Book' Em Danno

Feature film director Len Wiseman and DP Gabriel Beristain, ASC, BSC, help give a blockbuster look to Hawaii Five-O

By Iain Blair

Labels: TV

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The TV landscape is littered with hopeful remakes of former hits—Knight Rider, The Bionic Woman, Dragnet, Melrose Place—that quickly crashed and burned. Happily for its many fans, Hawaii Five-O, the new hit reboot on CBS, isn’t one of those shows. An homage to the original iconic and long-running crime drama (it aired from 1968 to 1980), it stars Aussie hunk Alex O’Loughlin in the Steve McGarrett role and Scott Caan as Danno Williams, and quickly has become one of the few new network shows to score strong ratings, establish a loyal following and get picked up for a new season.

But it’s easy to see why. Hawaii Five-O has exotic locations, a terrific cast that includes Lost’s Daniel Dae Kim and Battlestar Galactica’s Grace Park, plenty of gruff humor to leaven the murder and mayhem, and the good sense to keep the beloved “Book ‘em, Danno!” line, along with the original theme music. But the new version has another ace in the hand—a sophisticated, cinematic look, thanks to features director Len Wiseman (Live Free or Die Hard, Underworld) who teamed up with top cinematographer Gabriel Beristain, ASC, BSC (S.W.A.T., The Ring Two, the Blade franchise), to shoot the series pilot.

The result is that the show, executive-produced by Peter Lenkov (CSI: New York) and Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (the team behind the successful reboot of Star Trek), dazzles from its very first scenes, helped along by superior production values—the pilot alone reportedly cost CBS close to $9 million to shoot—and state-of-the-art visual effects, courtesy of Ntropic, Pixomondo and CoSA VFX.

For TV virgin Wiseman, the biggest challenge was the accelerated TV schedule. “I wanted to present it like a mini-movie,” he says, “and having never done a series before, it took a while to adjust. Luckily, in Gabriel, I had a great DP for the job.”

Beristain was brought on by Kurtzman and Orci. “They called me and asked me to meet with Len about the show, and I was intrigued even though I hadn’t really done any TV work,” recalls Beristain. “And they told me how they wanted this to have a very strong feature-film look, and that really got my attention. Ironically, all TV is now shot digitally, and neither Len nor I had shot a full HD project in the past, although I’d kept up on all the advances. So I told him, ‘Let’s take advantage of the situation.’”

“I’d shot some of Die Hard in HD, and even though I didn’t direct Underworld 3, we shot that digitally,” explains Wiseman. “I was very hands-on with it, and I was very happy with the look and how much freedom we had in the DI.” With his strong film background, Wiseman adds that he has “always been able to pick up types of video-trailing effects within action and handheld work, so I did a lot of camera tests with all the different settings to see which ones would avoid artifacting and get as close to a film look as possible.”

The team quickly decided to shoot using the Sony F35, “then the most powerful and reliable camera on the market,” says Beristain. “The ARRI ALEXA wasn’t available, and the F35 was the obvious choice. But we also experimented quite a bit to see what setup would work best for us.”

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