Anyone familiar with the historic, wobbly-wall British scifi series Doctor Who will know how often it looked a bit…cheap. Part of this is down to the disused stone quarry that often served as the set for whatever planet was needed for each episode. (So much so, it even became a point of parody.)
Which is why there’s something wonderful about the fact that several of the decidedly expensive-looking Deadpool & Wolverine’s scenes were also shot in a disused British stone quarry.
But that’s not the only way in which Deadpool & Wolverine reaches for some historical techniques.
A tall order
The quarry is just one of a huge range of environments that Deadpool & Wolverine depicts. The production also worked at Bovingdon, an ex-airfield previously used for 1917, Fury, and The Batman. Plus, there was studio work at Pinewood. If there’s a watchword for this film, it’s variety, and that’s a challenge that makes the cinematography as much of a philosophical question as a technical one.
Deadpool & Wolverine shows us a parallel-universe, post-apocalyptic desert wasteland, the office of a used-car dealership, the very different offices of a trans-dimensional reality control agency, and much more. Usually, the idea is that all of a film’s scenes look like they exist in the same world. In this film, many of them are certainly not that. But the whole production still has to avoid total visual chaos.
Variety and consistency are hard to unify.
Consistency is probably the second or third fundamental requirement of camerawork, after exposure and focus, but variety and consistency are hard to unify.
In that respect, Deadpool & Wolverine didn’t make life easy for George Richmond, BSC. The cinematographer had previously collaborated with both Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy on the 2021 film Free Guy. That’s another action comedy with quite a lot in common with Deadpool & Wolverine. His background also includes two Kingsman films and the 2018 Tomb Raider, a globetrotter that also took in a lot of different environments.
Imposing a look
One approach to consistency is to be bold about choosing a look. The Matrix is famously green (and occasionally blue). Saving Private Ryan is desaturated and contrasty. Soderbergh’s 2000 film Traffic—well worth a look for camera-oriented people—is a whole series of interesting colors.
This sort of thing can be really tempting for people working on a student project, because they’re things we can easily emulate. The bleach-bypass of Saving Private Ryan is accessible at the touch of a trackball. If we want to be old-school and do it optically, as we often do, Wratten color temperature filters can give us more or less the look of Traffic.
But like a lot of Marvel movies, Deadpool & Wolverine does not choose a visual style that’s easy to sum up. Compare another superhero piece, something like Man of Steel. It goes everywhere from alien worlds to the school bus, but it’s contrasty and cautious in its use of saturated color. So cautious, in fact, that there are (rather unfair) YouTube videos out there called things like “What if Man of Steel was in color?”
Whether we like the results or not, they’re only a couple of clicks away in post. It’s tempting to reach for those controls, sometimes, but it’s hard to see that working for something with the comedy elements of Deadpool & Wolverine. It is a superhero movie, but it’s also a buddy movie and an action comedy.
Comedy is hard. It very often involves playing with people’s expectations, and that means clearly setting up expectations to subvert. Showing people things they recognise works. Showing people pictures that look like an alternate plane of reality doesn’t—even if the scene is set in an alternate plane of reality.
Deadpool & Wolverine’s cameras and lenses
In 2024, it’ll be no surprise to anyone to discover that Deadpool & Wolverine was shot on both the Alexa LF and its Mini cousin. There’s a certain irony in the realization that “large format” is actually smaller than “medium format.” Either way, really big sensors have long since been available to filmmakers at all levels.
No, I’m not suggesting that a Sigma FP is in any sense the equal of an Alexa LF. But the FP is a large-format (that is, full-frame) camera that can be rigged, according to the fascinating video below, as a practically pocket-sized route to a really big chip.
With Deadpool & Wolverine’s package provided by Panavision, lenses included the Ultra Vista and VA primes. Both are purpose-built for large format work, though that’s a combination of spherical (VA) and anamorphic (Ultra Vista) lenses. At one time, such a varied selection might have seemed esoteric. It’s been much more common since Joker did so well with a deliciously broad selection of glass, hand-picked from the dustiest shelves of the rental facility.
That encourages enthusiastic, underfunded people to scour the lowest-priced options on eBay auctions of 1970s stills glass. That might work—just test carefully, and don’t take the smallest number on the f-stop ring all that seriously unless you want it all to look like it was shot through a high-numbered Promist.
The VA series, and other carefully-vintage looking glass, can be described as more or less a response to the issues of old lenses. Too often, really old glass goes from cool to just bad at wide apertures. Panavision describes the VAs as having “some vintage-feeling aberrations” while maintaining an almost universal sub-f/2 performance. Unlike the thrift-store specials, they should keep looking pleasantly vintage wide open without becoming a smudgy mess.
Ultra Vistas are an interesting case. Panavision describes them as specifically intended to recall Ultra Panavision 70, which debuted in 1959. It was a combination of 65mm film and 1.3:1 anamorphic lenses, and was one of cinema’s rarer acquisition formats. It was wide: a 2.76:1image, which was sometimes exhibited in Cinerama-branded facilities at a time when cinema was trying to conspicuously outperform TV.
Big-ticket grandeur in a dive bar
Not many films were ever shot in Ultra Panavision 70, but it’s not hard to figure out why people might want to call back to it now. That’s some seriously big-ticket historical grandeur with a deep connection to the glory days of film acquisition. Can we shoot it now? Well, not really. The Hateful Eight did use original 1960s cameras with 1.25:1 lenses.
