FEATURE FILM

Windtalkers, a 'soulful' story about friendship during war

	Cinematographer Jeffrey Kimball. (PHOTOS: STEVEN VAUGHAN)

Jeff Kimball, ASC, describes Windtalkers as a soulful film that deals with such ethereal values as friendship, betrayal, truth and kinship. The story takes place in the Solomon Islands during the early days of World War II when United States Marines and Japanese soldiers were entangled in a desperate battle to control vitally strategic areas.

The screenplay is an original story about a handful of American Indians who coded and decoded secret radio messages in the Navajo language. They were called "windtalkers." The Japanese military had no way to decipher these messages since there was no Navajo dictionary. A U.S. Marine was assigned to each windtalker as a bodyguard. They were supposed to protect them, but if capture seemed imminent, the bodyguard was ordered to kill the windtalker in order to keep the codes secure.

Director John Woo and Nicolas Cage.

"You like to think things like that didn't happen," says Kimball, "but prejudice against Indians was rampant and war is brutal."

Kimball's eclectic body of work includes Mission: Impossible II, Jacob's Ladder, Curly Sue, Stigmata, The Specialist, True Romance, Top Gun, Wild Things, Revenge, Beverly Hills Cop II and The Legend of Billy Jean.

"John Woo asked if I was interested in working with him on another, very different film while we were still shooting Mission: Impossible II," Kimball recalls. "I'd follow him anywhere. He works off inspiration and is open to ideas."

	Director John Woo and Nicolas Cage filming on the set of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures' drama Windtalkers. (PHOTOS: STEVEN VAUGHAN)

The cinematographer read the script for the first time about two months before they started shooting in Hawaii. His first impression was that Windtalkers is a dysfunctional buddy story with many big exterior scenes, lots of explosions, and raw violence. Woo said he wanted a documentary feeling that would enable the audience to experience the story as though they were there.

Adam Beach was cast as windtalker Ben Yazzie, and Nicolas Cage played his bodyguard, Sergeant Joe Enders. They come to respect and like each other, creating a moral dilemma that Kimball likens to a Chinese opera. Others in the ensemble cast include Christian Slater, Peter Stormare, Noah Emmerich, Mark Ruffalo, Brian Van Holt and Frances O'Connor.

Cinematographer Jeffrey Kimball sets up a shot.

They shot for two months in Hawaii and completed photography in a canyon area and at other practical locations in and near Los Angeles.

"John had specific ideas that were well thought out," Kimball says. "He knew how he wanted to tell the story and the emotions he wanted to reveal."

A quick decision was made to frame Windtalkers in Super 35 format (2.4:1 aspect ratio). Woo, Kimball and production designer Holger Gross agreed that the scope of the story, with its big battle sequences, required a wide film format. Kimball preferred Super 35 rather than anamorphic because it enabled him to use spherical lenses and created a grittier look.

"I didn't want the images to look too slick," says Kimball. "We had as many as 13, 14 or 15 cameras flying around covering the big battles from every perspective. The explosions were live pyrotechnics that literally rocked the ground. There is a sense of horrific realism that adds ambiance to the story."

At times, Kimball put a Super 8 camera on a track running alongside the action. "During the first battle Nic's character is wounded and hospitalized. Later, he flashes back on that first battle where he lost a lot of friends," explains Kimball. "I felt the Super 8 look was distinctively right for flashbacks. That's one of the things that makes this job so interesting. Everyone is working as a team, but we all have different ideas.

"Windtalkers is like a silent film in some ways, because at times there's not a lot of conversation, so the images have to speak for themselves. There are also moments of tenderness that we approached a lot differently. When Cage (Sgt. Enders) is in the hospital, there's a woman and the lighting is much softer and glossier."

That scene was filmed at a veteran's hospital in Los Angeles, where the architecture was appropriate for the 1940s. Kimball says the lighting is softer and the look is more luxurious, slightly shinier and glossier than the jungle footage.

There was no margin for error while Kimball was shooting the big exterior scenes. They sometimes began shooting scenes in sunshine and finished in rain, dust storms or darkness. The lighting package he brought to Hawaii included two of the new 50,000 watt Soft Sunlights from Lightning Strikes. Kimball had them mounted on a construction crane that was an all terrain vehicle.

"When the sun went down at 4PM, or the clouds rolled in and it got darker, we had the lights 60 to 80 feet in the air that followed the action (with artificial sunlight) on those giant master shots. I also used six arcs. It's not the kind of artistic lighting anybody is going to notice, but it allowed us to keep shooting from any angle or direction in a 360-degree arc. The look fits the story. We wanted raw lighting with a rough edge which reveals the attitudes of the characters."

