One Nation, Under Siege

“Can it be made into reality?”. “Can it be made to look real?”. These were the major questions that went through director Michael Bay’s mind when he was offered up the job to direct “Pearl Harbor”. These questions, however, were soon answered when he went to Hawaii and found that many of the military bases that were there were still old-fashioned. Many still had bullet holes in them. The military also had old warships sitting in the harbors not being used that he was told he could borrow for the movie. This was exactly what he needed to say yes.
He immediately enlisted his long-time director of photography, John Schwartzman, ASC. The two immediately sat down together and started to flip through still photographs and discuss 1940s films. They wanted to begin with the idea that they were making a modern film in the 1941. This brought about a question of lighting and color palettes. Schwartzman decided to use alot of hard light in the movie so that you could get the feeling of the atmosphere that went alot with a war back in the 1940s. During the scene with where the couple kisses in front of this huge metal built plane. Schwartzman used two Maxibrutes on the plane to help separate the actors from all the flat blue ambience. Unfortunately Schwartzman was unable to control the lighting for the bombing and had to wait until the light was the way they wanted it and then shoot as much as they could while it was there.
Trying to prove to the audience that the ships were actually being bombed and shinking was a task in itself. The ships that the army just so willingly gave them could not be shunk in any way. Therefore every shot and to be in place for the bombing and shooting to look right. For the ships that you saw actually get hit by a bomb, the timeing between the bomb hitting the ship and the squibs exploding had to be perfect in order for the audience to believe the ship was actualy hit. These shots usually took 2 times to get right. The day consisted of 35 to 40 shots per day as is. In the 100 days that they worked on Pearl Harbor, they shot 37,000 setups with the first unit. That averages out to more shots per day than they do on episodic TV! Also, another tool that the cinematography used against the inconsistent weather would be the black smoke that was poured into the bombing scenes. This smoke helped to cover the weather and create an atmosphere inside itself so to speak.
A final factor in the look of the film was Bay and Schwartzman’s decision to utilize Technicolor’s revived dye-transfer process for a substantial number of Pearl Harbor’s release prints. He gloats that the pictures come out sharper than Eastman color positive. Dye-transfer process takes a piece of negative and physically extracted the image into three matrices, coating them in food coloring and then laying them back onto a piece of clear celluloid. Eastman color positive is projecting light through a negative that’s in contact with a piece of positive.