Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Now, I almost didn’t do this set visit. I went to Budapest recently to visit the set of HELLBOY 2 and that trip reminded me why I don’t like big junket visits. There were at least 12 other outlets going on the visit and while I had a really good time hanging out with my colleagues at ComingSoon, JoBlo, Starlog, MTV, Wizard, etc, the set visit felt very uncomfortable, like we were always interrupting something. If you read my MIST coverage you’ll see what my ideal set visit is like. A unique experience I can share with the readers where I’m not in a tidal wave of press. The crew, cast and filmmakers react much differently in those situations and when I do an observational visit it’s much easier for me to see how a set is run. Shortly after I returned from Budapest I was contacted by Adam Kersh at Lionsgate asking me if I’d be interested in visiting the set of Frank Miller’s Will Eisner’s THE SPIRIT. “Of course,” I said. He warned me it would be a press day visit and I was hesitant. As we talked more about it the following week the press numbers kept growing to a point where it looked like another HELLBOY 2 situation. So, I declined the visit. I understand it’s hard to get an exclusive day on the set, but I just don’t see the point in writing the same story as every other online outlet. Last week I got a call out of the blue from Lionsgate telling me I got my own day on the set and to get ready to come out. It was a surprise, but a good one. On Tuesday of this week they held the big press day. Those reports have already hit over at places like ComingSoon. Wednesday I had my own day on the set. I spent about 6 hours on the set, sitting behind Frank Miller quietly taking notes. They were shooting on two of the bigger Albuquerque Stages about 5 minutes away from the airport, stages 7 and 8 to be specific. What’s interesting is that Miller is using the SIN CITY approach (ie filming in a big green box), but he’s using more crew, so how he’s filming is he’ll jump from Stage 7 to Stage 8 and back again, depending on who’s ready to shoot. So if he wraps a scene on Stage 7, the crew will already be complete or nearly done setting up the next shot on the next stage, so there’s a limited turn around time. I can only assume that shooting so much against greenscreen helps Miller to be so free to let the crew set up. I know he did a lot of storyboard work, hand-drawn himself, so I’m sure that helps as well. When I got to the stages I had to trade my driver’s license for a “Spirit Day Pass” I hung around my neck and I was led immediately to Stage 7. They were setting up a shot at the rear of a van. The door was up and the angle was low, looking at a pair of boots. The boots had thick soles and were segmented up the shin, like an armadillo’s shell, and ended at the knees. They were also a weird fuzzy black/grey. The camera tilted up as the owner of those boots jumped down. The camera moved up a funky jacket, black/gray as well, the pattern something off a ‘60s era Las Vegas hotel wall. The jacket also had furry cuffs and a big furry collar. Tilting up even more we got an extreme close up of Sam Jackson as the villain known as The Octopus. He had this weird silverish eye make-up (like Grace Jones extreme) above his eyes and below each eye were a series of squiggly lines going down to the top of his cheekbone. I didn’t take a careful count, but I’m sure each eye had 4 and they represented Octopus arms. His eyebrows were divided, too. Each one had at least two silverish breaks. Sam Jackson scowled as his eyes dashed left to right. His henchmen exit the truck behind them. Both were bald and overweight, one of them being noneother than Louis Lombardi, who I am very familiar with from his role as Edgar Stiles on 24 (the guy that SHOULD have gotten together with Chloe). Also in the van were racks of guns and lots of gas cans. For comic book nerds, the van had “Ditko’s Speedy Delivery” painted on the side. The first time I saw Miller he was sketching something in-between set-ups. The publicist brought me up to him and with a smile he stood up and vigorously shook my hand and welcomed me to the set. I also met a couple of the producers, Deborah Del Prete and Gigi Pritzker (whom I had met before when doing interviews for HOOLIGANS) before they had to go back to work and I stepped back into the shadows eyeballing Sam Jackson’s awesome pimpilicious outfit. On the monitors they played back a previous shot that comes directly after the shot of Sam stepping off the van. It’s a wide shot (they’re shooting widescreen, 2.35:1, on the Panavision Genesis camera) with the Ditko van in the background, The Octopus and his henchmen on the far right side of the frame, a woman in a long silken robe in a femme fatale pose (naked leg in high heels propped up on a box in front of her and gun held out) with a plain Jane standing in the middle. That plain Jane I came to find out was Scarlett Johansson, playing Silken Floss. I saw a close-up of her wearing some hot ‘50s glasses and a conservative dress and hairstyle. Unfortunately she was not on set for me to gawk at and get all schoolyard boy nervous over. However, Miller did let me watch Eva Mendes kiss for 4 hours, so I can’t complain. Eva Mendes plays Sand Saref. For those unfamiliar with Will Eisner’s source material, Sand Saref is The Spirit’s childhood sweetheart, but there was a split and he went on to be a cop and she went on to be a criminal. Turns out in the playback I mentioned, the femme fatale was Eva Mendes. Her outfit is out of this world. It’s everything you’d expect from Frank Miller… god bless him, the horndog. He loves to get girls partially clad. She has a long, thin hooded robe with a busty dress that has a ring in the