By Iain Blair
Director/producer Francis Lawrence and his go-to cinematographer Jo Willems SBC ASC got their start – and honed their skills – making music videos for such A-listers as Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Janet Jackson, Pink, and Britney Spears, as well as high-end commercials for such clients as Pepsi, Coke and L’Oreal. After re-teaming on a couple of TV projects (Gotham, Touch), the duo saw their careers go turbo-charged when they took on the ambitious challenge of directing and shooting four of the five Hunger Games films and helped steer the sci-fi dystopian series into the record books as one of the most successful franchises of all time. Willems additionally shot Lawrence’s spy thriller Red Sparrow, the fantasy adventure Slumberland and the Apple TV+ series See.
Director of Photography Jo Willems and Director Francis Lawrence in The Long Walk. Photo Credit: Murray Close
Their latest collaboration is The Long Walk, another timely dystopian survival thriller that dovetails neatly into their vision for The Hunger Games series. Based on the 1979 novel by Stephen King, it’s set in an alternative reality where the U.S. is now a totalitarian military regime, and a national contest, The Long Walk, features 50 lottery ‘winners’ who must keep walking until the last one standing gets to claim the huge prize. Those who fall by the wayside in the live-streamed walk are brutally executed by the accompanying soldiers.
“It’s the R-rated Hunger Games, and the only way you could do it was to shoot in natural light, like a documentary,” explains Willems. “So, both Francis and I had to be on the same wavelength in terms of what that looked like, and the key was to pick locations that would work in our favour for light. We shot in Manitoba, Canada, and all the locations were mostly on an east-west road so that you could start shooting in the morning with the backlight and then as it goes towards the south you could start doing profiles and then towards the end of the day you could start shooting towards the west. We’d go behind the boys and block and shoot the scenes in that way. The night scenes were a little bit different, but we kept it all very simple.”
Cooper Hoffman as Garraty and David Jonsson as McVries in The Long Walk. Photo Credit: Murray Close
In terms of his camera and lens package, Willems chose the ARRI Alexa 35 with Panavision T-series anamorphic lenses. “I wanted a very cinematic look as we shot in very open landscapes, so I felt widescreen was definitely the way to go,” he explains. “I wanted to use the Alexa 35 because I needed as much dynamic range as possible and an organic image, something that felt quite real, with good skin tones. And anamorphic immediately puts the audience in something that’s transformative. It feels a little bit different from normal or real, and I had shot Red Sparrow with the T-series and I really loved that look, but I also wanted a little bit more character for this, so I went to Dan Sasaki at Panavision, who’s the lens guru there, and he did a little bit of tweaking of the glass to make the edges a little bit more fuzzy, a little more distorted, and that’s how I landed the visual look. All the equipment came from Panavision in Toronto, but the lenses were shipped from Panavision in LA to Manitoba.”
Director of Photography Jo Willems in The Long Walk. Photo Credit: Murray Close
The DP worked on a LUT with his longtime colourist Dave Hussey at Company 3 in Santa Monica. “He did Red Sparrow and The Hunger Games films with me, and for this I wanted something that didn’t have too much contrast, because I needed to keep the highlights and the shadows,” he reports. “I knew there would be a line of guys who would have every shade of skin tone, from very pale to really beautiful black skin that is very reflective. And these are all things as a DP you really must think about. What problems can I run into? What are the challenges? What is going to be difficult? What will I need to fix in the DI? So then with the colorist we did have to tweak some of that stuff with windows where you bring one person down a bit, the other person up a little bit, and you lower the contrast. But the LUT was fairly simple.”
Willems also didn’t do any on-set colouring, admitting that “in the past I’ve been obsessive about being in the DIT tent and doing colour and changing contrast. But I’m going increasingly away from that, because as a DP you remove yourself from the set and it’s not enjoyable. You’re doing your job and you’re disciplined, but at the same time you’re not there. So Francis and I would sit in this golf cart as they walked and I would have just a monitor in front of me. I would do the exposures, but there was no colouring or DIT on set to do any sort of tweaking.”
Tut Nyuot as Baker, Ben Wang as Olson, Jordan Gonzalez as Harkness, Charlie Plummer as Barkovitch, Joshua Odjick as Parker, Cooper Hoffman as Garraty, David Jonsson as McVries in The Long Walk. Photo Credit: Murray Close
Prep was a short six weeks and the shoot was just 38 days “as we decided to shoot rain or shine,” he reports. “And we shot almost the whole movie chronologically.” To avoid the long walk from becoming too repetitive in terms of the visuals, the team would just block scenes and vary composition and framing. “Francis is really good at that, and then we would look at the scene and very few of them were storyboarded, and there was no previz, so it was quite loose in that way,” he adds. “We also shot scenes in one continuous take – even if we had a very long seven-page scene. Francis wanted to do the whole thing as a two-shot. We’d have two cameras on electric vehicles, and just to get a rhythm and to get everybody to move at the same pace and to keep these frames wasn’t easy. Sometimes they were quite close, and you wanted to hold them for that whole take. That was definitely the trickiest part of the whole shoot for me, and then also the boys would walk 15 miles a day. They were really exhausted. So, after we finished a take, Francis and I would get out of the golf cart and then we’d walk all the way back to where we started from on that take, so we would do half the walk just in solidarity.”
Willems cites the scene on the hill where they start climbing as “the hardest one of the whole shoot to get right, because I wanted to shoot that scene, where they finally get to the top, at dawn. But due to the schedule we shot it at dusk so you could see a little bit of that light in the sky, and we followed them to the top of the hill and it was really tough because it was steep and there were a lot of bodies falling, and we had to maneuver around that. The last scene in the film was also very challenging because there’s a lot of rain, a lot of extras, a lot of people, a lot of little bits and pieces to get right with the camera. And we also had to contend with rain deflectors which make a lot of noise. They’re not the most pleasant thing to have on set because you end up looping all the dialogue. They’re incredibly loud and they don’t always work. So we had to deal with a lot of logistics,”
Director of Photography Jo Willems in The Long Walk. Photo Credit: Murray Close
For the DI, Willems took his inspiration largely from documentary war photography from the Vietnam War era, “as the book is basically a metaphor for the Vietnam War and the draft that sent these young men into this senseless war,” he notes. “I leaned into imagery from that period, which gave me the basics of the slightly low contrast look that’s a little gritty, a little desaturated, a little dirty. It has some warmth here and there, and all the military vehicles of course also had their impact. So, we built all these lights on top of that, but then I ended up putting a lot more on top of it to create a bit more backlight and to keep the image dynamic. I also played around with what time of day it was, as there were a lot of things that just get thrown at you. Sometimes it’s overcast and you don’t try and make it look sunny. You lean into that and cool it off a bit, so I tried to vary the look a bit throughout the film. I tried to be as realistic and as honest about it as possible. There’s some imagery that has a little more beauty, like the scene where they’re walking in the mist, but that was pure luck.”
Joshua Odjick as Parker, Jordan Gonzalez as Harkness, David Jonsson as McVries, Cooper Hoffman as Garraty, and Charlie Plummer as Barkovitch in The Long Walk. Photo Credit: Murray Close/Lionsgate
“It was probably one of the most communal experiences I’ve ever had on a film set,” he sums up. “Everybody was really into it. Everybody knew what it was going to take, and everybody was away from home, so every day as we began shooting there was something very communal about, ‘All right, let’s start walking.’ And however brutal it was, it was really about these relationships among the actors that started forming a support system and a connection and a brotherhood.”
