Untraceable On The Set

For actor Billy Burke, who recently starred in director Gregory Hoblit’s Fracture, Untraceable was a second chance to work with a filmmaker whose on-set approach he greatly respects. “In my estimation, Greg does exactly what the director of a film should do. He knows what he wants very specifically, so he hires the right people, lets them do their jobs and tweaks them just enough to get what he wants.”

Even with decades of experience behind him, Hoblit’s enthusiasm for his craft is evident. “It’s fun to find a piece of material that lights you up, that you get an idea about, as you’re reading it,” he says. “I was shooting this as I was reading it. I knew what it could look, taste, sound, feel, smell like.”

Untraceable, according to Burke, is the definition of an adult thriller, which made it a perfect project for Hoblit. “What Greg does very well is make smart movies, and he doesn't condescend to the audience. He makes films for people who really pay attention and don't need their information spoon fed to them.”

Actor Colin Hanks also sings Hoblit’s praises. “With Greg you're dealing with someone who has been behind the camera for more than 20 years now and has a lot to show for it, both in film and television. He knows what he wants, and he knows when he's got it. In what to me would seem like a fleeting moment, or a take that wasn't that good, he can see the one bit that he needs.”

To make sure he gets it, Hoblit tends to work with the same core group of production crew members on each of his movies. “It avoids the process of convincing people of your vision, the way you want it to look and sound and feel,” says the veteran director. “Bringing in people I know will support that vision makes my job easier. Part of the process for me is casting the whole movie, whether it’s the actors or the crew, getting everybody going in the same direction, understanding the overall game plan and goal, and then getting out of the way.”

Hanks concurs: “When you work with the same group of people on multiple occasions, you end up sort of being able to have your own language and to communicate thoughts without speaking. This crew is very much like that. It's a well-oiled machine. As an outsider coming in, at first it's a little intimidating. But, once you get in there, it helps tremendously.”

Production designer Paul Eads is one of those crew members who Hoblit has called on for numerous projects. “Greg is someone who is really very interested in telling the story in as visual a way as possible,” says Eads. “He really responds well to architecture and he likes to come up with interesting ways to move the camera through a space, as do I. So we look for locations that will resonate with the story and that will support it in terms of coloring and the tonality.”

Although Untraceable was originally set in Baltimore, the filmmakers wanted to explore the possibility of using Portland, Oregon instead. Eads had never been to Portland before scouting for this film but the natural beauty of the city convinced him and Hoblit it was the right setting for the story. “We were beginning our scouting in the late fall and winter in Portland, and quickly realized how appropriate to the story the city was going to be,” says Eads. “It provided a very gray, very drizzly palette for the movie, which we liked.”

“Paul Eads showed me all these pictures of bridges that were wonderful” says Hoblit. “We went to Tom Rosenberg and said why don’t we just shoot Portland for Portland? There is indeed a cyber crime unit up there, so why don’t we make it easier on ourselves and do this?”

Adds producer Hawk Koch: “It's worked out really well. They've been fantastic up here.”

With the setting changed to Portland, location manager Jennifer Dunne was tasked with incorporating some of the city’s most recognizable locations to establish the city as more than a backdrop.

For instance, the Broadway Bridge, one of seven bridges that cross the Willamette River and contribute to Portland’s picturesque skyline, is a major location in Untraceable.

“From the Broadway Bridge, you look onto the downtown area, the Pearl District, the Rose Quarter, which is their large arena complex, the train station and several of the other bridges that go down the river. It became a focal point in the story. We see our lead character on the bridge throughout the story, coming from her house to work, and to other locations throughout the movie.”

The bridge also serves as the setting for one of the film’s most suspenseful scenes. As she’s crossing the span at night in the middle of one of Portland’s drenching rainstorms, Agent Marsh’s car suddenly stops working. She soon realizes the killer is using his technical expertise to trap and terrorize her. He has somehow managed to short out the car’s entire electrical system, leaving Marsh virtually trapped in her car. The windows won’t roll down, the doors won’t unlock, the OnStar system is shut down…………Add to this the fact that it’s the middle of the night and pouring rain, and it makes for a very tense scene.

