Downtown scenes around Jack’s office required a system of “rain trusses” supported by 80-ton cranes that sprawled a full city block. But, as impressive as sheer volume can be, Lazarowich notes that often what they needed most were a few well-placed droplets. “Richard used the rain for mood in very specific ways” he says, “sometimes lighter and sometimes heavier. Marco [director of photography Marco Pontecorvo] and I would take time to manipulate one or two rain drops so they would hit Harrison’s face at just the right angle.”
Injecting his own sense of black humor, the director also used the Stanfield television as part of the story’s soundtrack, casually juxtaposing the most dramatic moments in the imprisoned household with the inane background of cheery commercial jingles, cartoons and cooking shows, mixing menace with the mundane.
Throughout, Loncraine sought to engage audiences through realism. Says visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton (Emmy Award nominee for Band of Brothers and a frequent member of the director’s creative team), “I’m all for a grandstanding visual effect, but in this case our job was to be absolutely invisible.”
Among the myriad tasks Bickerton and his team accomplished was to create the illusion of a 20-storey view outside Jack Stanfield’s office, for an interior that was actually on the 2nd floor; not to mention switching out the Vancouver cityscape for Seattle. In keeping with the mood, he and director of photography Pontecorvo adjusted light levels and “shot separate elements to create windblown rain on the windows. When we first see Jack in his office everything is bright and sunny but before long the weather has become dark and gray, rainy and oppressive.”
For scenes set inside the Landrock Pacific Bank, Loncraine and production designer Brian Morris (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and a 1996 Oscar and BAFTA nominee for Evita), toured a Los Angeles-area bank pre-production for back-office design ideas – not so much to reproduce the working facility exactly but to get a sense of its proportions and atmosphere. The director found its security system “an interesting mix of high-tech and low-tech devices, from mounted cameras to airlock doors and biometric fingerprint sensors,” many of which appear in the film.
Loncraine, who studied art and earned a fair amount of renown as a sculptor and designer in his native England prior to entering the film and television industry, is acutely aware of the power of visual detail. One example was his determination to avoid what he calls “the fake NASA Control look on computer screens, where you get the giant flashing ‘ABORT’ or ‘FAILURE’ signal that no one really believes.” Instead the film uses a range of ordinary computer graphics and standard banking format, offering very close shots of the screens when necessary.
Bringing in banking security specialist Lawrence T. Levine to vet technical dialogue and procedure provides additional grounding, although, as Loncraine acknowledges, “there are points at which you have to take a leap of faith because a procedure is too complex or unnecessary to depict realistically. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s important that the audience understands all the technology. But it’s essential that they believe the characters in the movie understand it.”
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