“One Battle After Another” Cinematographer Michael Bauman Breaks Down Filming the Chaos in El Paso

Spoilers below.

About an hour into Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson, a washed-up revolutionary living off the grid in Northern California, sends his teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) to her first high school dance, lights a joint, and queues up The Battle of Algiers when the phone rings. “Bob, we have trouble ahead and the road isn’t clear…”

He might be a burnout perpetually be-robed in tattered leisure wear that would make Big Lewboski proud, but Bob has earned his paranoia and remembers (at least partly) the codes from his years as part of the French 75, a resistance cell where he met Willa’s mom, Perfidia Bevery Hills (a sensational Teyana Taylor). Getting this type of call means the one thing keeping Bob tethered to the world, Willa, is in danger.

What follows is a breakneck, pulse-pounding sequence packed with secret tunnels, car chases, riots, firebombs, and getaways built for migrants overseen by the preternaturally cool Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro), Willa’s karate instructor, who chips in to help a supremely stressed-out Bob in his time of need. When Bob comes into Sensei’s apartment and finds mulitple families living there, Sensei happily tells him he’s running “a little Harriet Tubman situation.” Bob’s racing to escape a siege on his little hamlet of Bactan Cross, orchestrated by the twisted, tweaked Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and his platoon who are hunting Bob and Willa down.

It all comes to a crashing halt when Bob tumbles off Sensei’s rooftop and is arrested. Cinematographer Michael Bauman (Licorice Pizza) photographed the action, doing so in VistaVision, a film format from the 1950s that produces richer, more detailed images than standard 35mm negative. Even with the scope and scale – Variety reported a budget of $130 million, PTA’s highest to date – Bauman suggested the director sought an indie feel. “There are all these elements because of the vehicles and chase scenes but he really wanted it to be as small of a footprint as possible.”

The chaotic scenes around Bob’s arrest were filmed in El Paso, Texas, a border city steeped in political history. Once a key outpost during the Mexican Revolution, it became a military hub and refuge for thousands of fleeing Mexicans, reshaping its cultural identity. Production drew inspiration from its history for the Underground Railroad storyline, with Sensei (Del Toro) operating a safe house for displaced escapees. “El Paso was very accommodating as far as letting us have access to downtown, and that was critical for the car chase and creating the riot scene. The generosity of the folks there was great,” notes Bauman.

For a scene that involved Bob hiding in Sensei’s apartment, production designer Florencia Martin (Licorice Pizza, Babylon) built a complete set within a real location. “With Paul, you’re always doing practical locations. The only thing that was built on stage for this was when he [Bob] crawls through the tunnel [at his house] and pops up at that stump,” recalls Bauman. “The whole apartment complex was the work of Florencia and Andrew Cahn, who’s our art director. They pulled some magic out of that one since we needed a space we could move through and have a bunch of different dimensionality.”

Production found a building with an abandoned upstairs close to the location that served as Sensei’s karate dojo, where Bob frantically tries to find a phone charger. “That entire apartment, the hallway, the stairs, all the rooms in the apartment were all built,” says Bauman.  “Then Anthony Carlino, who did the set decoration, sourced everything locally, and it was great, because it had so much character. There was a lot of love that went into making that whole thing happen.”

From a lighting standpoint, colors shift from fluorescent greens inside the dojo to warmer hues inside the apartment and then to cyan and blues as the military raids the complex. “It was a lot of naturalism. That was the whole thing on this job. Paul was like, ‘Look, nothing should look perfect. Nothing should look like a movie. It’s got to have this ‘70s vibe.’ So our north star was the French Connection,” says the cinematographer.  

Camera language mirrors the shifting dynamics, often feeling restrained in the apartment, then more paced and urgent as Bob scrambles onto the roof. “I don’t know if it was intentional, but certainly those scenes [inside the apartment] had a lot more dialogue with the two of them. And I think it worked really well, contrasting as soon as they stepped outside the building. It’s like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, they’re just running their asses off,” says Bauman.

Plenty of other sequences caught the cinematographer’s attention, one being the climactic hallucinogenic road sequence captured near Highway 78 in Borrego Springs, California. Bauman tells The Credits everyone is asking about it, and for good reason—as we described it, it’s a “sui generis chase scene” capturing “a desperate but increasingly resilient young woman trying to puzzle out how to evade the psychopath behind her.” Bauman says what stood out to him was the uniqueness of the location and how much it underscores the tone of the sequence. “I don’t know how Florencia and Mike [Glaser, supervising locations manager] found it, but as soon as they found it, it was like holy sh*t, this is something.”  

Asked how the locations in Texas and California inspired the work, Bauman says. “I got to say hats off to Florencia, she was always looking at different stuff, and Michael, who was doing locations, was looking all over the place in California. But I think it’s a lot of trying to create a tapestry of space that is in areas that people haven’t shot before. A big thing for Paul was that it was really important to stretch the muscles and find new and unique spaces.” Something tells us those locations are going to see a lot more visitors.

One Battle After Another is in theaters now.

Featured image: Caption: LEONARDO DI CAPRIO as Bob Ferguson in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures