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Inside Man (2006)
Inside Man is a 2006 American crime thriller film directed by Spike Lee and written by Russell Gewirtz. It centers on an elaborate bank heist-turned-hostage situation on Wall Street. The film stars Denzel Washington as Detective Keith Frazier, the NYPD's hostage negotiator, Clive Owen as Dalton Russell, the mastermind who orchestrates the heist, and Jodie Foster as Madeleine White, a Manhattan fixer who becomes…
Directed by Spike Lee · Shot by Matthew Libatique · Cut by Barry Alexander Brown · Music by Terence Blanchard · Ratio 2.35:1 · 129 min
How it was made
- Cinematographer Matthew Libatique shot Russell's heist-planning scenes with a Steadicam to suggest control, and Frazier's hostage-negotiation scenes with multiple handheld cameras; Steadicam operator Stephen Consentino estimated that 80 percent of the film was shot handheld or on Steadicam.
- For the interrogation “flash-forward” scenes, Libatique shot on Kodak Ektachrome 100D reversal stock, which Technicolor then cross-processed and bleach-bypassed to neutralise colour temperature and increase contrast.
- A former Wall Street bank at 20 Exchange Place, by then repurposed as a cigar bar, was restored to its 1920s architecture by production designer Wynn Thomas to double as the fictional Manhattan Trust branch.
- Because the interrogation-scene negatives proved too dense for the production's Northlight scanner, they had to be scanned separately on a Spirit DataCine during the digital intermediate.
- Seven cameras covered the scene of the hostages' release, and a Technocrane was used for the crane shot that followed them onto the buses.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Spike Lee
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