Production
The film was partially financially backed by Steve McQueen through his "Solar Productions company", receiving credit in the final seconds of the film.
Bruce Brown on filming method: "At times I’d have a particular shot in mind. For example, I wanted to shoot a muddy motocross race and show the riders with mud all over them. First you have to be at a motocross race when it rains, then you have to find a good location to shoot. We tried and tried to get a shot with a rider caked with mud. We finally did get the shot, but for a while it seemed like we never would."
Some of the most dramatic shots of the movie were the extreme closeup slow-motion segments of the Grand National races. From his surfing movie days, Brown was used to working with super telephoto lenses. The budget didn’t allow the expense of high-speed cameras, so Brown improvised by using 24-volt batteries in the 12-volt film cameras. The result was a makeshift high-speed camera. Brown also used a helmet camera on some of the riders, one of the first times something like that had been attempted. This was before the days of miniature cameras and the set-up was often quite bulky on the rider’s helmet.
At one point, Bruce Brown found a perfect location for a sunset beach riding shot — Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton.
"I figured there would be no way to get approval to film on the Marine base," Brown recalls. "Steve McQueen said he’d see what he could find out. The next day he called and told to contact some General and the next thing you know we are shooting the beach sequences. It was pretty amazing the doors he was able to open."
This beach scene is used for the final scenes of the film with Brown filming McQueen, Lawwill, and Smith riding in the setting sun.
Read more about this topic: On Any Sunday
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity; and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views; for lies are always detected, sooner or later.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)