VFX

Director Paul Greengrass thrives on recreating real-life crisis, whether it’s putting audiences aboard a commercial airplane hijacked on 9/11 (“United 93”) or a container-ship overrun by Somali pirates (“Captain Phillips”). However, his journey to discover how to recreate the 2018 Camp Fire that engulfed Paradise, California for “The Lost Bus” was filled with detours.

“The truth is I went in one direction when I was prepping the movie, and then radically went the opposite way,” said Greengrass said on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast.

“I’d [wanted] to make a movie about a wildfire that is the best that it can be done, up to now, with the technology available,” he said. “And the reason for that is the world is burning, the fires are getting worse and more [frequent], so I wanted to find a way of conveying the intensity off what those things feel like and how it might feel to be in one.”

He though he’d found the answer when he attended U2’s immersive concert at The Sphere in Las Vegas, which utilized the unique venue’s 160,000-square-foot, wraparound LED display to transport the audience to the desert.

“It’s absolutely extraordinary how realistic it is. Technology has got to the point now where you truly believe you are there. It’s eerie and uncanny, even though you know you are sitting in a seat in a theater, you feel like you are in the desert,” said Greengrass. “So I was very taken with that and thought, ‘Ok, what we’ll have to do is have a Sphere-type experience around the bus.”

This meant embracing the LED virtual stages pioneered by Star Wars series “The Mandolorian.” Greengrass and his team got to work, spending pre-production dollars on feasibility studies and tests. But for the director who cut his teeth making documentaries, he could never make the tech work for him.

“I came not to believe in it because, fundamentally, my soul as a filmmaker wasn’t really in not being in a real world,” said Greengrass of shooting on virtual stages. “So we then went in entirely the opposite direction.”

“The Lost Bus” locations team found an abandoned campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The enormous area supplied the production with different terrains, multiple winding tree-lined roads, and free rein to shoot with moving vehicles and to light its own controlled fires.

“It enabled us to have a bedrock of reality,” said Greengrass. “We could lay gas lines so we could have controlled flames that were safe. We weren’t burning stuff that [sent] particles into the atmosphere that could create a forest fire, and we could control all the dangers.”

The production lit fires in the foreground and around the bus that could be augmented by visual effects,. Greengrass argued these were every bit as real as the flames on set.

“People talk about CGI as in computer-generated images, but the truth is nowadays some of them are not,” said Greengrass. “In this case, we went and shot a thousand pieces of fire for different fires operating in different ways, different smoke operating in different ways.”

Visual effects supervisor Charlie Noble’s team created their own controlled burns to film in an effort to capture the wild and wide range of fire’s unpredictable behavior. The Paradise inferno’s movement, color, power could change in a split second.

“It was real image married to real image via a computer to create a seamless whole,” said Greengrass. “It was the most painstaking piece of work I’ve seen. We’d try some pieces, then say, ‘That’s not right,’ and [Noble would] have to go and shoot other bits.”

Perhaps the most painstaking adjustment Greengrass felt compelled to make came in form of light. Specifically, what happens when a fire produces so much smoke it blocks the daylight.

“You’re blocking out the sun, but you got the flames,” said Greengrass. “ It’s a very strange light. It’s both dark and light all at the same time. You can see, and yet there’s no light.”

Greengrass said the only direct comparison is the infrequent, fleeting moments of a solar eclipse, but the closest analog is the 45-minute window before sunset — aka, “magic hour.”

“That led me to think that the only way that we could successfully make this movie [excluding the beginning and end of taking place in the non-smoke-filled daylight] was that it had to be shot at magic hour,” he said. “That’s only 45 minutes at the end of the day, but that’s what we did: We actually shot the bulk of this movie in a tiny  portion of time.”

This meant a very different way of approaching the shoot day. The cast and crew would arrive late morning and spend six to seven hours rehearsing all the vehicle movements, stunts, gas burns, and actor staging (including the child actors on the school bus with Matthew McConaughey and American Ferrera). Then, rather than split the action into different camera setups or shots, Greengrass would aim to get two or three longer takes of that day’s action, which later could be cut together with additional, tighter coverage of the cast shot on a sound stage.

“That gave the film its dramatic emotional intensity in terms of performance because it was a sort of once and only once kind of experience, in the light, rather than, ’Shot four, now we go on to shot seven,’ and the orthodox way you might do it, so those are the elements,” Greengrass said.

“The Lost Bus” is now available on Apple TV+. To hear Paul Greengrass’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.