{"id":1206,"date":"2014-09-03T15:36:21","date_gmt":"2014-09-03T13:36:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samdb.co.za\/blogs\/?p=1206"},"modified":"2014-09-03T15:36:21","modified_gmt":"2014-09-03T13:36:21","slug":"qa-with-into-the-storm-director-steven-quale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samdb.co.za\/blogs\/blog\/2014\/09\/03\/qa-with-into-the-storm-director-steven-quale\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A With Into The Storm Director Steven Quale"},"content":{"rendered":"

Into The Storm<\/a> opens in South African cinemas 5 September 2014, and in the run up to this release, why not prepare for the storm by checking out the Q&A with director Steven Quale below, and reading the SAMDB Review of Into The Storm<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Can you talk about the feeling you wanted to create as you introduce us to the characters that we\u2019re about to go on this incredible ride with in Into the Storm?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

For me, it\u2019s actually two parts. \u00a0At the beginning of the film, there\u2019s the father and his sons, and the other people from the small community of Silverton who are doing their normal thing.\u00a0 The threat of a storm is coming, but nobody knows it\u2019s going to become something as big as what it eventually ends up developing into.\u00a0 Then, on the other side, we meet a group of storm chasers who are actively seeking a tornado but can\u2019t seem to ever be at the right place at the right time.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of suspense leading up to when the storm finally hits, and then, once it does, the third act is just non-stop where you\u2019re just fighting for survival.\u00a0 And when the two groups converge\u2014the storm chasers seeking the thrill of the tornado and the people who are just trying to survive\u2014it\u2019s interesting to see their dynamic together and how they come to help each other out in the end.<\/p>\n

Richard Armitage plays Gary, the father who has to go out into the storm to find his son.\u00a0 Can you talk about what qualities you wanted for Gary and what Richard brings to the role?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, Richard Armitage has this wonderful quiet presence to him, and what I liked about him as Gary is that he could be a Vice Principal, who maybe is in charge of the football team as well, and does some other activities for the school.\u00a0 At the same time, he\u2019s trying to deal with his two kids, being a single father and having teenagers in that awkward moment in life when they\u2019re rebellious.\u00a0 So, as a result of all that, things aren\u2019t exactly smooth in his family life and he\u2019s just doing his best to try to be a good father, but he\u2019s spread kind of thin.<\/p>\n

But then, when this tornado hits, he becomes the reluctant hero.\u00a0 Suddenly he has to step up and take charge, and try to save the school by going completely against what the Principal because he knows instinctively the right thing to do to try to save these people.\u00a0 He is able to have those leadership qualities and lead not by intimidation, but by inspiration.<\/p>\n

What I liked about Richard playing this character is the contrast because everybody knows Richard from The Hobbit<\/em> movies, and here he is, this huge warrior, super strong and powerful, even though he\u2019s small.\u00a0 It\u2019s nice to have him play just a normal guy who doesn\u2019t have all these amazing powers and just has to use his intelligence and his reasoning to try to convince people to go with him to save as many lives as he can when this horrific disaster occurs.<\/p>\n

How about Sarah Wayne Callies as Allison, the scientist who joins Pete, Matt Walsh\u2019s character, and the storm chasing team?\u00a0 What was it like working with Sarah and what did she bring to the role?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Sarah Wayne Callies is an amazing person.\u00a0 She was wonderful to work with, as were all the actors on this project, but she just brought this immediate intelligence and believability to the character.\u00a0 The very first time I met her, I knew immediately that I would buy her as this dedicated, enthusiastic scientist researcher who\u2019s trying to save lives by learning more about these storms and trying to predict when they\u2019re going to hit, to try to have earlier warnings than they currently have.<\/p>\n

So, for her, it\u2019s all about saving lives and helping the community through research, as opposed to the thrill-seeking aspects of storm chasing, or the idea of getting the most amazing video shot in history that Pete has.\u00a0 They\u2019re kind of at odds with each other because of that.\u00a0 She just wants to get the scientific data and Pete wants to get spectacular-looking video footage to show how amazing these storms are.<\/p>\n

So, what Sarah brought was a total believability to the character, and particularly with her relationship with her daughter onscreen, and what was kind of fun is we were able to use Sarah\u2019s actual daughter to play her fictitious daughter in the movie for the scene where they Skype together.\u00a0 So I was really pleased, and it was adorable to see both of them together, so I was fortunate in that respect.\u00a0 You can\u2019t always do that, per se, in films, but that was wonderful little thing, and again, I just loved how much conviction Sarah brought to it, and also her likability.<\/p>\n

