Dariusz Wolski, a director of photography whose resume includes such highly stylized projects as The Crow, Dark City and The Mexican, approached Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest much as he would any other project. Owing to new technology from ILM, the motion-capture process was more advanced and less onerous than ever before, and the strategy during production was to get as much as possible in the camera, on real, remote locations, without resorting to soundstage work. The result is a big-time summer blockbuster that harkens back to the era of old-time Hollywood adventure movies. We asked him about working with a VFX supervisor on set, the DI at Company 3, and what frustrates him about the business end of a big VFX film.

Film & Video: Did ILM's new motion-capture process affect your work on the film?

Dariusz Wolski: Everything ILM does is a new process, which is what is so brilliant about working with them. When we did skeletons on the first one, we just shot the actors and then ILM animated in the skeletons – no blue screen, no nothing. This time what they did was much more elaborate, and in many more scenes. We settled on actors dressed in gray suits with tracking marks on top of them. We called them pyjamas – you had real actors and then you had guys in pyjamas, like they were in some 1960s sci-fi movie.

Was it a different experience to do motion-capture on set?

Not really. They were just setting two cameras up outside the parameters of our cameras.

What was collaborating with [VFX supervisor] John Knoll like?

What is remarkable about John is that he is truly very respectful – to directors, first of all, and to cameramen. His philosophy when he comes onto the movie is to try to understand how the whole film has been envisioned by a director or director of photography. He has a tremendous understanding of lighting, and that makes the conversation between the two of us much better. In so many difficult situations I turn to him and ask, “How can I solve this for you and for me?” He helps me out, and I help him out as much as I can.

Sometimes it's a very difficult situation, logistically, when you're on location doing big visual-effects scenes. You’re at sea, or you’re working at night in some impossible place, and you have to fly a blue screen for some reason. It’s not like you’re on the stage and pre-rig a bluescreen – you just fly it on speed rails and scaffolding and it becomes a sail. What is the best way to do it? Can you make a 100-foot-by-40-foot blue screen at sea? That’s where John is so helpful. Other VFX guys would just rebuild everything on a stage, which would be prohibitively expensive. It’s about flexibility, and John’s love for having as much real stuff in the material as possible and then just complementing it [with VFX]. It’s the most creative way of approaching CG.

Do you ever have to modify your strategy for lighting a scene because of all the CG that will appear in the final scene?

Not with John, never. We always have this tool, which is like a sphere, and half of it is 80 percent gray and half of it is mirrored glass. After the shots requiring CG characters, they stick it on the set and get my whole lighting set-up reflected in the fixture. They’re very smart about imitating lighting and trying to follow what I was doing, and they’ve done an amazing job. I was shocked. Sometimes they take it too literally – sometimes I wish they would fudge it a little bit. Because you know the guys in grey suits are going to be CG and you don't see the final effect, you don’t pay as much attention [to how you’re lighting them]. If you have an actor, with hair and a sweaty face, you fine-tune everything more because you can see it.

So he never tries to influence your work to make the CG look better?

It’s the philosophy of the VFX supervisor. John is a filmmaker – if he was not a VFX supervisor, he could be a cameraman or anything else. He just understands the film process very well. We went through a lot of difficulties on this film, and we’d look at each other and I’d say, “John, how are you going to do this? I don’t know how you’re going to pull this off.” I’ve been doing VFX-conscious movies for 12 years, and every year there’s a new way of approaching things. It changes all the time. What used to be a major, cumbersome, motion-controlled one-shot deal? Now it’s, “Let’s shoot it handheld!” We still have to do 40 to 50 percent of Pirates 3, and I have a lot of confidence after seeing what they’ve done in the second one.

Technology is always advancing, and you figure out how you can take advantage of it.

I remember talking to people who worked on the first Jurassic Park. “Let’s make dinosaurs run around!” And they had Stan Winston with puppet dinosaurs, but they did so much CG. And water on Titanic was a huge issue. It’s always, “How far can you push it?” The technology is insane. Unfortunately, it’s very expensive, and studios have gotten used to delivering these movies so quickly. If there was another month of post-production, everything could be 10 times better. The first one was done in a very short post-production time, so this time we’re expected to make it even shorter. That’s the problem with technology right now. Studios rely on movies with CG and VFX – but they’re not allowing anyone to experiment and really, really, really make it great. It’s a business decision, not based on what can be done creatively.

Did you set the look in camera, or did a lot of the film’s visual quality come around in the DI suite?

It was a combination of both. I came up in music videos and commercials, so we were pushing the envelope 15 years ago. Studios have accepted the fact that a DI is not just fixing someone’s bad photography – but I was one of the first people who was really pushing for it, so I remember the struggle. Pirates 2 was big enough that everyone agreed to do it. We worked with Company 3 and Stefan Sonnenfeld.. He’s always in the loop with creative people who are pushing the envelope. He has a great eye, and there was a phenomenal shorthand. You shoot certain tests with the DI already in your mind. You play around with Stefan, find certain looks. and find out how much you can push it and alter it. So the look is predesigned, but the main advantage of a DI is the control of color and contrast and saturation. You have secondary colors you can play with, and that looks more painterly.

And you get really good-looking release prints, too.

Yes, especially when you shoot Super 35 so the negative is already squeezed. On this film we made eight negatives from the [digital] file, so there are lot of originals to make prints from.

Was this the biggest project you’ve worked on?

Every element. The sets were bigger, the schedules were tighter – although there were a lot of days, the locations were very difficult because we were shooting, looking for the most spectacular vistas and rainforests and jungles and beaches, and access to those palces was very limited. It was a combination of having tons of technology and lots of equipment and doing things in Hollywood terms. The locations were so remote that you had to go handheld and very basic. Hopefully it makes this film a little bit more alive and not so artificial. We had tremendous CG technology, but we also shot night exteriors with lots of light, on huge sets built in Hollywood, and in the raw jungle with no control of clouds or sun. Just shoot. We kind of went for this with Gore because we wanted to have a connection to reality.

It sounds like you were trying to bring a more traditional feel to a big Hollywood FX blockbuster.

I’ve done very stylized movies completely on stage, but I’ve also done things that were very simple. You have to be able to combine everything you know. Phenomenal cameramen and directors of photography came from documentaries – Chris Menges, Tom Sigel. It’s a matter of taking everything you know about filmmaking and applying it to the situation you’re in.

>> Read the interview with John Knoll.