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| © Sony Pictures/Michael Muller |
| Muller's take on Spider-Man Tobey Maguire. Click photo for more images. |
Shooting movie posters was something Michael Muller always wanted to do. Yet even his impeccable photographic credentials -- ad campaigns for Speedo and Mercedes, magazine covers of Spider-Man Tobey Maguire for Premiere and Adrien Brody for Flaunt -- hadn't won him the chance to shoot those dazzling film promos we see on billboards and bus stops. It was a self-assigned, movie-themed art project that finally brought movie-poster opportunity knocking.
Muller's project, called Superfamous, was a series of portraits of the superhero-costumed souls who parade around Hollywood's famous Chinese Theatre, where for five bucks they pose for tourists' cameras. "Most of the money goes to feed a drug habit," says Muller, "and one of the key pictures is of Batman smoking crack in the alley." The marketing head of Fox Studios saw a 4x6-foot print of that image at the home of Joaquin Phoenix, who Muller befriended when he was doing publicity photography for Walk the Line, in which the actor played Johnny Cash.
The Fox exec happened to be working on the runup to X-Men: The Last Stand, the third, Brett Ratner-directed installment in the Marvel comic-based series, and was so impressed with Muller's image that Phoenix immediately phoned the photographer to come meet him. Muller was hired on the spot to do the posters for the movie. "You never know what's going to open the door for you," he says.
Muller pored over pictures by the full-time set photographer "to get a feel for how the movie looked." (He also likes to see a film's script to better understand its characters, though that sometimes requires reading it in a high-security vault.) Then he put together what amounted to a roving studio, outfitted with battery-powered, 1,200-watt-second Profoto 7B strobes and mobile C-stands, that could be moved to any part of the set where filming wasn't in progress. "I'd walk around and find little nooks and crannies to shoot in, then pull aside Hugh Jackman or another cast member who was available," he says.
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Digital capture -- 17 megapixels' worth, shot with the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II -- helped close the deal with Jackman. Muller just fired up his laptop and showed the actor, who plays the film's Wolverine character, what he had already produced. "When you can show the director and the cast on the spot that the pictures you've been doing are good, they're much more open to working with you," says Muller, who has since posterized superheros for Spider-Man: The Last Stand, the Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and Robert Downey Jr.'s new Iron Man. "It becomes a very organic, collaborative experience." This doesn't change the time constraints, however. "I've got to be able to light and shoot someone in less than five minutes," he says. "Time is money, maybe a million dollars a day on a big movie, and the poster photographer is low-priority."
To add to that challenge, Muller likes to get as much of the image right in-camera as he can. "Whenever I've shot someone on location, I challenge myself to find settings within a couple of blocks, and do the whole shoot within a very short radius," he says. "And that way of working translates into what I've been doing for the movie posters. I go and find little pieces of the set, or walls, or something they blew up the week before, and use that as a background element."
Muller's improvised yet controlled approach is a radical departure from the movie poster custom of shooting the subject on a seamless sweep and letting the studio "comp" the rest. In fact, he says that the studio just "slapped a bar code" on two of three images that were used in posters for the movie Hitman. Of course Muller has to arrange the pose and compose the image so that empty spaces are available for type and other graphic design elements, but he says this allowance is now "wired into my shooting."
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