ALEXA 65 on “Mickey 17”

Set in a dystopian, climate-changed future, “Mickey 17” tells the story of Mickey Barnes, the sole “Expendable” on a mission to colonize a snowy planet inhabited by intelligent aliens. His job entails being placed repeatedly in unsurvivable situations and his body being regenerated, with memories intact, each time he dies. Eventually Mickey number 17 unexpectedly survives an accident and returns to find himself face to face with Mickey 18, putting them both in danger of permanent destruction for being illegal “Multiples.”

Combining aspects of sci-fi, comedy, and political satire, the film defies easy classification in a way that typifies the work of its South Korean director, Bong Joon Ho. Knowing that the shoot would present significant visual challenges, Bong turned to the world-renowned cinematographer Darius Khondji AFC, ASC, with whom he had collaborated on his 2017 movie “Okja.” Together, Khondji and Bong began discussing format and equipment choices for the UK-based production of “Mickey 17.”

The cinematographer recalls, “We talked about film as well as digital capture, because we both love film. But we felt that digital would fit this project better and give us more freedom to shoot the way we wanted.” Fairly quickly, they gravitated towards the 65 mm format and ALEXA 65 camera they had used on “Okja,” and then each gone on to use again subsequently: Khondji on “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” and Bong on “Parasite,” the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

“We both love the 65 mm format,” explains Khondji. “The way actors are rendered on this format, on this sensor, and the way it lets us film their performances; it gave me, personally, great pleasure to shoot with the ALEXA 65 again. In general, I tend to use ARRI cameras on 99% of what I shoot, because I’m so used to the palette and the way of working, but the ALEXA 65 is something special; it’s absolutely fantastic.”

Having decided on the exceptionally large 65 mm format, Khondji and Bong turned their attention to selecting an aspect ratio. “We wanted to get away from the widescreen format and CinemaScope feeling that is used on so many big movies now,” says Khondji. “When IMAX approached us they thought it would be great for us to shoot in 2.40:1 for the main release and then do a 1.9:1 IMAX version, but we didn’t want to do that. We were adamant that 1.85:1 was the way we were both visualizing the film.”

Khondji went to ARRI Rental’s facility just outside London, which was servicing the production, and started looking at lens options. He says, “They helped me in testing a lot of very different lenses. It was really important for me to use as much of the ALEXA 65 sensor as I could, so that I would be using the whole format. In the tests, I ended up liking the Cooke S7 lenses more than the newer S8s, and I especially loved the TLS Vega lenses because of the Nikon glass inside them and because they covered 95% of the ALEXA 65 format.”

While neither the Cooke S7 series nor the TLS Vega optics were designed to cover the 65 mm frame, their large image circles allowed them to do so, even though it meant going to the very edges of what the glass could render—beyond what was originally intended by the lens manufacturers. “That's what I liked about it,” says Khondji. “I like the quality it gives when you use the whole lens, because it’s got slight defects out at the edges. It's not perfect and it gives the image a bit of a vintage look, which I like very much.”

Rather than mixing the Cooke S7 and TLS Vega lenses throughout the shoot, Khondji used each series for different sections of the story. He explains, “The Vegas I used more for the gritty parts of the film and for the final battle, for instance—everything that's towards the end in the snow worked well with the Vegas. Then I used the Cooke lenses specifically for everything that's on Earth, or some of the more luxurious parts of the spaceship, like the captain’s cabin. But I love the Vega lenses and their Nikon glass for the structure they bring to close-ups of faces, so sometimes I would introduce them as well.”

Many of the spaceship interiors are dark, grubby spaces, lit by practical fixtures built into the sets. Khondji says, “We worked closely with the art department and they were really helpful. Our production designer Fiona Crombie and set decorator Alice Felton were very good at working together with my gaffer John “Biggles” Higgins and his lighting team. We had two or three families of lights that we built into the sets and we repeated them all over the ship, so if you look at the film, there’s only a few different types of light. Everything is the same and we painted them to be dirty, so they blended into the metal of the walls. It helped me, visually, to have the practicals very bright and the faces slightly underexposed. Sometimes I had tube lights on the studio floor to supplement them, or we had openings in the set where we could add some very soft light, but basically it was all driven by the practicals.”

With Robert Pattinson playing Mickey 17 and 18 in the many scenes featuring both characters, as well as vast snowy landscapes populated by thousands of aliens, visual effects were a critical element of the production. Khondji credits visual effects supervisor Dan Glass with preventing the VFX requirements from getting in the way of the cinematography or the performances. He says, “Dan was really phenomenal and helped us tremendously. He knew how much I don't like blue and greenscreen and he said, ‘If you want to do it white, maybe we can do it white.’ So, we shot tests and were able to film the big snow battle with white drapes all around the huge stage at Leavesden Studios, which made it very organic for us, very real. And for scenes with more than one Mickey, Dan had a clever process that let us film the two performances separately as though they were normal scenes with no VFX, so it felt completely natural.”

Continuing his praise of key collaborators on the production, Khondji notes, “I have to credit our legendary key grip John Flemming and his team; our amazing focus puller Vincent Scotet on A-camera and also Russell Kennedy on B-camera; our operators, Chris Bain on A-camera and Steadicam, and Barney Piercy on B-camera; my fantastic DIT and on-set colorist Gabriel Kolodny; and Chris Ross BSC, who did some really good additional photography for us.”

The production of “Mickey 17” took place before ARRI Rental announced its new 65 mm camera, the ALEXA 265, which is only one-third the size and weight of the original ALEXA 65 and offers image quality improvements. Khondji says, “They showed it to me at the end of last year in New York and it’s a very nice camera; I can’t wait to shoot with it. I’ve always told the people at ARRI that filmmakers love the 65 mm format and want to use it, so I’m pleased that development has continued, especially with this new much smaller camera.”