In Disney's live-action feature Mulan, the eponymous hero (portrayed by Yifei Liu) disguises herself as a man and joins the Chinese army in order to spare her father from having to return to war. Through the trials that follow, she unlocks her hidden potential and embraces her true identity.
The movie found director Niki Caro partnering with cinematographer Mandy Walker, ASC, ACS. When Panavision spoke with Walker in late August, she was in Queensland, Australia, in the midst of preproduction for her next feature project, director Baz Luhrmann's Elvis Presley biopic, which had seen its shooting schedule pushed back when productions worldwide shut down earlier this year due to COVID-19 lockdowns. The pandemic also prompted Disney to change course on Mulan's release strategy. Originally slated for theatrical distribution back in March, the feature instead premiered exclusively on the Disney+ streaming platform on September 4. People have been waiting for this movie, and we've been desperate for them to see it, Walker says. I'm really proud of it.
Panavision: Had you and Niki Caro known each other prior to your meeting for Mulan?
Mandy Walker, ASC, ACS: No, and it's funny because she's from New Zealand and I'm from Australia, so we had worked with people who knew both of us, but we had never met before. I've always been a huge fan; Whale Rider was the first film of hers that I'd seen, and I always really wanted to work with her. I had the opportunity to interview with her for this movie, we got on really well, and it went from there. She's amazing. She's so organized, and smart, and a kind person, and the crew and the actors just loved her. It was a dream.
Was Disney's animated Mulan a reference for you, or did you find other inroads to the movie's visuals?
Walker: The story has been around for hundreds of years. It was originally a poem called The Ballad of Mulan, and other movies have been made about the story in China, and then there was the Disney animation. We looked at a lot of the previous incarnations of it, but this script was its own entity. It's a new take on the story. One of the big influences for me was something that Niki said in one of our first meetings: Just remember, Mulan is the center of the film, and I want the audience to be on her journey with her totally, through the whole movie.' I just kept thinking of that.
We looked at contemporary Chinese cinema, the films of Zhang Yimou, things like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and also Chinese art and architecture. A lot of the Zhang Yimou films put people in the center of the frame, and when you look at China's architecture, it's very symmetrical. It lends itself to putting things in the center. Normally if you're shooting widescreen, you'll place the actors on the frame's thirds, but we decided to keep Mulan centered in the frame.
The movie is a portrait of a young woman discovering her identity, but it's set against a sweeping backdrop of a nation at war. Keeping Mulan in the center of the frame would have been part of this, but how else did you and Niki Caro seek to balance those two ideas?
Walker: Niki and I talked extensively about the battle sequences. We looked at a lot of martial-arts films and even how different battle sequences had been done in Game of Thrones and Gladiator. One of the things Niki and I discussed was to not have just a melee of violence or a mishmash of people fighting, but to instead keep the whole battle centered on Mulan. When she goes out to the main battle sequence, she's wearing red, which is very important in Chinese culture. And we went to a place that was devoid of color a harsh, uninviting, scary place, with geothermal steam rising out of the ground and the opposing army wore mainly black and browns, so she would pop in this red outfit and be really visible to the audience at all times.
She's ultimately an elite warrior, so for special moments in battle, we had a lens that [Panavision senior vice president of optical engineering] Dan Sasaki made, based on a Gauss lens, with a little bit of magic in there and a little bit of chromatic aberration on the sides of the frame. And then Dan brought out his 2,800mm lens, which I used a lot for our battle sequences. Yifei did a lot of her stunts herself the martial-arts moves, the sword fighting, the horse riding so we could focus on her with really long lenses and be on her face. That was a big part of our visual language that we worked on: How do we keep the audience with her through all these sequences so they'll understand what's going on around her but still feel like they're emotionally with her throughout this whole story?
What were your primary lenses for Mulan?
Walker: Our main set of lenses were Sphero 65s that Dan had adjusted. There was one particular painting I showed him of a landscape, and I said, That's what I want our landscapes to look like.' What he did was he lessened the contrast and color saturation a little bit, and then, on most of our lenses, we had a slight vignette with a focus drop-off, and some of them a vignette of exposure drop-off. I really like that; I think it feels like a portrait, it feels a little bit more painterly. We ended up keeping a lot of it in the mid-range or very long lenses. Occasionally we went super-wide, which would have been the 24mm, but that was rare, just for certain shots when we wanted to show wide vistas.
I talked to Dan very early on in preproduction. He's an amazing technician, but he's also an artist. What he does is very special. We'll sit and talk about the visual language of the movie in an abstract sense, how you can affect people emotionally with the lensing, depth of field, aberrations, color and contrast. We talk more like
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In Disney's live-action feature Mulan, the eponymous hero (portrayed by Yifei Liu) disguises herself as a man and joins the Chinese army in order to spare her father from having to return to war. Through the trials that follow, she unlocks her hidden potential and embraces her true identity.
