Cinematography Style: Bill Pope

INTRODUCTION

After starting out by shooting music videos in the 80s, Bill Pope progressed into being a highly experienced feature film DP responsible for photographing many high budget Hollywood movies.

At the core of his work, he focuses on collaboration and using the structure that director’s provide to fill in the story’s tone visually.

In this episode of cinematography style I’ll go over how Bill Pope broke into the world of film, look at his philosophy and ideas on cinematography and go over some of the gear and equipment that he uses to execute his work. 

BACKGROUND

After graduating from NYU graduate school, Bill Pope didn’t stay in New York for long before he decided to make the move out to California where there was far more work available in the film industry.

“I just kept hammering at it. I’d just shoot for free. I went over to AFI and volunteered to shoot movies for free and I did. I shot many. You fall in with a group of people and I would always just shoot for free. And I worked for free for years. During the day I would be a PA and then I’d take time off to shoot whatever was necessary.”

While working as a camera assistant on a Roger Corman movie, he even used the camera and spare short ends, which is the unused film stock on a reel, to shoot a short film in his garage on weekends. 

One of the networks he built during this time was with a friend whose production company made music videos with budgets between $2,000 and $5,000. Later, when MTV kicked off and they were looking for DPs with music videos on their reel, Pope’s name came up. 

During this time he spent about six to eight years shooting music videos for various well known artists, before director Sam Raimi persuaded Paramount to let Pope shoot his first feature: the superhero movie Darkman.

From there he became a regular features DP, who over the years worked for many other well known directors such as The Wachowskis, Edgar Wright, Jon Favreau and Joe Cornish.   

PHILOSOPHY

“I would say to a young cinematographer the most important thing you have is relationships. And the earlier you form them the better you’re going to be. You can have all the talent in the world but if you don’t know anybody you’re not going to go anywhere.”

Not only does building relationships with directors have the most obvious and most important effect of allowing you to get work, but it also has other downstream effects. Working for a range of different directors exposes cinematographers to many different situations and many different ways of working. It also allows you to pick up on various strengths and weaknesses that directors may have, which will strengthen your skillset as a DP.

“We don’t make the framework. We bring the atmosphere. We bring the thread. We bring the tinsel but they bring the tree.”

Directors will first approach Pope either with a meeting to talk about a project, by sending a screenplay and then a bit later by sending through a shotlist or a storyboard.

Although he has compiled shot lists for certain directors and certain projects, he usually prefers to be a sounding board for the ideas, shots or storyboards that the directors put forth, and then gives his unfiltered feedback to them.

“You’re just bouncing things back and forth. In a way, I’m the first person to see the movie. So, I’m the first audience member and I just say to directors, “When I start, look I can be really annoying, because I’m going to say what is in my head and I’m not going to filter it too much. I’m gonna be direct feedback to you because I feel like that’s my job.” 

This may involve him proposing anything visual, such as an alternative shot, tone, angle, lens, costume palette or art direction to the directors that he feels better conveys the story. These ideas can either be rejected, accepted, or through collaboration, morphed into a new idea.

This process happens both during prep, as well as on the day of shooting, where he needs to be adaptive and quick on his feet to make loads of quick decisions about how to best tell the story. 

This is especially necessary when working for a director such as Edgar Wright who likes to cut quickly to a variety of angles - which makes the shooting schedule very tight. 

Making good decisions, but also making them quickly is an important quality for a DP to have. 

Using his analogy, the director brings the script and structure, or tree, and then they both decide what ornaments, like the tone, shots, or palette, they can add to it, to better accentuate it.   

GEAR

Since he started his career in the 80s, long before the first viable digital cinema cameras were released around the early 2010s, much of what he has shot was done using film. Although his recent projects have mainly been shot digitally on versions of the Alexa, he does occasionally still get opportunities to work photochemically.

“It’s just a discipline. You know the mag is going to last 10 minutes long. The slate comes in fast. Everyone is on their toes. It becomes sort of flaccid in the digital world. They’re on their phone, they’re like whatever. On film it’s a complete old fashioned discipline. It’s gotta be in a can. It’s gotta be split up. It’s gotta go to the lab. It’s gotta be returned. Everything’s got a deadline to it and a precision to it that people step up to.”

On top of film changing the set dynamics, he also values it for its look - which renders images with an elevated realism. On Baby Driver he made the decision to shoot the vast majority of the movie on a single film stock, the more sensitive Kodak 500T. He did this in order to preserve a similar continuity of grain across the entire movie. The more sensitive a film stock is to light the more prominent the grain will be - so a 50D stock will have finer grain than a 500T stock.

