Season 2 of HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” continues the rivalry between the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics as they battle for the NBA championship. For Emmy-nominated cinematographer Todd Panhazel, filming the playoffs was important, but capturing the emotions of the game was essential.
Talk to Varieties Inside the Frame, HBO's Variety Artisans explained the first challenge he faced: How would the cameras keep up with the storytelling? “A lot of it was about camera gear that could keep up with that and stay close to the actors. When we're in the huddles, there's a lot of handhelds, a lot of smaller cameras so we can actually be with them.”
Banhazel revealed his secret: a snowboard camera. John Lake was the camera operator, armed with a backpack and a 16mm camera. “It’s a way for him to be in the game and fly around.” Banhazel chose this format for some elements of the game so that “it feels more alive and the game feels like archival footage.”
The ice camera was moving at a fast pace in the game, and when it came to blocking and coaching, Lake was so immersed in the game that the plays were happening around him. Banhazel likened working with Lake and the ice camera to dancing. “We started doing these magical switches where we could ice with our actors and then we could turn,” he said. “We could sneak up on one of our basketball players to score a goal, and then we could turn around and land on our actor’s face.”
Once the action was resolved, Banhazel faced another challenge: The sequence itself was huge. “How do you show them moving across multiple teams over a season while also feeling like they’re looking directly at each other?” He and director Sally Richardson had conversations about what the scenes should look like. “She said, ‘I don’t know exactly what it looks like yet, but it almost feels like we’re rotating with them and they’re playing with each other,’ and that’s when we started to think, ‘What if it was like they were passing and shooting and playing with each other across games?’”
Banhazel approached Larry Bird with a “somewhat Western-style” approach. “There's a lot of mythology about who Larry Bird was and where he came from. So the idea was to portray him like a big Western villain, but at the same time connect with him emotionally.” In doing so, he chose to shoot him in a Western-style low, wide angle.
But by the time Bird reached the playoffs, it was more about portraying Bird and Magic Johnson as equals and champions. “Both guys deserved to win and they were the only two guys who could match each other,” he explained. “So it was about putting them on equal footing, connecting them and treating them as if they were playing together as equals.”
In shooting Magic, Panhazel treated the film like the superstar and hero he was. “There was a joy in having the camera take on all the grit that Magic had. So for him, it was like the sexiest thing we could come up with for the camera, but it was also about contrasting that with the most vulnerable things.” Big crane shots looking down on him from above or long off-axis shots with a 16mm lens. “It was about making him as cocky as possible and as abstract and human as possible.”
Banhazel and Richardson relied on their iPhones during rehearsals to see where the problems were and improved the scene based on that footage. “This sequence in particular because it had to span all these different points where it looked like they were passing or shooting at each other,” he revealed. “We shot it on the iPhone very carefully and then edited it on the iPhone to make sure all the hidden cut points would work as glue.”
Lighting was important to the scene. The basketball was shot on a single stage with a 360-degree green screen. LED lighting was used from above to simulate the harsh old stadium lighting. As the play transitioned between the Garden and the Forum, the lighting would switch. “The Forum was like a white light show, almost like a stage show or a rock and roll show. Then the Boston Celtics Garden was an amber orange. It’s much older and in Boston, and we were playing to make fun of how old and bad the Garden was.”
“Winning Time” was shot on 35mm Panavision film using Primo lenses. That combination served as the basis for the film, and beyond that, he mixed formats from 16mm in color and black and white, and even 8mm “to make it look more archival. Like footage found in a little bin labeled ‘Lakers 1985’ that had been forgotten for 40 years.”
