Season 2 of HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” continues to follow the rivalry between the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics as they battle for the NBA championship. For Emmy-nominated cinematographer Todd Banhazl, ASC., filming the playoffs was important, but capturing the emotion of the game was crucial.
Talk to diversity In “Inside the Frame” for Variety Artisans, presented by HBO, Banhazl explained his first challenge: How would the cameras keep up to tell this story? “A lot of it was about what camera equipment could keep up and stay close to the actors. When we’re in the groups, there are a lot of handheld cameras and a lot of smaller cameras going on so we can actually be with them.”
Banhazl revealed his secret: the rollerblade camera. He was operated by John Lake and was armed with a backpack and a 16mm camera. “So he can be in the game and fly around.” Banhazl chose this format for some elements of the game so that they “look more immersive and feel like archive footage in the game.”
The rollerblade camera could move at a certain pace in the game, and blocking and rehearsals would involve Lake, with plays arranged around him. Banhazl compared working with Lake and the rollerblade camera to a dance. He said, “We started doing these magical switches where we would rollerblade with our actors and then we could turn around. We could slide in one of our basketball double shots for a dunk, and then we could turn around and land back on our actor’s face.”
With the movement sorted out, Banhazl faced another challenge: The sequence itself was a big one. “How do you show them moving through multiple teams over the course of a season and still make it feel like they’re looking directly at each other?” He and director Salli Richardson discussed what the scenes should look like. “She said, ‘I don’t know exactly what it looks like yet, but it’s like we’re rotating with them and they’re almost playing with each other.’ And so we came up with the idea of, ‘What if it was like they were passing and shooting and playing for each other across games?'”
Banhazl approached Larry Bird’s staging “a bit like a Western.” “There are a lot of myths about who Larry Bird was and where he came from. So the idea was to film him like our big Western villain, but at the same time build an emotional connection to him.” To do this, he opted for a low angle shot and wide Western-style push-ins on him.
But when Bird was in the playoffs, it was more about photographing Bird and Magic Johnson as if they were both equal heroes. He explained, “Both men deserved to win and they were the only ones who could be each other’s equals. So it was about putting them on the same level, keeping close eye lines to each other and treating it as if they were playing photographically as equals.”
When shooting Magic, Banhazl approached it as if he were the superstar and hero he was. “It was a pleasure to let the camera capture all of Magic’s bravery. So for him, it was the most striking thing we could think of for the camera, but it was also about contrasting that with the most vulnerable stuff.” It was big crane shots looking down on him, or shots with a long, off-axis 16mm lens. “It was about making him as cocky as possible and as stripped down and human as possible.”
Banhazl and Richardson relied on their iPhones during rehearsals to identify where there were problems and refined the scene based on that footage. He revealed: “Particularly that sequence, because it has to include all these different cut points where it looks like they’re passing each other or shooting each other. We shot it very carefully on the iPhone and then actually edited it on an iPhone to make sure that all the hidden cut points worked like a link.”
Lighting was important in this scene. The basketball was shot on a single 360-degree green screen stage. He used LED lighting from above to recreate the old, brutal stadium lighting. As the piece switched between the Garden and the Forum, the lighting changed. “The Forum was like a white show light, almost like a stage production or a rock ‘n’ roll show. And then the Celtics’ Garden was this pissy amber orange. It’s much older and located in Boston, and we played with making fun of how old and gross the Garden is.”
Winning Time was shot on Panavision 35mm cameras with Primo lenses. He used this combination as the basis for his hero film, and he also mixed formats of 16mm in color and black and white and even 8mm, “to make it seem even more archival. As if it was footage that had been found in a little box marked ‘Lakers 1985’ and forgotten for 40 years.”
