Happy Accidents, Revolutionary Moments, & Killer Improv: Inside “One Battle After Another” With DP Michael Bauman
Spoilers below.
“That dude is unbelievable,” admits One Battle After Another cinematographer Michael Bauman to The Credits about Leonardo DiCaprio. “I mean, he’s a star and he brings people in [theaters] but his ability to expand the character is unreal.” Bauman has worked with Paul Thomas Anderson on five different features in one capacity or another, but it was the first time on set with DiCaprio on the acclaimed film, which sees the Oscar-winner as a bomb-making revolutionary turned protective father.
The scene that elicited the reaction happened during a sequence when DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson visits his teenage daughter Willa’s (Chase Infiniti) high school for a parent-teacher conference. “It’s supposed to be a history classroom, so Anthony [Carlino], our set decorator, put pictures of presidents on the wall. And so we did a bunch of takes using the original dialogue, but then Leo starts looking at the presidents, and his character says something like, ‘Oh, you got the grand wizard, Mr. Ben Franklin.’ And then he takes a vape and says, ‘Fucking slave owner.’ That was all, Leo just riffing off of what he saw, and that was our second day of shooting. I was like, ‘This is amazing. This guy brings it.”
Bauman was impressed by all the actors’ ability to improvise, saying the cast brought “interesting stuff every day.” For the cinematographer, it meant lighting spaces to let the actors move freely. The approach created plenty of off-the-cuff moments. For instance, the tense sequence where Bob hides in Sensei’s (Benicio Del Toro) apartment, evading Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) as the city falls to the military. With chaos erupting, he makes a desperate call to revolutionary headquarters to learn the whereabouts of his daughter. “When Leo runs in and goes to sit down. He tries to close the curtains, but they fall down. That was never scripted or even intended. It just happened because they had rigged the curtains kinda crappy and they fell. But he just went with it, and it amped that moment even more,” notes Bauman.
Another improvised moment happens between Bob and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), the mother of Willa, as she decides to leave her then-baby daughter to continue the revolutionary fight. “Teyana is a powerhouse, and she brought game every day. I always like a sports analogy, and it was like Steph Curry and Michael Jordan playing, watching her and Leo doing stuff,” says Bauman. “When we shot the scene where she’s made that determination to go join the revolution, we cleared everybody out of the set. It was just me and Justin [Dickson], the gaffer holding one light that we could move around because they were just going to improv it. We did maybe eight takes, and every take she would just up it even more and more. And there’s this shot in the movie where the camera swings over and she looks at the baby before she heads out the door. The look on her face and the light hitting at the right moment…I said to Paul, ‘People will come here for the car chase but they’ll stay for the postpartum rant that happens’.”
When asked if those serendipitous moments are what make PTA films special, Bauman acknowledged that Anderson is a phenomenally good writer, but the spirit of this film was different. “I think a lot of it comes from his writing. But what’s an interesting difference between this movie, and say Licorice Pizza, he was really focused on the filmmaking as far as what was in his head. This thing [One Battle After Another] was way more jazz. He was open to all that [improv]. We have this running joke from Spinal Tap when they say, ‘We’re not about to do a free-form jazz exploration in front of a festival crowd.’ That’s the line we say when we’re just going to roll with what’s about to happen. And when magic is happening, he just wants to explore it. So there are moments in all of his films where you’ll be like, okay, this is what’s going to happen, but then something else happens.”
Bauman recalls one in particular on Phantom Thread, a film where Daniel Day-Lewis plays a renowned fashion designer in an obsessively controlled relationship with a strong-willed muse played by Vicky Krieps. “The first opening shot, when Vicky first comes in, she trips on the floor that we had to lay down for the dolly. She stumbles as she walks in, and Paul is like, ‘Let’s not do it again. That was great.’ That’s in the movie. There are so many times that you see those kinds of happy accidents in his films. He grabs those moments and builds off of them. He really embraces them.”
A happy accident on One Battle After Another was a diner scene that ultimately didn’t make the cut. “We’re in Eureka [California], and we broke for lunch and went to this little diner around the corner. We’re eating lunch, talking about what we’re going to do for the rest of the day, and Paul’s like, ‘What do you think about this place?’ What if we shot here after lunch?’” And literally, people are eating their food, and Mike [Wesley], our location manager, is doing a cash deal with the owner, so we can go in and shoot. And we roll in with this camera, and people are like what’s going on here? And then all of a sudden in comes Leo, Regina [Hall], and Chase, and we shoot there for about 45 minutes. It was going to be part of a montage, which didn’t make the cut. But it was that kind of vibe he was trying to imbue in this film, which is a little different from some of the precision types of things that we’ve done in the past.”
The must-see One Battle After Another is in theaters now.
Featured image: Caption: TEYANA TAYLOR as Perfidia in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
