As if to welcome veteran thriller director John Frankenheimer to town, two window washers got stuck 10 stories up on the side of the Four Season Hotel, where the 70-year-old filmmaker was staying earlier this month.
Frankenheimer didn’t grab a camera to shoot their rescue by firefighters, which took place as he ate lunch, but the director of “The Manchurian Candidates” and the new “Reindeer Games” knows a thing or two about filming people in peril.
“It’s a horrible predicament, isn’t it?” he said of the stranded washers. “It probably would take us two weeks to film it.”
Gee, it looks easy enough. Shoot the nervous window washers. Show one of them dropping something that falls splat on the ground. Zoom in on the rope fraying with tension…
“One of the hardest things to photograph and to make really real is eight,” he said, nothing the screen’ horizontal aspect ratio. “Height tends to flatten out, and you have to be very careful with the camera angle and how you do it, and it’s best to have it go across screen. But it’s hard. Hitchcock did it well. He did everything well.”
Frankenheimer’s track record isn’t too shabby either. “The Machurian Candidate (1962) set the standard for political thrillers, and he also has captured the excitement of auto races in “Grand Prix” (1966), car chases in “Ronin” (1998) and Super Bowl terrorism in “Black Sunday” (1977). Now comes the plot-driven intrigue of “Reindeer Games,” which stars Ben Affleck as a newly released convict who unwillingly becomes involved in a casino robbery.
Frankenheimer’s thrillers don’t look like other filmmakers’ thrillers, and that’s the way it should be. What would be the point of everyone shooting scenes in the same way?
That’s been Frankenheimer’s thinking since early in his career, when he was under contract at CBS in the 1950s. He and his fellow live-TV directors–including Sidney Lumet, Robert Mulligan and Ralph Nelson–were obligated to take turns filming a live piano player during a 15-minute gap before a 7:30 p.m. show.
“Ralph Nelson devised this thing,” Frankenheimer recalled. “He said, `Everybody put $200 into a pot, and the guy that does the most exciting shot of the piano player wins the whole thing, and we all vote.’ So we all just every night would tune in at 7:15 to see what the guy did with the piano player.
“We had two cameras, and I got a crane, and I got mirrors on the piano, and I did this great crane shot on the guy’s hands and up and around, and it was really good, and I got calls from five or six guys saying, `Brilliant! Wonderful! Great!’ And Nelson was on the next night, and he said, `Very good. Just wait. Tune in tomorrow night.’
“Sure enough, tune in the next night, he starts off with a close-up of the piano player, and he pulls back, pulls back, suddenly he starts to put in a lot of head room, and he takes his second camera, and he puts it on the guy’s feet, and he superimposes the second camera on the guy’s feet on the pedals, and the way it comes out, he’s hitting himself on the head with the pedals. It was brilliant. And Nelson won.”
In a sense, that kind of competition continues to be played out every time a director tries to thrill increasingly jaded movie audiences, although many filmmakers seem content with repeating action-movie formulas. Frankenheimer said he consciously tried to top all previous car chases in “Ronin,” while “Reindeer Games” is more “straightforward.”
After 40 years of directing feature films, the director has developed his own set of rules to make his films transcend the typical cookie-cutter action flicks. What are the most important thriller elements?
“I think you need the basic three-act structure,” he said. “I think you need that very, very badly. I think you have to get your main plot points in early–and sneak them in sometimes, don’t hit the audience over the head with it. And then have at least one, preferably two, wonderful surprises in the third act. That’s to me what you need.”
He’s also a passionate advocate of logic.
“To me it’s everything. Everything,” he said. “I worked so hard to make this movie logical and believable. You cannot, cannot ever have the audience turn and say, `I don’t believe this. This wouldn’t happen.’ You’ve got to fill every hole. You’ve got to answer the questions the audience is going to ask. And we really worked like hell to do that.”
That said, “Reindeer Games” boasts some lulu plot twists, though nothing that Frankenheimer thinks breaks the rules. That’s in contrast to “Reindeer” writer Ehren Kruger’s previous thriller, “Arlington Road.”
“After I saw `Arlington Road,’ I said to him, `Look, we cannot make a movie like that because the whole ending of your picture was total (baloney),”‘ Frankenheimer recalled.
