01/02/2022
Reposted from Bora Bora, French Polynesia, December 2008. The St Regis resort is a paradise built on paradise, and it is here on the white sandy beaches and in the glistening green lagoon that the filming of Couples Retreat is underway, direction by Peter Billingsley with cinematography by Eric Alan Edwards. Couples Retreat can best be understood as a tragedy of buffoonery as four improbable couples wander through a hell of their own making, despondent and desperate.
Now, a few weeks into production, the script changes. What were once all Day scenes while on location in Bora Bora have yielded to creative currents, and an inspired impromptu Night luau scene is written. A small change, perhaps, adding the word Night on paper. But when the shipping containers were packed and shipped to Bora Bora on their four-week journey from LA, they were filled with the lights best equipped to compete with an equatorial sun: 18K Fresnels, 12K, and 4K pars. And not, as is now needed, lights for providing night ambience.
It only takes 11ish hours to fly equipment to the island. It does, however, cost a considerable amount more than shipping by boat as they fly in hundreds of feet of 4/Ot cable (cable that weighs a pound a foot), Clay P**y 1200 Profiles, balloons, networking equipment, programmer Scott Barnes, and a techno crane.
The luau takes place on the beach, so there’s nowhere to anchor lifts and they need to create soft ambient lighting from above. The rigging key grip, Les Percy, invents a clever rig using 20” box truss, palm trees, and balloons. The box trusses are vertically strapped to the palm trees (without damaging them), with a cross section of box truss attached at the top. In that cross section, a cradle is made into which the air-filled balloon is nestled (providing the ambient light), with the moving lights hanging off the bottom of the cradle (providing highlights and background light). All of it is controlled by a Hog 3.
Director: Peter Billingsley DP: Eric Alan Edwards Gaffer: Mike Bauman Rigging Key Grip: Les Percy Rigging Gaffer: John Manocchia Programmer: Scott Barnes