Based on the book by Roald Dahl and now streaming on HBO Max, The Witches tells the story of a young boy (Jahzir Bruno) who goes to live with his grandmother (Octavia Spencer) in 1968 Alabama after having lost both of his parents in a car accident. Just as Grandma seems to be succeeding in bringing the Boy out of his shell, his world is rocked again by the revelation that a real-life witch is in town and poses a grave threat. Hoping to let the danger pass, Grandma and the Boy sneak away to a ritzy hotel, but as fate would have it, an entire coven of witches, led by the Grand High Witch (Anne Hathaway), has gathered at the same setting, where they hatch a plot to turn all the children of the world into mice.The Witches marks the eighth feature collaboration between director Robert Zemeckis and cinematographer Don Burgess, ASC, following such titles as Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Flight and Allied and their partnership can be traced back even further, through Death Becomes Her and Back to the Future Part II and Part III, on which Burgess served as 2nd-unit director of photography. It's nice when you work with a director like Zemeckis and there's organized intent to what the scene is about and how it needs to be photographed to support the narrative, Burgess shares. That's why I've enjoyed working with him so much. There's a lot of thought that goes into where the camera's placed and why. It keeps the audience connected to the character and makes them feel like they're in the middle of the story. That's a great part of cinema.
Zemeckis and Burgess began discussing The Witches in December 2018. We generally talk in grand concepts of what the movie's about, the cinematographer notes. He said to me, Parts of this movie can be really beautiful and nice, but other parts need to feel like a horror film.' Ultimately, this is a movie made for kids that adults will also like, especially with the great cast that Bob put together.
By March 2019, Burgess was set up in England in advance of principal photography, which was completed in a brisk 42 days. Bob's an efficient filmmaker, Burgess says. He doesn't shoot a lot of what ifs.' He just shoots what he sees is in the movie, which is great for everyone. He's really A-camera driven, but he wanted to use more angles than he generally would, with a little more opportunity to control pace in the editing room. So in those situations where a B camera could work, we would use one, especially with the kids. We only had them for so long, so we wanted to get as much as we could.
Production primarily took place at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden. All the interiors were on stage, Burgess says, as was the exterior balcony of the hotel suite where Grandma and the Boy take up residence and which, it turns out, is directly above the Grand High Witch's own suite. Bob likes control, and the only way to really have that is to shoot in a studio, the cinematographer offers. Unless it's supposed to be an overcast day, though, it's tough to do daytime exteriors onstage the balcony was about as big a shot as you can do. So I'll usually push to do daytime exteriors outside, even if they're just on a partial set with a lot of bluescreen. Lighting-wise, I think that looks the most realistic.
Such was the approach taken for exteriors around Grandma's hometown of Demopolis, Ala. Production designer Gary Freeman and his crew built a backlot town, Burgess explains. The buildings were all just facades for camera angles it looks great in the movie. It was fun to create a period Alabama town on a backlot in London.
The town exterior provided the setting for a flashback that reveals Grandma's childhood encounter with the Grand High Witch, a sequence that found Burgess employing an Antique Suede filter in front of the lens. Elsewhere through the movie, the cinematographer says, I used Hollywood Black Magic for diffusion to soften the edges for a fairytale feel. When we had a big close-up of a witch, I would take the Hollywood Black Magic off the camera and make the scene a little harsher.
The movie starts off very cold and harsh with the car accident, and then it warms up and becomes more friendly when we get to Grandma's house in Demopolis, Burgess explains. When we get to the hotel, everything's supposed to be great, and it's warm and wonderful but then the witches come, and the color gets a little harsher, and there's less filtration. It keeps going down that path, but then it comes out the other side at the end, where it's warm and wonderful again.
Following a brief prelude with a narrated slideshow that establishes that witches are both real and hiding in plain sight, the story gets underway with the immediate aftermath of the car accident. The Boy is seen in profile, buckled into the backseat of his family's car, and in the background, outside the window, snowflakes appear to be rising up into the sky until the image begins to rotate, revealing that the car is upside down. For that particular shot we used the Oculus head because we needed it to go a full 180 degrees, Burgess reveals. It was tricky because there was only about a half an inch of clearance to rotate the head inside the car, and it actually pulls out of the car as it's rotating. And as the camera rotates 180 degrees, the pan and the tilt start going in different directions, which is always difficult for an operator. But it worked well. It makes the audience go, Wait a minute, what's really going on here?'
The cinematographer elected to work with Panavision's Millennium DXL2 as his primary camera, having previously put it through its paces on director Sheldon Schwartz's short The Tattooed Heart. That was my test ground for the camera, Burges
