameo apperance in the movie.
Lucky Chris Klein. His character is the one who gets to drive the Cobra. He also drives another Shelby model, the curved, silver new Series I. The Rollerball company actually used two of these models; one was stripped down to the essentials, as it was destined for an explosive end.
The production had a lot of fun creating the vehicles of Rollerball's near-future. "Because it was in the near future, we wanted the vehicles to be familiar, but just a little ahead of our time," says Gino Lucci, the cars supervisor on the film. "We took ordinary vehicles and exaggerated them. Whe took a two-door Jeep Cherokee and added two additional doors to the rear and stretched in to accept four rear wheels, so it was a six-wheeled vehicle. To stretch a car, you basically cut it in half and add pieces."
"We also purchased two Porsches," continues Lucci. "We had to buy them because of all the modifications we made. McTierman thought that for the scenes in San Francisco LL Cool J's character should have a little sophistications in his vehicle. It's a 911 C-2 Porsche given a turbolook: very wide tires, with the bodywork contoured to the wheels. That car was built from start to finish in four days.
"When all the components are together," he says, "we can basically work miracles. We also took a Pontiac transport minivan and enlarged the wheelbase and the tires. The idea was so it would have exhaust coming out of the hood like a hot-rod. We also took an Oldsmobile called the Aurora, and we magnified the wheel arches, giving it bigger wheels."
Lucci credits these fantastic cars to McTierman, with whom he has worked twice before. "I enjoy working with John because of the knowledge he possesses. He has a vision that goes from here to the moon. The cars in this picture were a lot of fun because we experimented and most of the vehicles were fabricated. We were always going down uncharted avenues, and hopefully the final product is something that everyone enjoys."
Lucci's team also built the Rollerball motorcycles, a conglomeration of so many different pieces that Romijn affectionately called hers "Frankenbike."
"It was John McTierman's idea to start with a very light-weight motor bike," says Lucci, "about 150 pounds, which he found in Spain. We contacted the company and procured a total of 12 bikes. Our first concern was safety, because of the close proximity of the motorcycles to people. They were very agile, made out of a chromemoly, which is a very strong but light material used in racing. We took these motorcycles and then basically altered them in every possible way. We designed a core body for the team bikes, which were basically the same except for different team colors.
"Because of the speed of the original bikes," he says, "which were very, very powerful, we experimented for approximately two months with a much smaller engine to slow down the vehicle so it wouldn't become a projectile on the track. We combined a smaller motor with special bodywork strong enough to form the shape but weak enough to collapse in the case of an accident. We created motorcycles that were lightweight but looked menacing.
"Of course, you'll notice some motorcycles were individualized to the characters, "he says. "LL Cool J drives a Harley lookalike, and we created a very radical design for Rebecca. The basic configuration of that bike was unbelievable. It had a very small wheel in the front and an awful, exaggerated wheel in the back. It was amazing."
Original article: Rollerball press kit |
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