middle holding the fabric together, leaving her sides exposed. She also wore knee-high boots, ending in high heels, obviously. After a few minutes I moved over to Stage 8 and saw cinematographer Bill Pope (ARMY OF DARKNESS, DARKMAN, SPIDER-MAN) setting up a 360 shot. There was a circular dolly track set up around a raised platform that was going to hold Gabriel Macht (THE SPIRIT) and Eva Mendes as the camera spins around them. I grabbed a director’s chair about 5 feet behind Miller and his crew, next to chairs marked “Spirit” and “Sand Saref.” I wasn’t there more than 5 minutes when Gabriel Macht came over and sat down in the “Spirit” chair. His outfit was pretty much a black suit with a bright red tie. He had a black shirt, black gloves, black slacks, black shoes and the red tie. His mask was black as well as his hair, which was slicked back. Macht has brown eyes and The Spirit has blue eyes, so they had to Legolas him and throw in some blue contacts. He was nice enough in our brief introduction, but I struck up a really good conversation with him before I left… more on that in a few minutes. I was also introduced to Eva Mendes who was very nice, but she was called back in front of the cameras almost immediately. “Excuse me, I have to go make out,” she said with a laugh as she walked off. As I mentioned above, they put the two on a raised platform that had a circular dolly track built around it. Bill Pope manned the camera on the raised dolly for a medium close shot of the two. Mendes reaches up to peel the mask back from Macht’s eyes. She peels it back about halfway and smiles a radiant smile. She gently puts it back in place and pressing it back in place on his cheekbone turns into a loving pet, which turns into a passionate kiss as the camera circles around them both. They had it timed so the 360 was slow at the beginning, starting profile, but as Mendes peeled back the mask we just saw the back of Macht’s head and an over the shoulder of Mendes’ radiant smile. By the time it circled around to the other profile Mendes had just replaced the mask and we see the loving caress on the cheek. When they go in for the kiss the camera sped up on the dolly, spinning around them more quickly. This was actually the middle of the scene and I saw them film the beginning and end after lunch. Before they broke for lunch, they grabbed a half-dozen takes of the 360 shot, trying to get the timing and performance right. Miller wasn’t quite getting what he wanted. Before the fourth take he disappeared behind the green curtain, where the actors were, and talked to Mendes. On the next take instead of the slow lean in for the kiss, she pauses for a good few beats then darts in, like a hungry dog thrown a bone. The kissing on this take was much more ravenous and when Miller saw that he pumped his fists in the air and went, “Yeah!” and gave a thumbs up to his producers. After he called cut he said, “Perfect, down to every little last goddamn detail!” They did a quick reset and lowered the camera, tilting up on the actors, and did the kiss again from a little further back and angling up. There was one really great take where the wind machines caught Mendes’ lace cape and it whipped right at camera just as it passed. They couldn’t have orchestrated it better if they tried. They got the regular 360 shot, moving in a clockwise direction, and Pope suggested getting a couple in going the opposite direction, counter-clockwise. So, on the first take of that the camera’s moving quicker and quicker as they kiss then we heard a thump and someone go, “Umphh…” and on the monitors the angle went askew and dropped drastically. Someone tripped up and seemed to cause the dolly to jerk, but later on Miller told me that when he saw the monitor his immediate thought was that something happened to the platform holding his actors about 6 feet above the hard, concrete floor. “For a minute there I thought my actors were falling. I thought it was my John Landis moment…” At lunch I ended up sitting with the producers and Miller. We had a great, light conversation about everything from small Buddy Holly prop-planes (we shared experiences… mine involved flying from Providence to Martha’s Vineyard on a plane with a door that didn’t completely close… and just how freaked out I became when I could see the controls – I was sitting directly behind the pilot – and I could see just how fast the gas needled dropped towards the E) to comic books (Miller loves directing and he’s going to continue to do it, but he is not quitting on comic writing and illustrating) to the release date (January 16th 2009, edging out WATCHMEN by a couple of months) to SIN CITY and the technique that film inspired. As a comic book fan and a fan of Miller’s in particular, I can’t understate how cool it was just shoot the shit with the dude, who was a lot more open and friendly than his image usually is. I almost nerded out to an extreme… I almost asked him to draw a sketch of The Spirit in one of the Spirit books I brought on my trip in order to brush up on the character and the world, but thankfully good taste and a certain level of professionalism won out and I didn’t do something too drastic. After lunch I ended up going back to the Sam Jackson stage. He was gone, but I got to check out a few movable sections for different shots. The one they were setting up involved a stunt team on wires. The set was about a 30 foot tall green board that had a rusted iron fire escape bolted to its surface. Above this wall (in one of the corners of the giant stage, about 40 feet to the left of where the Van was) was a complicated wire rig and below the fire escape were tons of puffy mats, ready to catch some unlucky asshole who will not be staying on that particular fire escape in the