Clint's Collaborators

Director Clint Eastwood (far left) and Cinematographer Tom Stern (second from left) prepare a shot from Changeling, filmed using Kodak Vision 500T 5279 stock.

The remarkably efficient Clint Eastwood filmmaking machine keeps marching along with, at press time, three feature films in various states of progress. As Eastwood began marketing his current film, Changeling, he was posting his end-of-year release, Gran Torino, and just launching preproduction on his 2009 Nelson Mandela biopic, The Human Factor. The three projects come on the heels of Eastwood's back-to-backWorld War II films that were produced more or less concurrently a couple of years ago: Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. The scheduling, logistics, and creative intent of those two films (as documented by millimeter) required certain incremental changes in how Eastwood's pipeline works, such as his embracement of the digital-intermediate process for the first time. His new slate of films have further evolved pieces of that pipeline.

Rather than radically departing from his traditional methods, however, Eastwood tends to strategically make subtle changes when circumstances require them, and then decide later if those changes should be permanently incorporated into his system. As the Gran Torino DI was about to start recently, millimeter caught up with four of Eastwood's key collaborators to discuss the current state of that system and how it was applied on Changeling and Gran Torino. Those collaborators: his longtime DP Tom Stern, co-editor Joel Cox, his technical producer Rob Lorenz, and Technicolor Digital Intermediates colorist Jill Bogdanowicz.

Eastwood's first decision was to continue shooting all three movies on 35mm film, as usual. Although he experimented with HDV camera systems for certain action sequences in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima and has expressed interest in shooting digitally from a philosophical point of view, Eastwood simply had no creative need to involve them in any of these three films, according to Tom Stern. Nor could he justify switching his acquisition procedures on account of speed and efficiency, considering his productions already operate at maximum efficiency — Changeling was shot over a period of 45 days in late 2007, and Gran Torino was filmed in just 33 days this summer. But that is not to say he isn't seriously investigating the concept.

“Shooting digitally does interest Clint from the point of view of making the image-capture process less invasive to the drama and the performance,” Stern says. “But it has to fit the way that he works specifically. If he could get a camera that was smaller or quieter or less obtrusive that would basically run forever without needing to reload, with comparable quality, that is something that would interest him a lot just in the sense of taking acting out of the industrial environment of slating and reloading and all that stuff.

“But the cameras aren't really there yet for the other things that are important to him, although they are getting closer, so we're watching them closely. In our setup, we have a reputation for being really fast, and the problem with a lot of the digital solutions is that they are not as fast as we are yet. That's because the stability and the complexity of the downstream part of the equation isn't quite there yet. As it gets resolved, I'm sure we'll get more involved.”

On Changeling, Director Clint Eastwood attempted to get away from the ultra-dark aesthetic of his recent movies, despite its dark subject matter.

Stern emphasizes that he is constantly studying not only digital cameras, but also advances in film stock emulsions. For Changeling, a period piece/thriller that takes place in late-1920s Los Angeles, he made no significant changes on the acquisition side, shooting the entire movie on Kodak Vision 500T 5279 stock — a stock he has used for Eastwood since Mystic River (2003). But for Gran Torino, a contemporary piece starring Eastwood as a crotchety Korean War veteran trying to come to term with his Laotian neighbors, he switched to a newer emulsion: Kodak Vision3 500T 5219.

That switch, according to Stern, gave him a chance to better highlight the richness of Eastwood's beloved blacks within the film's overall color palette.

“You get a tighter grain structure with [5219],” Stern says. “It used to be, at least for us, that we could get lost in the tonality or richness of the blacks. Now that we have a way to boost the blacks in the DI process, we felt it was an improvement to use 5219, since the DI process emphasizes the characteristics of the film emulsion. The DI is now such a powerful tool that you can basically synthesize a lot of the aspects of enhancing blacks with it, but you still need to pick an emulsion that is a good fit for the process, going into a regular-release print stock.”

The DI on Changeling was just completed at press time, and the DI was about to begin on Gran Torino. The process was important to the palette of both films, even though it is still relatively new to the Eastwood team, which used it on the two World War II films for the first time. In the case of those two movies, the use of the digital version of the ENR photo-chemical process was key to the dark, desaturated look Eastwood wanted. While it's not as pronounced in either Changeling or Gran Torino, the synthetic DNR approach is still crucial to both, and it has become a favorite tool in Eastwood's arsenal recently.

Stern and Lorenz explain that Eastwood's team has concluded that when they prefer the ENR look generally, they are better off achieving it in a digital-intermediate suite than photo-chemically, in most cases. This is a big reason why Eastwood has permanently adopted the DI process after his success with it on Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

“We used the photochemical ENR process starting on Mystic River, and we found it difficult to maintain on release prints, since it is difficult to control on a worldwide release where thousands of prints are done, and it is relatively expensive,” Stern says. “With a photochemical process, at a certain point, you get some chromatic shifts, and we really fought those on Mystic River, which had lots of white walls that made it easy to see those shifts. With the synthetic approach, we can control that much better. So, through Technicolor, we basically came up with a synthetic version of the process. It worked quite well, has given us print consistency once it is locked in, and it has saved a substantial amount of money, since a Clint Eastwood movie always means at least 2,000 or 3,000 prints.”