How did you work with the actors to communicate the massive visual effects components they\u2019d be interacting with while also bringing naturalism and spontaneity to their performances?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, what was important for me was in the whole film, from visual effects all the way to the characters and performances, was to have a sense of realism.\u00a0 When I did research for this movie, I found that tornadoes are so spectacular in their own right that you don\u2019t really have to augment it.\u00a0 What\u2019s there in actual Mother Nature is stunning and horrific, impressive and awe-inspiring … lots of adjectives when you see these images and video of real storms and tornadoes in particular.<\/p>\n

So, I filtered that down to all aspects of the film.\u00a0 I wanted the performances grounded in total reality.\u00a0 I wanted the characters, the situations, the conflicts not to feel contrived, but to feel believable.\u00a0 With all the actors, the idea was to try to make it feel as real as possible.\u00a0 We developed back-stories for each of the characters that aren\u2019t included in the film, but gave them ways to relate to what they were doing.\u00a0 Then we just worked as a team.<\/p>\n

Part of what helped keep it grounded was the fact that we shot the film using handheld cameras for the most part, and in a kind of relaxed environment.\u00a0 Yet it had to be very structured because of all these visual effects that we would be adding later.\u00a0 We also had practical special effects with wind machines, and so forth.\u00a0 So, we had to maintain what you normally have in a movie, with rehearsals and hitting your marks and all of those normal things.\u00a0 But we let it be a little looser as far as the back and forth between everybody.<\/p>\n

With improvisation, interestingly enough, you find that if you go too far with it, it almost becomes incoherent as far as dialogue.\u00a0 If you actually take a recording device and record a person\u2019s conversation, people cut each other off so quickly and so frequently, and you finish other people\u2019s sentences.\u00a0 It\u2019s kind of a shorthand but you can understand it when you\u2019re in a conversation with someone.\u00a0 When you make a movie, that same thing can be incoherent and it just doesn\u2019t feel real.<\/p>\n

So, we came up with a hybrid where you interject just enough of that into it, but still stick to the dialogue and the way it was written.\u00a0 It\u2019s just a very fine line, but I had wonderful actors who were very talented, and did a great job of making it feel believable and real.<\/p>\n

So, moving on to the other main character of the movie, can you take me through what went into creating these massive tornadoes onscreen, in terms of both on-set effects and working with visual effects companies to bring them to life digitally?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Well, when I first read the script, I thought there was an amazing potential for the tornadoes.\u00a0 We have four major tornadoes that hit and, in some cases, merge together, and my fear was that you could potentially have a feeling of repetition.\u00a0 But it also occurred to me that the tornado is a character, so like any great character in movies it can be very diverse and have different attributes.\u00a0 So, as I did the research for this film, I found that tornadoes can be radically different.<\/p>\n

Having grown up in the Midwest\u2014in Madison, Wisconsin\u2014I never actually experienced a tornado directly growing up, but we had numerous tornado watches and warnings when you\u2019d have to go into your basement and wait it out.\u00a0 But I did have some indirect experience with it in terms of friends and relatives.\u00a0 But when I was looking at all the videos and all of the photographs of tornados, I was surprised and amazed at all the different types there are.<\/p>\n

There are the really thin and narrow rope tornadoes, which can have multiple vortices in the same tornado storm system.\u00a0 And then you\u2019ve got the more traditional tornado, which is just a big wedge that goes up into the sky, which we\u2019re most familiar with.\u00a0 And then you have these mile-wide or two mile-wide wedge tornadoes, which are enormous tornadoes that can spin with rotational speeds as high as 300 miles-per-hour.<\/p>\n

Then there is a fourth one, actually, the fire tornado, which is probably one of the most spectacular things in the film.\u00a0 As I was researching this, I found that it\u2019s an absolutely true phenomenon, and it looks almost exactly like we depict it with our digital simulation.<\/p>\n

So now we have four different, unique tornadoes throughout the film, and as each tornado comes, it gives the audience something new and unexpected to deal with.\u00a0 So that, for me, was this moment of \u2018Ah-hah!\u2019\u00a0 I knew we could escalate and build up to the end when we have this giant, two-mile-wide tornado, which is just destroying entire buildings, like a giant beast coming at you, and it\u2019s unstoppable.<\/p>\n

Then, the difficult part was how do you create all that and do it in a photorealistic manner? \u00a0We wanted it to be absolutely real.\u00a0 So we took all our reference footage and showed it to the visual effects companies.\u00a0 These are probably some of the most difficult visual effects to accomplish because everybody knows what clouds look like, and everybody knows what trees look like blowing in the wind. \u00a0This is not a science fiction movie where you can create your own universe to have a unique particle effect and special rays that cause destruction.\u00a0 We had to create these tornadoes and these digital cloud formations that looked exactly like the real tornadoes.<\/p>\n