Eads chose the setting for both aesthetic and practical reasons. “I liked the color of the Broadway Bridge the most,” he says. “But, from a practical standpoint, it was the only bridge that gave us a street directly below it, which was necessary to the storyline.”

When the script called for a place to have a kid’s birthday party, Eads worked in a piece of Portland’s colorful history as the setting. “We went about looking for some interesting kind of iconic place to have a birthday party,” he says. “We found a fantastic roller rink that dates to 1905. It has a fabulous Wurlitzer organ, which I think was installed in the ’30s, that hangs directly over the center of the roller rink. It just was such a unique space we all fell in love with it.”

The Marsh house, where Diane Lane's character, her mother and her daughter live together, is located in the Northeast section in a neighborhood called Irvington, one of Portland’s oldest.

Logistical considerations dictated that some scenes would require the crew to build sets. Almost half the movie takes place in the FBI offices and the scenes span the length of the film. Knowing that the scenes were scheduled for the end of the shoot, Eads chose to build the almost 10,000 square-foot space, giving the filmmakers more control in terms of lighting and continuity.

Eads visited the FBI offices in Portland and Los Angeles to get a feel for what the real cyber units are like. “They're very new to the framework of the FBI, so they're often in spaces that were especially built for cyber-crime investigation. We wanted to give it a very contemporary feel, as well as the complexity that a cyber unit would have.

“The furniture they use in the forensic unit is something I had never seen before,” adds Eads. “It was very compelling in terms of cinematography because it's a little bit transparent. You could shoot through these workbench units and get some very interesting camera angles, foreground interruptions and things like that. So we found the exact furniture that the FBI uses.”

The environment where Untraceable’s cyber villain dispatches his victims was the most character-driven set, according to Eads, which also made it the most interesting to create. “We wanted it to have the feeling of his personality kind of turned inside out,” he says. “I wanted the ceiling to be as low as humanly possible, to always feel the containment in the basement, the foreboding darkness closing in. It's barely seven feet tall.”

Cindy Carr, the set decorator, searched garage sales and estate sales for the trappings of the basement set. “The primary thing was that the basement had to be pretty sinister from a set-dressing standpoint,” says Carr. “We found two young men in town who build their own computers, who kind of channeled the computer geek part of the character for us, and helped us establish the very dense computer world that he lives in pretty much 24/7.”

By contrast, the Eads’ team went in search of a softer, warmer atmosphere for the world of the three generations of Marsh women. “I always had in my mind that the house had a pretty terrific garden attached to it, because of the end of the film, where a garden implement becomes important,” says Eads. “And as we were driving around neighborhoods on one of our very first days of scouting, we drove past this house with a great garden. Instantly everyone fell in love with this house. I don't think we looked at another house after that to be honest.”

One of Portland’s other best known features is its climate, which includes 36 inches of rainfall per year. It fell to special effects supervisor Larz Anderson and his team to create the rain that served as the backdrop for some of the film’s crucial scenes, including the one between Marsh and the killer on the Broadway Bridge. Anderson says the rig for that scene was the biggest he’s ever created, covering 900 feet of the bridge and pumping 1,500 gallons of water per minute.

Creating the rig required the use of a 40-ton crane on the bridge. “We had to get engineering on the bridge to make sure the crane wouldn't fall through,” Anderson recalls.

“One of the biggest challenges of doing that scene is that we were starting out 50 feet in the air, so you can't just reach up from the ground and hang things, and you've got to push water up at some points 100 feet in the air. So it's pretty massive.”

But Anderson says despite the difficulty of creating the torrential downpour, rain is one of those effects you don’t want audiences to marvel at. “Ultimately, when you see it, I hope it just seems like it’s raining in Portland. That’s when I know I've done a good job.”