Watching “Reindeer Games,” “Ronin” and other recent Frankenheimer films, you may notice that the colors are muted and the picture is grainy. That’s no accident.
“Up until recently, my best movies were done in black-and-white, and I went kicking and screaming into color,” he said. “All the photographers who influenced me were black-and-white photographers.
“I was floundering in color, and I remembered what (John) Huston did in `Moby Dick,’ where he took the black-and-white negative and just superimposed it right over the color. I started playing around with that, and since then I desaturate everything in the laboratory. I use a technical process–it’s called CCE–and what it does is it takes the colors out and accentuates the blacks.”
He also essentially removes the colors from what he’s filming.
“A location is chosen because of its neutral colors in most cases,” he said. “If there is something that distracts my eye that is a bright primary color. I’ll paint it, or I’ll go into another location. Costumes, the same way. All costumes have to be black, gray or earth colors.
“Set dressing, the same way. If I shoot on a street, beforehand everybody has to know that you clear that street of any bright-colored object, whether it be an awning, whether it be a car; whatever it is. I won’t shoot it if it stands out like that.”
What’s the problem with bright colors?
“Look, I don’t make that kind of movie,” he said. “I think all my movies would be better in black-and-white.”
As for the graininess, that comes from a film process called Super 35, which complements Frankenheimer’s fondness for wide-angle lenses that keep everyone in the foreground and background in focus. Because Super 35 film can’t carry both the picture and soundtrack, the movie’s prints must be made from a second-generation copy of the original, hence the graininess.
“There are a lot of directors who don’t want to work in Super 35 because of the grain,” he said. “I embrace it.”
The picture also is grainy because he uses fast film stock to get his “depth of focus,” which he thinks, along with his filming style, helps establish a sense of reality.
“I come from the school of really fluid camera movement with a minimum number of cuts,” he said. “I think you have to give the audience a geographical feeling that they know where everybody is and they know what’s happening at all times.
“So many of these movies today, they just put 10 cameras on something. When you don’t know what the point of action is, you just shoot everything, and you shoot it with a lot of long lenses, and the background goes all out of focus, and you haven’t got the faintest idea where you are and when you cut all the stuff together. And they cut it together like a music video, so you don’t get any reality to it.”
Likewise, the acting “has to be totally realistic. You can never wink at the audience. You can never say, `Ah, we don’t mean this.’ `You have to make the stakes very high in every scene.”
Frankenheimer isn’t proud only of his thrillers. “George Wallace,” his 1997 movie for TNT, won three Emmy Awards, including one for directing. He’s also fond of Marlon Brando’s loopy big-piano/tiny-piano duet with a look-alike dwarf in “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” calling it “one of the best scenes I’ve ever done.”
Mike Myers apparently agreed, using the diminutive “Moreau” character as the basis for Mini-Me in “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,” which also included a spoof of the duet.
“It’s the highest form of flattery,” Frankenheimer said. “I loved it.”
TALK ABOUT THE GRAPES OF WRATH
What was the hardest scene director John Frankenheimer ever had to shoot?
Filming the Super Bowl mayhem in “Black Sunday” was tough, he said, and improvising scenes with Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando in “The Island of Dr. Moreau” was no picnic. But his worst experience came in a grape-filled vat in 1966’s “Seconds,” about a frustrated man who leaps at an offer of a new life and finds it carries a terrifying price.
“That wine-stomping sequence in `Seconds’ was an unbelievably difficult scene to shoot because we had Rock Hudson and Salome Jens who had to really be in that vat and have dialogue, and we had all of these drunken people naked all around them, and we were shooting during the height of the Hays Code so you couldn’t show certain things. All these people refused to keep their clothes on.
“The cameramen refused to get into the vat with the hand-held camera. I had to take the hand-held camera and get in there with a bathing suit on, and the first thing that happened is these two girls ripped my bathing suit off, and I’m standing there. I don’t want to tell you what they were doing to me, but it was really not conducive to keeping the camera steady.
“All these naked people, and you’re trying to concentrate on what the actors are supposed to be doing, and Rock Hudson was a very shy guy anyway, and they’re ripping his bathing suit off. It was tough.”
— Mark Caro