scene. On the other side of the stage was a giant square on rollers, maybe 50 feet by 50 feet. The surface was a run down knoll of some sort. Hilly earth, with brittle yellow grass and tons of garbage from rusty cans to broken crates littering the ground. I was introduced to the set photographer (and I’m an asshole for forgetting his name… sorry, dude) as he was photographing various weapons. I got to see him set up a big gun. It looked like a big automatic rifle, with a real $2500 scope mounted on the top, but I was told it is in reality a type of rocket launcher. Back to the kissy stage I went and saw them film the bookends to the face-mashing I already saw. What I saw was the regular coverage of the scene, starting on running the scene on Eva Mendes over Macht’s shoulder and then turning around to get Macht’s performance. The sequence starts with The Spirit below camera and Sand looking down at him with a smirk on her face. “On your feet, Officer Colt.” Macht stands into frame and delivers his lines in a low, rough voice. “I guess it’s time you finally dropped your armor, Sandy. I almost forgot… you lost something…” He holds up a necklace with his left hand, a simple locket, which is nothing compared to the giant glittering diamond necklace Sand Saref is already wearing, but it obviously means more to her as she immediately rips off the diamonds around her neck without a thought and puts the locket around her neck. In rehearsals they played with the placement of the hand holding the locket within the frame. At one point Macht was swinging the locket back and forth in front of Mendes’ face. Miller told him to cut it out. “You’re not hypnotizing her. You’re just giving it to her.” The final framing had him raise it up, chain wrapped around his fingers and locket resting in the palm of his hand at about the middle of the screen. At this point I had a Comtek receiver and headphones so I could hear all the dialogue being spoken in the scene. I also got to hear a lot of the onset chatter and the sound guy communicating with his boom operator. I know from this that in the final film there will be helicopters and carnage filling in the greenscreen around the actors. I also got to hear Mendes joke around with the crew in-between takes. Someone asked if the diamonds around her neck were real. She says, “Of course it is. Everything above the waist is natural.” There was a laugh and then someone said, “That makes me worried about what’s below the waist.” With a complete straight face, Mendes responded with, “I do have strong features, don’t I?” before cracking up. Anyway, as The Spirit hands over the locket and Sand Saref puts it on with an amazed smile plastered on her face he continues his dialogue. “Old man Kurtzman… he said he’d take it back.” Saref’s smile becomes more coy after she secures the locket. “Well, maybe I’ll wear it now and then, but it doesn’t mean I’m your girl.” At this point they did a quick mime of her peeling back Spirit’s mask and then a quick lean in for a single kiss, knowing that at this point they’ll cut in with one of the elaborate 360 takes they did earlier. Then they pull back. Spirit delivers the next line without looking her in the face. “You better take your treasure and get out of here. It’s all you ever wanted.” Mendes smiles… she doesn’t look hurt by this statement, but she is more distant. She whispers, “Not everything.” Macht’s eyes connect with hers and they share one more moment. “Good-bye, Sand.” “Good-bye, Denny.” They did that about half a dozen times and towards the end they added a moment after Mendes’ good-bye where she lifts her hood back onto her head and follows “Good-bye, Denny” with “Good-bye, Spirit.” Before I left I ended up once again sitting next to Macht as he had his blue contacts re-inserted for his close-ups of the above scene. I ended up talking to him about the day and then I dropped in “I have to say… I’m a huge, huge, huge, huge fan… of MONSTER SQUAD.” Gabriel Macht is the son of Stephen Macht, who was the father of Sean in THE MONSTER SQUAD. Gabriel laughed and said he loved the movie, too. He remembered quoting it with his friends as a teen… except he really could have been the leader of the MONSTER SQUAD with the dad he had. He also said that his dad really liked the movie and is happy that it’s finding its audience again. I ended up leaving shortly after this, but not before I saw two of dames Frank has in his flick come in for hair and make-up tests. One was blonde, one brunette. The blonde was Sarah Paulson (THE NOTORIOUS BETTY PAGE, DOWN WITH LOVE), playing Ellen Dolan. She had a kind of built up ‘50s secretary doo going on and the brunette was Stana Katic, playing a rookie cop named Morgenstern. I swear to god Katic looked just like a BLADE RUNNER era Sean Young, but didn’t seem as batshit insane. She came across as adorably goofy. I went around and said my good-byes. Frank once again shook my hand vigorously, giving it a solid two-fist pump. I guess he was really happy to see me gone. Heh. Before he let go of my hand, Mendes came up and said good-bye as well. We talked about something more, but I honestly can’t remember what it was because the whole time we were talking she was kind of petting my shoulder with her right hand. I hope you’ll forgive my mind for letting our conversation slip right through at this particular moment. Not a bad visit, I say. I got to eat a lot of green chile dishes and spend a day watching Frank Miller make a big geek movie. I also spent some time with Tom Jane on the set of his directorial debut, a 3-D noir flick called DARK COUNTRY. I have a big report on that coming soon, too, but my Holiday Gift Guide must be completed. Keep an eye out for all that in the very near future! -Quint quint@aintitcool.com