“Clint just loves those deep, dark blacks,” Lorenz says. “As the digital and photochemical technologies improve, he likes to see what the latest and greatest way is to achieve that. So consistently — every film — we've been testing the ENR look on Vision stock and Premier stock with both photochemical and digital ENR, and we have even done tests in terms of scanning at 2K and 4K with grain reduction and so forth — just trying to find the best look each time. This [digital ENR] process has produced the best look for what we are trying to do, and since that look drives the seriousness of the picture, it's a big motivating factor in why Clint now likes the DI process.”

Eastwood directs and stars in Gran Torino—a film shot on Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 stock, and he is expected to use the digital ENR process during the DI phase.

On Changeling, Stern says, Eastwood wanted to get away from the ultra-dark aesthetic he has relied on in recent years. Instead, he chose a more chromatic approach within the context of the period in which the movie takes place.

“We were thinking more Day of the Locust, which also took place in Los Angeles and is more about the banality of daily life, but not quite as chromatic,” Stern says. “Still, more chromatic than we've done lately, but with super-good blacks that sort of matches the story of this woman descending into despair.”

In finding their way to this look, filmmakers used the digital ENR process as sort of a starting point, according to Bogdanowicz,who has handled all of Eastwood's Dis thus far.

“Clint likes [digital ENR] as a good base,” Bogdanowicz says. “Then, from that point, he can tell me to go further — ‘Let's take it colder,'' or whatever. That is actually what happened on the Changeling DI. We started with the basic ENR look and then we went cooler, more cyan than warm. But it was consistent. On Flags of Our Fathers, we had different versions of the ENR look depending on where we were in the story. In Changeling, it was a more consistent feel — the palette has browns, cooler blues. We stay in this period world, and we don't jump around.

“I'm now doing tests for Gran Torino, and that one will have a lighter version of ENR, but still those real inky blacks that Clint loves so much. It's just that it has become our communication starting point for every movie, and then, we figure out whether to get stronger or lighter with it.”

The big recent workflow leap made by Eastwood's team between the two movies was the schedule-driven decision to finally move into digital dailies for Gran Torino. That was a decision most of the rest of the industry made long ago, but which Eastwood never had any particularly good reason to make until now, according to his collaborators.

Basically, as Cox explains, Eastwood simply decided to “slip in” the small-budget, indie-style Gran Torino production between Changeling and the ramp-up for The Human Factor. “It was a little film that Clint just announced he wanted to do, slipping it in before the Mandela film,” Cox says. “He had the crew available and didn't want to have to wait a year to do it, so he put it on the schedule, and that gave us a very tight turnaround.”

That decision, therefore, made digital dailies a necessity, and the result will probably keep Eastwood in the digital-dailies realm going forward.

“We're about the last people to give up film dailies,” Stern says. “We have always printed our dailies, and that's what we did on Changeling. The schedule [on Gran Torino] is what forced us to break with that tradition. We would telecine it and get DVDs for [Cox and co-editor Gary Roach] to see in an HD setup at their studio [Eastwood's Malpaso Productions], while we got DVDs sent to us on location [in Detroit]. With film dailies, there is that moment where you have to lock picture on the Avid and then conform a work print — and while they do the work print, everything else stops until we can see it on the big screen. What saved us time here is the conforming of the work print direct to the EDL in the Avid — that probably saved a week or two, which was important on this kind of schedule. There is the matter of quality assurance if you are watching critical focus in high-def, so we would still print 200ft. or 400ft. of film once or twice — printing real wide shots to make sure there was no drift in our system. But the truth is, [digital dailies] save so much time — it's just something everyone is doing now.”

Eastwood's collaborators say the advantages of the process so outweighed what they lost that they are confident their boss will likely continue its use.

“We had two editors — Joel Cox and Gary Roach — and while we are shooting, they are much more efficient because they are not spending time syncing up dailies anymore,” Lorenz says. “That means they are available to cut more, and therefore, they were right behind [the production] in terms of cut footage. That gave us an initial assembly just a couple days after we wrapped shooting the film. Clint found that helpful because, as we were shooting, he could see cut footage coming in and get a better sense of where the characters were, and the whole look of the film. Beyond seeing dailies — seeing cut scenes much quicker is very helpful. I think this is the fastest we have ever cut a film together, and I suspect Clint will keep doing things this way moving forward.”

Changeling had only a handful of visual-effects shots spearheaded by Visual Effects Supervisor Michael Owens to build period backgrounds for the era — “historic scrubbing” in Stern's words. Train stations and trolley cars in 1930s Los Angeles were a typical example. But Cox says the movies Eastwood is currently producing do not require any fundamental shift in Malpaso's editing infrastructure.

Thus, he has resisted any move toward Avid's Media Composer Adrenaline system or any other update beyond the facility's current Media Composer infrastructure. Cox and Roach lead a team that used three Media Composer Meridian systems with Unity storage for Changeling and Gran Torino, and Cox expects that same infrastructure to be used for The Human Factor.

“For what we do, this is the best system — it's bulletproof,” Cox says. “We aren't doing big effects shows, which would require the Adrenaline, and which is now starting to be superseded by the [Avid] HD system. But I feel no need to go there right now. I'm in touch with Avid and have taken all the classes, but we have a system that allows us to go very fast right now, and there is no reason to change it. Gary Roach came on board as my co-editor with [Letters from Iwo Jima] and now that we have two guys editing, we can go very efficiently. A few days after they finished shooting Changeling, we had a first version all cut for Clint to watch.”