WIRED TO WIN: Surviving the Tour de France

“Then I got this job in a medium that could do that in ways that had never been done before, and express science concepts in ways that were so powerful that—if you were good at it—people would never forget the imagery; they would be stimulated to find out more; kids would go ‘Wow!’”

The medium was IMAX, and Bayley Silleck is good at it. He’s made six giant-screen movies, including the Oscar-nominated Cosmic Voyage, a trip through the universe from quarks to quasars. Bayley got there through a process that he describes as “accidental, like a lot of things in the film business.” His first exposure to the industry was as a movie reviewer for the Rome Daily American in 1965, where he hung out at Cinecittà, a massive production studio built by Mussolini to jump-start the Italian film industry. This led to a job as a unit publicist for MGM and a transfer to London, where he was assigned to the David Lean film Ryan’s Daughter, which was being filmed on the beautiful, rugged west coast of Ireland.

The director as team player

“That’s where I learned filmmaking,” says Bayley. “I was on the set all the time for a year, watching the director, David Lean, and the cameraman, Freddy Young, do their work. Some directors are dictatorial, but I think most smart ones, like Lean, draw in really good people and make the most of their talents. It’s a creative process that produces something out of chaos—because you walk on to a set in the morning and nobody knows what to do—and that thrilled me. I’ve always felt comfortable working with people.”

In the late 1970s he went to work for a documentary film company in New York City. “They said, ‘What do you know about oceanography?’ and I said, ‘Not a hell of a lot,’ and they said, ‘You better start learning.’” Bayley found himself off on a ship with marine explorer Bob Ballard and a group of scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, riveted with excitement. “It was the equivalent of the David Lean experience, that these geologists and geophysicists on board were reaching 6,000 to 8,000 feet below the surface and pulling up pieces of the mantle that would tell us literally earth-shaking stories about the history of the planet.”

Getting the knack of IMAX

With several oceanography films under his belt, Bayley was offered a job as a writer for and co-director of an IMAX film on energy for the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, TN, with Francis Thompson, one of the earliest practitioners of the giant screen. That’s when the man found his medium. “Every frame in the film should be surprising, beautiful, and full of information, and do justice to the IMAX system and format,” Bayley declares. Shots must reflect the fact that most eyeballs can’t take in the entire screen in a single glance. That also dictates a slower pace in the editing room. “You want to let the shot play long enough so that the detail and environment become almost visceral,” the director explains. IMAX soundtracks are equally dense: “You re-create every crack and rustle and creak and peep, so people feel they’re in the jungle.”

A demanding technology

IMAX equipment is heavy and noisy; shooting is expensive; and the magazine contains only two and a half minutes of film! Unable to shoot 90-minute videocassettes like TV cameramen, IMAX crews have to master their subject in advance. “Let’s say we were filming wild swans,” says Bayley, a veteran of many wildlife shoots for the Smithsonian Institution. “We’d have to drag the equipment into a blind on our bellies, lie there for hours, and only start shooting when the behavior we were looking for was about to happen.”

These factors combined to make the Tour de France shoot the toughest Bayley or his crew had ever attempted. “Imagine trying to cover an event that’s like a circus that moves 200 miles every day with four 80-pound cameras,” he suggests. One camera was mounted on the back of a motorcycle, the only type of media vehicle allowed into the massive peloton of 198 riders, and operated by a cameraman in a helicopter hovering at 1,500 feet over the route. “Surprisingly, that method was a huge success. We got some of the best footage anyone’s ever seen, because no one’s been that close to the riders with an IMAX camera.”

To Bayley, every IMAX film poses a completely different creative challenge. In order to make Lost Worlds, the crew camped on a mountaintop in Venezuela where no one had set foot before, and dropped over Angels Falls in a helicopter. “Then you move on to the human brain and the Tour de France,” he muses. “It’s an extraordinary transition, and an extraordinary project.”

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