It took a lot of effort and time, and many passes at watching it and tweaking it, because the way they create these tornadoes is through really complicated math procedures.\u00a0 Procedural techniques aren\u2019t artistic, meaning if you want a cloud to have a certain look and paint it a certain way, it\u2019s hard to do that when you\u2019re dealing with these procedural simulations that are basically computational exercises inputting wind sources and other calculations.<\/p>\n

Sometimes you get lucky with those, and they look good, but sometimes they can be kind of boring.\u00a0 The big challenge was trying to use the artistic and the scientific methods, and having those two meld together so that the effects companies could deliver digitally what I wanted.\u00a0 All of the effects companies did a fantastic job getting there.<\/p>\n

What we found was that to make the effects feel as real as possible, we had to have our principal photography shot in an overcast situation. If hard sunlight is hitting your main actors, and you have an overcast grey tornado in the background, it just doesn\u2019t match.\u00a0 So I insisted that we have overcast skies for all of our shooting.<\/p>\n

The problem with that is it\u2019s not practical because not every day\u2019s going to be overcast.\u00a0 Ironically, they have what they call weather cover days, and normally they\u2019re for rain or overcast situations; we had just the opposite in our film.\u00a0 If it was bright and sunny, we had to go to an overcast situation.<\/p>\n

So the solution was to get these giant construction cranes and put these silk screens on them, basically.\u00a0 Instead of having the silks be white, which you normally would use to bounce light off of, Brian Pearson, the cinematographer, came up with the idea of making the silks dark grey, like storm cloud color, so that dark grey light would bounce and block the sun, and create an overcast look directly over the actors.<\/p>\n

The only problem with that is that would only work in a twenty- or thirty-foot square area directly where the actors are, and we were shooting wide distances that would show the whole environment.\u00a0 So what we did is we figured, as long as we can get the actors in shade, we can digitally paint out the rest of the frame and create it with digital trees and dark, overcast skies.\u00a0 That way, it would all feel coherent, like it is in this gloomy, dark, stormy weather.<\/p>\n

That was the big challenge, and then the challenge for the actors was to endure the high speed of these hundred-mile-an-hour fans that are blowing in their faces.\u00a0 We did some tests, and I always made sure they were safe.\u00a0 But when you stand in front of a hundred-mile-an-hour fan blowing, it\u2019s intense, but it\u2019s totally doable.\u00a0 And when you stand in front of a rain tower that\u2019s pouring rain on you, it\u2019s bearable; you can deal with it.\u00a0 The problem is when you combine the two, now suddenly those raindrops are like projectiles going a hundred miles-an-hour, hitting you, like little needles hitting your face.<\/p>\n

The actors did an amazing job, having to always be running around with that rain and debris hitting them.\u00a0 It also added so much realism to the film because all that stuff flying around was real and we augmented it with digital rain and debris.\u00a0 We did a hybrid approach, a combination of the practical special effects and digital effects integrated throughout the film, and it worked flawlessly.<\/p>\n

In creating the tornadoes, how important was the sound for you, and can you tell me about working with the Per Hallberg to create that component of the storm?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Well, the sound is always very important for me and I feel that it is fifty percent of the movie going experience.\u00a0 So when we got Per Hallberg to be the supervising sound editor, it was amazing.\u00a0 The first thing I told them was I don\u2019t want lion roars, I don\u2019t want over-the-top sound; I want it to feel absolutely real.<\/p>\n

He took that and went way beyond any of my expectations, so I\u2019m thrilled, of course, with the sound, and we even did things like intentionally re-recording dialogue sloppy so it sounded more real, as opposed to making it perfectly pristine and audible.\u00a0 We would futz it a little just to make it feel like it was recorded in the real environment.\u00a0 And with the Dolby Atmos mix that we did, we could literally have the sounds of the tornado enveloping you everywhere in the theatre.\u00a0 It\u2019s like a horror movie where you don\u2019t see anything, but you hear it.\u00a0 And it gets more and more intense until finally, the storm hits and that\u2019s all done with sound.\u00a0 Per and his team did an amazing job.<\/p>\n

One of the things that I always like to do with both visuals and sound is to create dynamics.\u00a0 If it\u2019s loud throughout the whole movie, you build up a tolerance, you block out the sound and it becomes quite monotonous. \u00a0\u00a0But if you go from really loud to really quiet moments and get that contrast, that dynamic range, then that perception for the person watching it is that the loud moments are more horrific and scary, and the quiet moments are quiet, and tension-building.\u00a0 That worked really well for this film, and it\u2019s a testament to all the hard work of all the artists and technicians that worked on both the sound and the visuals.\u00a0 But I think that sound is incredibly important to the movie, and hopefully people will be able to see this in really good theaters, and get that experience.<\/p>\n