For Kimball, it was comparable to orchestrating a complex ballet. Everything was moving almost all the time, including the characters, the cameras and the lights on the construction crane. It evokes a tactile feeling that is integral to the overall emotions.

Kimball used a combination of Primo lenses, but the workhorse was the Panaflex 11:1 zoom. He explains, "When big action scenes are happening in front of you, a variable focus lens is important. We had soldiers dressed in camouflage uniforms, hiding in the jungle, so we needed the ability to quickly change focal lengths."

Kimball notes that it took around six hours to set up the big battle scenes, so he knew he was just going to get one shot at getting them on film from various perspectives. He used Super Technocranes mounted on Chapman Titans. The telescoping arm allowed him to take the cameras places where it was impossible to lay track.

After shooting tests, Kimball decided to stick with one emulsion for consistency. He chose Kodak Vision 320T film 5277, which he rated for an exposure index of 100. On cloudy days he filtered the images through Tiffen grads on the lenses. The exposed film was flown to Deluxe Labs in Los Angeles, which shipped dailies back to Hawaii by air express two to three days later.

"We wanted a 1940s Technicolor look, a little brownish with a warmer tone, and not as much contrast as contemporary stocks," Kimball explains. "Our printing lights were down in the 20s and 30s. It's a matter of taste. If we had shot this film during the 1940s when the actual battle occurred it would have looked like this."

Kevin Lingenfelser, from Cinesite Los Angeles, supervised visual effects. He has worked with Woo on most of his American films including Mission: Impossible II.

Effects shots included 3-D airplanes and warships in the harbor.

"We built Hellcats from scratch which replicated the actual aircraft used during that period of the war," Lingenfelser says. "We never had a plane we could fly. We visited several air shows to look at restored Hellcats, but we pretty much built the planes from photographs and schematics provided by the military."

There is an effects scene early in the film that runs for some 1500 frames, just a little more than a minute, which can be an eternity if it doesn't ring true with the audience. The background plate is a shot of the ocean and a large valley.

Initially, two computer generated (CG) Hellcats were going to be digitally inserted into the scene, maneuvering through the frame from screen left to screen right. Woo decided to add four more planes with even more dynamic action. Two are dropping bombs.

Lingenfelser labels that series of composite shot "a monumental task, especially tracking the positions of the planes" so they are consistent with the movements of the cameras recording plates. CG artists at Cinesite also built an armada of naval vessels, including, battleships, destroyers, light cruisers and heavy cruisers that were digitally composited into the plate shots of the bay. They had to roll with the motions of the tide. As a final touch, muzzle flashes were added to guns firing on the planes and ships.

"Everything had to be totally photorealistic," he says. "Jeffrey and his crew were the greatest. They shot the plates at full aperture in Super 35 format using the same lenses and negative for consistency in the look. We extracted the plates from the center of the frame and converted them to digital format using a Kodak Lightning scanner. That gave us room on the north and south edges of the frame for more dynamic animation.

"Three shots had zooms built into them, which you normally wouldn't try to do on a plate. It makes it very hard to track the shots in 3-D with animated focal lengths. We recorded the composites out on the same color intermediate film the lab used for mastering release prints. It intercut seamlessly."

That brings us to the butterfly, which sets the stage in the opening scene. The shot begins with blackness and it dissolves to very low angle view with the camera hovering an inch or two over a body of water at an indeterminable place in the jungle. Three to four seconds into the shot a butterfly appears on the left side of the screen in the distance coming closer and closer. A leaf floats by and the butterfly seems to follow it into the foreground until it notices a trail of blood on the right side of the screen and flies away.

"This shot reveals the beauty of the jungle. It is also the calm before the storm," Lingenfelser says. "Jeff's crew shot a beautiful and serene plate. We researched the various species of butterflies that exist in the Solomon Islands, and we showed John (Woo) 20 to 30 of them. He chose one, and we found a collector who provided a mounted butterfly which we used to study colors, textures and shapes. We also looked at film of the butterfly in real time and slow motion to get a sense of wing speed, velocity and how it flies. Our animator created the digital butterfly using Maya software and then we composited it into the plate. It flies into the scene from a pretty good distance away at a leisurely pace, hovers, and then it sees or senses the trail of blood and flitters away. It's a performance piece. The butterfly is about four or five inches in width and it fills as much as 15 percent of the screen. It has black wings with a yellow body or highlights and four distinctive red spots, which contrasts with the green background."

When the butterfly leaves, the camera tilts up and pulls back revealing Sgt. Enders firing at a Japanese soldier who is hiding in the reeds. The drama begins.

"I'm kind of a method cinematographer," Kimball concludes. "I try to get inside the story and feel it with my heart and soul. I feel some sense of responsibility because movies are a powerful social instrument that can move people emotionally. A film like this makes you feel good about your work."

Windtalkers was produced and released by MGM.