How ‘Wonder Woman’ brought color to the DC universe

This piece was originally published in July 2017. We are republishing it on the occasion of 1984 Wonder Woman Christmas day debut in HBO Max.

When director of photography Matthew Jensen first met with director Patty Jenkins to talk about the visual influence that was on his mind for Wonder Woman, he was taken by surprise. The film would be set during World War I, but she did not show him a picture of the battlefield. The mythology of the so-called Extended Universe DC would continue, but she did not mention one of her previous entries, as Steel man and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Instead, it started with the work of a man who is not usually mentioned in high-level conversations about cinematic aesthetics – singer and songwriter James Blunt.

“She showed me a picture of James Blunt,” recalls Jensen, “and there was colored smoke in the background and he was walking in a dark overcoat in the middle of the smoke. And she said, ‘I really like this colored smoke thing.’ ”He laughs. “And I thought, Huh, I wonder what that means.“It quickly became clear to him that this meant looking radically different from recent DC Comics films, which were dominated by director Zack Snyder’s unsaturated, almost chiaroscuro tones. As Jensen says: “She was really interested in color in this movie. “

Jensen was willing to do that, and the final product reflects the common interest in using a diverse palette to paint his world tale of the most famous and iconic woman in superhero fiction. Its native and utopian island of Themyscira is all heavenly, green fields and crystal clear waters. The London she visits is filled with burgundy wood, striking outfits and a myriad of skin tones. There is even color in No Man’s Land when we see the title character running across the battlefield in his golden-red-blue costume. It is a big leap for the DCEU.

Much of that leap started with Jenkins’ desire to bring the past into the present. “She was really concerned, because it was a period film, which she didn’t want to look like what we associate with period films, which are a lot of desaturated colors and a smooth and transparent romanticization of the past,” says Jensen. . “The period would come from production design, costumes and scenery, but we would not do anything with the lenses that say it is a period film, essentially.”

That said, they used century-old landmarks as inspiration – not just black and white photos. Of particular interest was the vibrant work of the Edwardian painter John Singer Sargent, particularly the portraits he was making around 1918, the year the film takes place. But they also looked at more recent works of art in the form of Wonder Woman comics. Jenkins was enthusiastic about the innovative late 1980s directed by designer George Pérez, dyer Bruce Patterson and colorist Tatjana Wood; Jensen was fascinated by the early work of designer Cliff Chiang and colorist Matthew Wilson.

But while DC comics were an inspiration, Jensen adds that, surprisingly, DC Entertainment and controller Warner Bros. they didn’t interfere much with his vision and Jenkins’s. Studios are currently concerned with building brand consistency for their franchises (for example, the eye-popping primary colors of practically all Marvel Studios films and the metallic sparkles of the Fast and furious saga), but DC gave a touch of light when it came to the look of Wonder Woman. Perhaps this is due to efforts by DC Films co-chief Geoff Johns to inject more “hope and optimism” into the films he oversees, or perhaps it is just because he wants less strict supervision in general.

“They really left us alone,” says Jensen. “There was never a direct conversation about other DC films. I think we were very free to make our own film. Wonder Woman is just a different character than Batman and Superman, and we felt that, since that was her origin story, we could do our own thing. “

His own thing included what is perhaps the most visually stunning sequence in any DCEU film: a huge beach battle between the Wonder Woman Amazons and a landing team of German soldiers. It features masses of combatants swarming towards each other and engaging in combats that include everything from slow motion to slow motion to complicated riding. As you might expect, it was undoubtedly the most difficult part for Jensen and Jenkins to shoot – although not for the reason you might expect.

More challenging than anything, says Jensen, was a shot within the sequence that lasts only a few seconds, in which the camera moves down from an elevated point of view to the beach. “We wanted to see it in profile in a big, tall and wide shot, but then we could get the camera down close to the sand and stay in front of the action – and Besides that I wanted everything to be in slow motion ”, he recalls with a laugh.

Furthermore, they did not want to do this as pure CGI. “So, we built this huge equipment – almost a roller coaster of tubes and rails – and suspended it in the air with all these cranes, the camera on a remote head, programmed to start very high and go down and make an S-turn in front of the action. “But there is a problem:” It’s in the sand. So the platform would start to sink in the middle of the shot, so you just hope that all the elements line up perfectly. Defying the odds and the elements, they had the chance.

In sharp contrast to the cheerful colors of that scene and the others in Themyscira were the tones of London. Although it is still colorful, Jensen felt he should have more “blues, grays and blacks and cyans, instead of the lush color spectrum you get in Themyscira”. This was largely the result of a single line in the script. “There is a phrase in the script where, when seeing London for the first time, Diana says, ‘It’s awful’, so that was really the guide for me.”

Thus came the vision of the great city of England, devoid of nostalgia. “Many reference paintings that we saw from London at the time showed that it is polluted, it is gray, it is dark,” says Jensen. However, James Blunt would not have been happy with them if they had been totally unsaturated, so Jensen pledged: “We still wanted colors, so luckily we were shooting in London in the winter, so it was very cloudy light, which put a soft patina on everything. “

The key to all this creative energy throughout the film, Jensen says, was a fundamental fact of the film that the average viewer may not notice. “The film, essentially, was a road movie,” he says. “Therefore, we never settle in a group for a long period of time. We never feel comfortable throughout the film – as soon as you are discovering which angles work in one setting, we move on to the next. “

The end result is a new type of DCEU film, although Jensen is quick to add that he thinks he shares some DNA with Batsy and Supes’ previous adventures. “I wanted to make sure that we fit into the DC universe,” he says. “We certainly use some techniques that [Batman v Superman director] Zack [Snyder] and [Batman v Superman cinematographer] Larry Fong used it in other films. ” Yet, Wonder Woman it is still independent and unique within the DCEU, and the fact that it is the best rated of its relatives is due in large part to Jensen’s instincts and relationship with Jenkins. Perhaps it is the result of a simple maxim by which the two lived: “We were not comparing ourselves to other films, at all”.

If you subscribe to a service through our links, Vulture you can earn an affiliate commission.