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UNITED 93
“I knew it was going to be difficult to
get the amount of light inside the plane generally to give the sense of this intense sunlight. However, the stock really helped...”
continued from previous page
However, when they finally got together for the first time on United 93, a theatrical drama meticulously detail- ing the doomed flight of the fourth hijacked plane on September 11, 2001, it was, from Ackroyd’s point of view, more by good luck than judgement.
Said Ackroyd: “Paul had usually always worked with Ivan Strasburg who is a great influence on my work. This time round, Ivan was busy, which was lucky for me. Paul and I seemed to gel right from the beginning. In fact, we met for the first time only a few weeks before we started prepping. He’s not a man of many words and likes to delegate his work out to peo- ple and that way gets people to give of their most. It’s a technique you can use either very badly or very well.
“The film happened very quickly and the script was very simple: this happened then this happened... it wasn’t overcomplicated, full of camera moves. It actually took me back to the great days of documentary making when you could take a complete jour- ney from beginning to end with only the vaguest idea of where you were going at the outset.”
Ackroyd, who has shot 12 films for Ken Loach including a documentary, as well as a number of Stephen Poliakoff’s television dramas, was intrigued to dis- cover that Greengrass had actually sin- gled out Dominic Savage’s provocative Out Of Control as a work of the DP’s he particularly admired. “He seemed to like the approach and the look of it. When I work outside of Ken’s sphere, the key for me is to keep the same signature but to work with other people’s briefs.”
Although intercut throughout with scenes from various air traffic controls the stylistic decision was made early on that once the Boeing 757 had taken off, there would be no scenes of the plane from outside: “we didn’t want, for example, air to air shots of the plane going out of con- trol,” said Ackroyd. “From the passen- gers point of view, it was all to be told from the inside. I guess about 65 per cent of the action took place inside the plane.
“It became clear quite early on that we would shoot long takes by using two cameras. I was 2nd camera.
We’d overlap the cameras so we went handheld mostly. We had four minutes of film time so one camera would start and after a couple of minutes the sec- ond camera would come in and we’d overlap so we’d then have two cam- eras running for two or three minutes. The actors could live through this timeline, which they’d rehearsed.
“We’d do two or three takes a day, setting up in the morning then proba- bly trying to turn over by about 11am when everyone was all prepped and shoot, like, 40 minutes, by which time everyone was completely exhausted and worn out. The actors needed time to regroup as we did too, making adjustments to what we were doing. Then we’d do it all over again in the afternoon, maybe up to a total of three times in the day at best.
“The actors seemed quite appre- ciative about that way of doing things and certainly gave their all, living it all out three times a day for two to three weeks. Paul was very clear about this: everyone on board was a character. There was no main person, no specific heroes.” The overall effect was to afford a startling sense of 91 minutes of real-time action.
Before principal photography started, Ackroyd went out to Newark, New Jersey to shoot “some planes, kerbside stuff, landscape and shots of Manhattan. We took most of the cast through Newark airport and shot exte- riors of planes in Newark, Boston, Washington and Los Angeles to get the sense of a sunny day. We also had a Lear jet fly the route the Boeing took (before crashing in a field in Pennsylvania) so we could film a whole lot of aerial stuff.”
Main filming itself took place, first, at Stansted airport before the bulk of shooting occurred across five to six weeks at Pinewood Studios. There, sets were constructed to rep- resent the control tower at Newark International Airport (where UA Flight 93 originated and which, because of its location, provides a bird’s eye view of Manhattan; Control Centres in Boston (where the hijacked American Airlines Flights 11 and 175 originated) and New York; the Federal Aviation Administration’s operations com-
mand centre in Herndon; and the mili- tary’s operations centre at the Northeast Air Defence Sector (NEADS) in upstate New York.
As for the Flight 93 itself, the pro- duction team found a 20-year-old, out- of-service Boeing 757 earmarked for the scrap heap, had it dismantled and shipped to Pinewood. Then, gleaning instruction from a massive 9,600 page “owner’s” manual, the production crew began the careful re-assembly of the 150-foot long fuselage.
Rather than putting it back as one contiguous piece, however, builders reconstructed the 757 in pull-apart sections (the cockpit, first class and coach cabins). Each could later be mounted separately on motion gim- bals that could simulate the move- ments of the plane (banking, ascend- ing, descending, turbulence).
The art department then per- formed a makeover of the interior, dressing the seats and cabins with period-appropriate, company-issue graphics, fabrics, lights, magazines, even the correct images on the moni- tors – all to replicate as closely as pos- sible the appearance of the five-year- old Boeing 757 that took off that fate- ful September day in 2001.
“The plane itself is very much a ‘character’ in the film,” said Ackroyd, noting that one of the challenges was that the light must move in accor- dance with the flight. “One of the things I hadn’t done before on a scale like this was to have to have to build a rig which was 50ft long and had a row of 20k lights which you could then track the length of the plane and, by computerising, make it rise and fall by 90ft. The result was the plane looked as it was moving relative to the sun.
“We used the Eterna 500 stock inside the studio and the Eterna 250D for the plane. I knew it was going to be difficult to get the amount of light inside the plane generally to give the sense of this intense sunlight. However, the stock really helped and we needed some depth of field to shoot this kind of loose technique.
“The other difficulty was that we were shooting with two cameras and the other operator, Klemens Beckers, often likes to shoot with wide lenses
Photo previous page: Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd BSC;
this page main: Writer-director Paul Greengrass inside the aircraft, and tense scenes from United 93
14 • Exposure • The Magazine • Fujifilm Motion Picture