June / 2010

Gunless:
Getting Down and Dirty
with Greg Middleton csc

by Micol Marotti

Greg Middleton csc with director William Phillips.

Canadian Society of Cinematographers award winner and long-time member, Greg Middleton csc, just can’t get out of the mud. Two years ago he was knee deep in it for Paul Gross’s war epic Passchendaele. Then he was shooting in mud-caked trenches in the Alberta interior, and now he’s back on familiar ground, shooting with Paul Gross again in a Canadian Western, but this time he’s fighting the dry dust bowl wilds of Osoyoos, B.C.

“Looking back on it, shooting Gunless was very similar to shooting Passchendaele, except this time the mud was dry and instead of wet, sludge-filled trenches, I had to deal with dust tornados,” joked Middleton. The Gunless set was built entirely from the ground up in a remote location 400 km east of Vancouver in the Okanagan region of B.C. known as the Desert Wine Country; an area that sits at the foot of Mt. Baldy near the Washington state border.

Graham Greene.

“When we were scouting for locations, we were looking for a place that had a classic Western feel, but still felt authentic.When we arrived in Osoyoos we thought it was perfect. It’s unique because it looks like you’re in the desert and yet there are mountains in the background and, of course, no power lines,” he said. However, the remote location had its advantages and disadvantages as he soon discovered. “When we decided on the location, we loved it because it was so remote and there were no buildings. We didn’t have to worry about shooting around things or removing any modern-day references. We built the buildings to fit our desired look and positioning, so in that respect it was ideal. The drawback was that we were a good five hours driving distance from the nearest centre. Once we were on set, we were there to stay.”

What it meant for Middleton and his four-person posse was that they worked both A and B cameras and handled the second-unit filming as well. “I was the one operating the second camera because it didn’t make sense to get an additional person out there for the two-to-three days we needed them. We were like a band of pioneers – Brian Johnson, Kieran Humphries, the gaffer, Sean Rooney, my key grip, Dave Askey, and me – we had enough provisions to last us the entire shoot, and we knew that if something broke down we couldn’t just drive out and pick up a replacement part, but that we would have to find creative solutions ourselves.”

“Greg is a master at manipulating light and colour to visually convey to audiences the transitions between settings and character development.” Bill Phillips, director

Dustin Milligen

Middleton’s creativity was definitely challenged when nearby forest fires and flash rainstorms forced him to rethink his shooting strategy. “The set was fairly exposed, so for a few days we had what looked like overcast skies, but it was actually haze from a forest fire that was burning miles away. We had to compensate for the strange glow of that light with artificial lighting, and it did restrict our ability to shoot wide-angle exteriors for a few days.

“Then on the one day that the script called for dry, dusty conditions when the Montana Kid (Paul Gross) is helping Jane (Sienna Guillory) on her drought-ridden farm, we had torrential downpours that lasted 45 minutes at a time, which doesn’t seem like long but when you lose daylight at 4:30 in the afternoon on a regular shooting day, we couldn’t afford to wait out the storms. Something had to change,” Middleton said.

His solution included shooting split days and adding a touch of Hollywood magic. “Splitting the days meant that we could shoot most of the exteriors in the morning with bright sunlight and interiors in the afternoon when the set was almost entirely in the shade. And on that particular day of the farm exteriors, after we shot all we could inside and it was still raining, we decided to use a DOP’s best friend – the tarp – and throw up some lights. It was pretty jarring to look on the monitor and see a bright sunny day while outside the confines of the tarp it was just pouring.”

Paul Gross

His sense of humour in the face of environmental adversity was what attracted the Vancouver-based writer/director William (Bill) Phillips (Treed Murray, Foolproof) to Middleton in the first place. “It was almost like being paired up on a blind date,” joked Phillips, “I heard so much about Greg from my co-producer and Paul. What a nice guy he was and how we would be a good fit that I immediately feared that we would fight every day on set. As it turns out, when we met I knew he was the right person to film Gunless. He understood the Western genre. He didn’t seem intimidated by the iconic landscape shots that are almost a requirement when tackling this type of film, and yet he also realized the importance of not losing the close-ups that would drive the comedic timing of the scenes.”

“Before meeting Bill, I watched all the classic Westerns I could get my hands on,” recalls Middleton. “What really struck me about these classic films such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was their extensive use of dramatic widescreen shots intercut with moments of extreme close-ups. That technique really supports the storyline because even without dialogue, you see Blondie’s (Clint Eastwood’s character in the film) surroundings and that he has nowhere to go. And from the expression on the hardened gunslinger’s face, you realize that he knows it too. With Gunless, we wanted audiences to have that same perspective and feel for the Montana Kid,” he explained.

To mimic the technique, Middleton shot on Panavision cameras using three-perf super 35-mm film to highlight the sweeping panoramas and chose not to shoot steadicam for the close-ups. “Greg knew that I wanted to find a way to pay homage to the classic Western, but at the same time purposely destroy the overly romantic myths that American movies have created about the Wild West and add our own brand of Canadian humour,” explained Phillips. “Greg is a master at manipulating light and colour to visually convey to audiences the transitions between settings and character development. So he and I went about creating a different look and a subtly different colour palette for the film so that the audience has an immediate visual cue of when the displaced gunslinger starts to feel at home in his new surroundings.”

Just as Middleton started to get comfortable in his surroundings, Phillips introduced one more challenge. “The shootout scene was very challenging because it wasn’t your typical Wild West shootout,” Middleton explained. “In fact, the whole point of the scene was that there were very few guns involved. We had 10 gun men in the scene in 10 different vantage points. We had to constantly reposition ourselves to best capture the close-ups we needed to build drama and then sustain that tension until we introduced the plot twists.”

Middleton was keeping the plot secrets close to his chest, but he did reveal his secret hopes for the film. “It’s an accessible movie that I hope a lot of people beyond just Western lovers will appreciate,” he said. Two years ago, with Passchendaele, Middleton took on the challenge to prove that Canadians could make a great war epic film of their own, and now, with Gunless, he has staked our claim to the Western genre and hopes that the pioneering spirit they fostered on set will transcend to the screen.

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