You shot the movie using a variety of cameras, from SteadiCams to security cameras and iPhones.\u00a0 You even have cameras on the Titus, the storm-chasing vehicle in the film.\u00a0 What did you want to achieve using this shooting technique?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Interestingly enough, my take on this was that we have cameras and point-of-view shots that would traditionally be considered part of a \u2018found footage\u2019 movie.\u00a0 But I didn\u2019t want that to be distracting for the audience; I didn\u2019t want it to get in the way of the storytelling.\u00a0 So we used lots of different cameras, and we had an amazing camera operator in Peter Rosenfeld.<\/p>\n

The irony of this film is that the entire movie was shot handheld.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t have camera dollies or cranes or any of those techniques that you\u2019d normally use in a movie.\u00a0 But the audience doesn\u2019t notice.\u00a0 About halfway into it, you forget about the cameras and the \u2018found footage\u2019 aspect; it just becomes a movie.\u00a0 And we did that intentionally.<\/p>\n

I told Peter, \u2018I want this framed like a movie.\u00a0 I want good composition, I want steady shots, but we want to do it handheld so we achieve a little bit of that tension and realism.\u2019\u00a0 Because, with handheld, if you do just a slight zoom-correction during a shot, like a person who would, it\u2019s imperfect.\u00a0 But it\u2019s just enough of that imperfection that it feels organic and real.\u00a0 And when you add a digital tornado to that shot, now suddenly it feels like you\u2019re really there, as opposed to a Hollywood shot with a camera crane booming up, perfectly still, and then suddenly it feels a little fake because you\u2019re aware of the technique.<\/p>\n

That worked out really well, and we had tons of different cameras.\u00a0 The biggest nightmare was trying to keep the cameras dry with all the rain pouring in, but the camera department did a wonderful job.<\/p>\n

Tell me about the Titus, the ultimate storm-chasing vehicle that Pete, played by Matt Walsh, drives in the film?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Titus was a vehicle designed by David Sandefur, our production designer, which drew inspiration from an M1 Abrams tank.\u00a0 He\u2019s really into cars and worked with a group of artists and designers and came up with this concept of the hydraulic outriggers with grappling claws that deploy anchors to secure the vehicle to the ground and so forth.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, since we were filming in Michigan, we found a specialized auto company, Kustom Creations that does prototypes and concept cars for Detroit and they were able to build the Titus for us.\u00a0 It was based off a Dodge pickup truck, and then heavily modified.\u00a0 All we had was the chassis of a pickup truck, and they built the entire vehicle on top of that and did a wonderful job.\u00a0 It is almost a little mini-character in and of itself when you\u2019re trying to deal with all the storms in this movie.<\/p>\n

And Pete, played by Matt Walsh, is obsessed with getting the ultimate shot of the tornado.\u00a0 Specifically, he wants a tornado to come right over him in his tornado-reinforced vehicle, the Titus, and to be able to shoot the eye of the tornado\u2014the inside of a tornado where the storm is quieter.\u00a0 Nobody\u2019s ever really seen the inside of a tornado, so that\u2019s been his lifelong quest.<\/p>\n

So, we thought, \u2018Well, what would the inside of a tornado look like?\u2019\u00a0 We did see some footage of a tornado that rotated slightly, almost parallel to the ground. There was a telephoto lens on it, so we could almost see inside.\u00a0 It was a rope tornado, so it wasn\u2019t quite the same as a wedge tornado.\u00a0 But it was very interesting, so we based the inside of our very large, two-mile-wide tornado on that, and wanted that sense of its large size and diffused, misty light you see the further up you go.\u00a0 It\u2019s like the atmosphere of a cave.<\/p>\n

Method Studios, which was the effects vendor that created that shot, did an amazing job of getting the scale, the scope and the beauty of it.\u00a0 Because one of the things I noticed with tornadoes is that there\u2019s an awe and a beauty to these storm systems in addition to their horrific destructive power that you have to respect.\u00a0 I wanted to capture a little bit of that in contrast the horrific violence of the storm, and in that moment when we\u2019re inside its eye, I think we were able to do that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Into The Storm opens in South African cinemas 5 September 2014, and in the run up to this release, why not prepare for the storm by checking out the Q&A with director Steven Quale below, and reading the SAMDB Review of Into The Storm. Can you talk about the feeling you wanted to create as… Continue reading Q&A With Into The Storm Director Steven Quale<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samdb.co.za\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samdb.co.za\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samdb.co.za\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samdb.co.za\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samdb.co.za\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samdb.co.za\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samdb.co.za\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samdb.co.za\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samdb.co.za\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}