However, he did occasionally use the less sensitive Kodak 250D for certain car mount shots, where there wasn’t enough room to add a mattebox to the front of the lens, which, if shooting with a 500 speed stock, would be needed to hold ND filters to cut down on light.  

“Ordinarily I was shooting it all with 5219. Just so that I have enough speed to deal with polarizers and overcranking.”

Polariser filters are pieces of glass that let through certain waves of light while blocking others. Practically this filter can be used to either introduce more contrast to darker tones, most commonly in the sky, or to reduce or manage reflections, for example reducing the reflections seen when shooting through a car window.

However, this filter also reduces the amount of light let into the camera by around one stop. Therefore, Pope chose a faster film stock that was more sensitive to light to counteract this.

He also mentions ‘overcranking’. This means shooting at a frame rate which is faster than the regular 24 frames per second most commonly used. If the frame rate is doubled to 48 frames per second, it creates slow motion, but it also reduces exposure by 1 stop. 

So, again, choosing a more sensitive stock helped counteract that.

This overcranking was taken to the extreme on The Matrix, which was also shot using sensitive 500T for interiors. Because many of the fight scenes had super slow motion shots in them, Pope had to light these sets so that the camera could shoot at up to 300 frames per second. This was done on a high speed Photosonics film camera. 

300 frames per second requires about 4 stops more light to shoot at than regular 24 frames per second. This means that to get to his shooting stop on the lens of T/2.8 he had to light spaces at least 4 stops brighter, at T/11.

This is fine when shooting exteriors lit by strong sunshine, but is far more difficult when shooting the many interior sets or night scenes - which required many, high output film lights.

For the lobby scene which was shot with high frame rates, the idea was to add an ambient top light to the space and then key the scene with a side light. This sounds simple in principle, but getting to this super bright level of light, required doing this on a massive scale. 

His team rigged 1,000 tungsten par cans to the roof for ambience and about nine high output tungsten dino lights that side lit the scene through 12x12 grid cloths that softened the light.   

It also meant that any practical lights that could be seen in the shot had to be custom built using pyrex, and specially fireproofed, so that the extremely high output, hot sources of light didn’t start any fires.

While most shots in the Matrix were achieved on practical sets, there was also some visual trickery, such as the iconic bullet dodge shot. Rather than trying to physically move the camera around the actor, extremely quickly and shoot in extreme slow motion, Pope’s team instead created a rig that mounted many stills cameras placed around the actor in a green screen studio. 

They could then use an image from each camera sequentially, so that it gave the illusion that the camera was moving. This shot of the actor was then cleaned up and dropped into an environment, to achieve the famous circular slow motion shot. 

One of the metaphorical ornaments that was hung on The Wachowski’s metaphorical tree was how they used colour. The real world in the film was devoid of sunlight, so was always lit to a cool, blu-ish colour temperature. While the artificial, computer generated world of the matrix had a sickly green tint to it, inspired by the colour of the cursors of the time.

When working on these larger action based movies that require getting a lot of different shots, he’ll often shoot with multiple cameras to maximise the coverage he can get.

This means hiring crew, such as camera operators and dolly grips, who will technically collaborate with him to frame the images and influence the camera movement.

“Any director likes to have other filmmakers around them. You don’t want a piece of meat who isn’t going to give you an opinion. You want people who are smart and who are contributing all the time. I mean, I always consider operators and dolly grips to be part actor. They have to be able to interact with the actors themselves and feel the drama because the actors are never going to do it twice the same way. You have to feel it. You have to be one with them.”

The movies he shoots often use smooth dolly movement to tell stories by doing things like pulling out from an important object to reveal context, or very slowly pushing in with the camera to elevate an emotional scene or experience the character is undergoing.

Each camera move is another little ornament for the tree.

He’s used both anamorphic and spherical lenses, but does have a tendency of shooting grander, action stories in the anamorphic format, often on Panavision anamorphics, such as the G-series, T-Series or older C-series lenses.    

When deciding where to place multiple cameras, it’s useful to have a viewfinder or pentafinder to more accurately find the frame before placing the heavy cinema cameras in place or laying dolly tracks. 

There are a few photos of him using what looks to be an interesting viewfinder from Kish optics, which has a video tap inside, which can send an image to a little monitor. This makes it easy for both himself and the director to evaluate and find the right frame.    

CONCLUSION

The diversity of the films that he has shot makes it tricky to pin Pope down to only one particular photographic style. Rather, he works in a close collaborative relationship with each director in a different way. Acting as a sounding board for their ideas and providing his own perspective on how best to elevate and execute each story visually using his deep experience and knowledge of cinematography.