For anyone who isn’t Quentin Tarantino, Panavision refreshed its 65mm offering in the early 1990s with System 65, allowing people to shoot 65mm negative without a degree in experimental archaeology. For everyone else, there’s the Fujifilm GFX 100 II.
Marvel’s cinematic output has actually involved 1.3:1 Ultra Panavision 70 glass since at least 2018. Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame used the lenses. It’s not clear if there’s any direct technological lineage with the modern Ultra Vista series, which are a more pronounced 1.6:1 anamorphic.
At one time, Ultra Vistas were described as having a 1.65:1 squeeze factor. It’s not clear what prompted the change in description. Anamorphics are not always a topic involving absolutes, especially those intended to look vintage. Watch Deadpool get slightly shorter and fatter in the trailer at the beginning and end of the focus pull.
How much difference all this makes to Deadpool & Wolverine depends on the scene in question. It’s a very varied movie, and despite all the mid-century associations, 1.6:1 is less of an anamorphic squeeze than conventional 2:1 Super 35mm anamorphics. Many modern low-cost anamorphics probably look more anamorphic than the high-end ones used on this film. Sometimes that’s fun, if you’re JJ-Abramsing around the edge of frame with a flashlight.
Either way, a large sensor format and resulting shallow depth of field does bring out the properties of lenses. It’s perhaps most obvious in Deadpool & Wolverine during some bar scenes with plenty of practicals in the background. Bars are very often a somewhat self-production-designing environment. Find one with a lot of neon signs and small windows, and you’re only a big, soft, warm toplight away from a Marvel blockbuster.
A prosaic desert
The desert scenes are another matter. Day exteriors are often not the easiest place to see interesting lighting or lens effects, because there’s generally lots of available light and the easy option to shoot at middling stops. Even so, some interesting aberration does come up. That’s one of the reasons people like to shoot large format in the first place—though NDing for a reasonably wide aperture won’t hurt.
But no matter how huge a production might be, there’s always a limit to the physical space it can possibly light. For Deadpool & Wolverine, that wasteland scene was pretty clearly intended to invoke the ash-waste trope. We might think of the deserts of Furiosa (Australia), or the sands of Tatooine in Star Wars (Tunisia), or Wadi Rum in Jordan, which has been used to represent Dune twice and Mars at least four times.
It was particularly pivotal in Lawrence of Arabia, about which we’ll shortly hear more. For the howling nowhere of Deadpool & Wolverine’s desert, meanwhile, the crew repaired to the rather less exotic location of Pitstone Quarry.
That’s not in Africa or Australia. That’s about thirty miles north of Pinewood Studios, just outside London. On the A41, between Watford and Aylesbury, near the Red Lion pub.
There’s a reason Lawrence of Arabia didn’t try to mock things up at Pitstone. While interesting and unique, it’s also comparatively limited in size, and dotted with shrubbery of the type with which British schoolkids are familiar as a clandestine place to lurk while skipping chemistry. Critically, Pitstone Quarry is also in the UK. Richmond and his crew were there in July last year when the British weather, characteristically, opted for intermittent overcast. We can tell, because someone who lives in the area snuck onto a nearby hillock and shot a lot of spoilers.
Overcast is great
From a technical point of view, there’s a lot to be said for cloud. It behaves as the world’s biggest diffusion powered by our solar system’s brightest light. It creates the sort of directionless light that makes it much easier for a camera department to maintain that consistency that we talked about. It produces pictures that make quality control examiners very happy, and it doesn’t make life difficult as the sun moves through a long shooting day.
And it is, for the sake of the indie filmmaker, free.
It’s also a bit dull, and a huge nuisance when it comes and goes. For those of us who grew up dealing with this, the instinctive reaction is to surround the talent with negative fill—big black panels. With a bit of creative color balance, that creates the sort of cool, soft toplight which is a signature of cheap-but-careful music videos shot during the 11-month period that London calls winter.
That’s not really something we can do for a scene that takes place in a million-acre desert. As you can see in the video below, big productions have built some shockingly big flags and diffusion, which turns everything into overcast, but there are limits. That’s probably not what Levy and Richmond had in mind for their placeless wasteland anyway. Might we not expect burning sun? There’s a whole sequence which relies on Wolverine’s shadow falling menacingly across Deadpool. It’s in one of the posters.
Somehow they made it happen, either by waiting for a gap in the clouds or by using one of those giant lights that come with their own generator trucks and a crew of ten.
To some extent, this is why Lawrence of Arabia took over a year to shoot, and they went to the real desert. Freddie Young, BSC, shot Super Panavision 70—basically the spherical version of Ultra Panavision—with Eastman Color Negative type 5250. That means 50T (ISO 50, tungsten balanced) requiring a blue filter for day exteriors under natural light.
That means losing at least a stop and a half, possibly two, for an effective ISO of—what—twenty-ish? And then they shot everything at an f/5.6, because David Lean wanted to see the desert in deep focus.
But did Deadpool & Wolverine really want to turn its desert scenes into Lawrence, or its bus fight into the famous punch-up from Oldboy? Well, not really. It’s not that kind of movie. It plays those things for laughs, which is an impressive degree of restraint for a director with all the resources, all the toys, and the option to do more or less anything.
Maybe that’s a strange conclusion to reach about a Marvel movie, but it’s true. And even if it isn’t, the giant corpse of Ant-Man should probably be spectacular enough for anyone.
