Opening montage of Jessie James

[MNMike]

Hi Roger, I hope you and James are well.

I had a few questionings on the opening sequence of Jessie James.  My apologies if you have already answered these questions in the old forum.  Hopefully the old forum can be merged with this latest incarnation at some point so we don’t loose all of that useful information.

I was wondering how much of the montage was preconceived and storyboarded.  Did you spend a chunk of the shooting schedule focused on that montage or did you capture the cutaways as you went along.  An example- did you know you wanted to capture a rain storm ahead of time, or did you just happen to to be out shooting other scenes and train your camera on a distant storm that just happened by?

I also wanted to reference a specific shot that has always enchanted me.  There was a cutaway of grass moving that had a very interesting look to it.  I’ll upload the image.  I was wondering if you used the same augmented lenses that you shot the other sequences in the movie (“deakinizer lens”), or was this done with a tile/shift lens.  I’m aware of the unique focal plane look with these lenses that you have previously talked about, but this shot appears to have something else going on with the center background in focus, but also the foreground having some center blur AND focus.  It’s beautiful and very interesting.  Also, the light looks very interesting in the sense of the foreground being lit with sun (or a lamp), but the background sky looking dark and stormy. Can you speak to capturing this shot?  I know it’s inconsequential to the movie as a whole, but it’s one of my favorites of the film that has always stayed with me.

Cheers, Michael

 

Topic

[Roger Deakins]

The particular shot you refer to was made using swing and tilt lens. This was used a number of times for the montage shots and elsewhere, such as for the shots of the rocking chair.

The montage was mostly shot during pre production whilst others were made during the main body of the shoot when something interesting occurred to us.

[MNMike]

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question. Happy holidays to you both.

Michael

[Author]

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