J.A. Bayona’s “The Impossible,” with its scenes of tsunami destruction, provided all sorts of water-based challenges.
“We wanted to test how the water, how it looked physically and how it looks digitally — just how to manage that amount of water, but we noticed that the digital water didn’t work well. So we always wanted to be based in real water. So we started playing with miniatures.”
“The main thing is the set was scaled down 3 times smaller just because that’s the smallest you can go because you have drops of water. You remember those old films in which the drops of water look like this [makes a gesture the size of a watermelon]. So we played with that old technique of miniature, and created a wave three times smaller than the original. We basically tested it with an engineer whose main thing is to create waves — I know, there are crazy people all around! This guy was really passionate about waves.”
“[The scene with the Naomi Watts character being swept along, battered and injured with her son just out of reach] was shot in Spain in a water tank. Basically what we did was channel the water into two lanes that you could control with a joystick, two parallel lanes and in those lanes, you can change elements. You put, let’s say, a bucket in which you will put the actor so that they would be protected, and you can basically move it the way you want — two actors or props or even a camera and an actor, being moved along.”
But “The Impossible” was not just a production design challenge in terms of water, it was also a story that could be told through color.
“I really started experimenting with color a lot. I wanted to tell the story about what happened with this family. So basically the story is they have a kind of a normal life, though they’re wealthy, they lead a normal life which I wanted to represent that with saturated colors. We had a lot of bright colors at the beginning of the film. And then the water comes and everything gets muddy… we took out all the colors except the red, for pointing out certain things. Meanwhile, as other characters are recovering in hospital, they would have the color appear a little bit more and more, and then at the end, they have back all the colors but in a completely different saturation. As I said, color can have really a narrative.”
In a much more stylized way, that color journey continued in Jim Jarmusch’s “The Limits of Control”
[This film] was a beautiful trip. [Jarmusch] had just 30 pages written, then he built up the whole script while we were scouting. So it was a very very interesting process for him, for me too. And he also wanted the colors to become part of the quest. So first of all, again, are saturated colors. [The hitman played by Isaach de Bankolé] he’s there in the real life, he’s walking, he learns a little bit more. So the warm top colors were kind of a representation or a metaphor for that knowledge, for getting more information and understanding. And then when he gets near to the moment [with Bill Murray] inside the bunker that it’s never explained how he can go inside, he turns into like a ghost. We took out all saturation in the color. We left just whites and grays. Then he does what he had to do, and there’s a moment — the whitest moment — and then he goes back to life by bringing colors back to him.”
But although color plays such a fundamental role in his thought process, Caballero’s most celebrated recent collaboration was in black and white, and shot digitally.
“I think you now with digital you have a great tool to play with in terms of color. You have greater control — what you lose is this graininess which is great. But actually, you know, if you understand digital cameras, you can really go into something different. We shot “Roma” with a digital camera, which worked because we never wanted the black-and-white to look like a nostalgic black-and-white, like we were ‘copying’ what film would do. We wanted to a very controlled, digital black and white, and I think it turned out also very warm in a certain way, you know, it was not cold. It’s just how you use it.”
“[Cuarón] always said it would be black and white. And so we start experimenting with a proposed color palette that was good for the period. But we discovered that different colors turn into specific tones of gray. So we start to discard [real period color] and to apply colors according to the [corresponding] gray, even if they were a little disturbing in real life. Like we had this pink couch that I remember thinking “oof,” that but in the end we wanted that shade of gray, so we used it. I remember I saw some pictures some years ago of ‘The Addams Family‘ set, and when I saw the real color pictures, instead of the black and white, there were pink and yellows and golds! It was a strange thing, that, translated into black and white was very interesting. So we needed to think a little bit like that, so the colors of the cars and things were more based on the translation and had to have a very precise contrast between grays. This was this so-called “modern” black and white we were trying to achieve.
But of course, the biggest challenge of “Roma,” for which Caballero was again nominated for an Oscar (losing to Hannah Beachler for “Black Panther”), was recreating the Mexico City of his and Alfonso Cuarón’s childhood, when it no longer exists.
“We started by looking for real locations, like the avenues [that Yalitza Aparicio’s character crosses in several scenes]. It was a disaster — it is impossible to do it. Then we look for another location in the same kind of avenue, for example, and it was also terrible. Then we open the search for any avenues at all, but since we wanted to have an accurate period reproduction of that specific corner, then we ended up saying why don’t we build it? You have to see the face of the producers when we tell them!”
“But we build up to 7 meters high and… almost 200 meters deep. [Caballero shows video of an empty lot being transformed into not one but two massive, wide urban streetscapes, and it really is staggering]. And I don’t think this happens very frequently, but Alfonso kept me and some of my art department in the post-production phase. So I guided the visual effects company to do exactly what I wanted to the upper parts of the building — we basically did a 3D model of every single corner and then we went out to the neighborhood to take pictures of textures and features that we would send on a daily basis to the company that was doing the CGI.”
“And Alfonso tricked us, saying that he may put the camera inside these businesses [along the street] and do some coverage in there. So all of that was dressed completely [he shows video of the interior of stores with leaflets in the racks and coffee cups on the tables]. In the end, all the details we put in for the camera to pick up weren’t used, but you can feel them.”
“So it was a combination of low-end traditional methods of construction and high-end production. We like to say it was not hi-tech or lo-tech but Az-tech, because we are Mexican.”
In a strange, cyclical way, the reason they had to build the sets for “Roma” is sort of the psychological reason Caballero has become such a fine designer of destruction.
“In Mexico City, we had the big earthquake in ’85 that really changed the city landscape. Actually, I was thinking about why I do a lot of films of destruction. I think it has to do with that — my earthquake mentality. The earthquake happened when I was 13 years old, and then when I went out to look for my city and for my place in the city, in the neighborhoods that I was walking there was always one or two ruins in each street. Buildings that had collapsed and they sometimes took ten years to rebuild them. So I think it’s connected to that.”
And finally, his advice for aspiring production designers? Bring the chair.
Before I worked on films like “The Impossible,” where I had 600 people under me, I used to do things by myself. Build, paint, bring the chair. I had studied the history of art and I was kind of in a crisis about what to do, when a friend of mine was doing a project for film school, so I helped. And obviously, everyone in film school wants to be directors, DoPs, producers, even actors. Nobody wants to bring the chair, or ask the family if we can use their house, or paint the wall. So I ended up doing that, and feeling very good about it.
Qumra 2019 continues this week, stay tuned for more coverage.