idea ·After Hours (1985)

Five set-ups a day became sixteen

Scorsese drew every shot of After Hours in the script margins and found he had about 500 of them. At his usual pace that was impossible. Michael Ballhaus said he could do it.

camerawork
lighting
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production
ballhaus
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I had laid out all the shots in advance on paper, with little drawings on the margins of the script. But it worked out at about 500 shots, which was impossible. The way I had been shooting before this, we managed to do five set-ups a day and this script required an average of sixteen a day! But Michael thought he could do it.

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 99

Michael is Michael Ballhaus, who had shot fourteen films for Fassbinder and brought Fassbinder's speed with him. He ran his own crew and operated the camera himself, and the crew came from NABET, the smaller New York union, "instead of the I A, because it was an independent film" (sos 99). Fast film stock did the rest: "for some scenes we had to take the street lights down because it was so bright" (sos 99).

Ballhaus's memory of the numbers is bigger. A producer, he says, told Scorsese: "I've seen the shot list and they're 600 shots. How do you think you'll manage? We have 40 nights" (msk 125).

Scorsese's verdict on the shoot: "On the first day of shooting I realized happily that I had no time to sit down or wait in my trailer. If I was sitting down, there was something wrong! It was like a rebirth by the end of that film" (sos 99). The drawings were what made it possible: "So you have to have a blueprint, and the drawings I do are that plan" (sos 99).

A case for Camerawork and for the Commerce context: the style of After Hours is what a fixed budget and a fixed number of nights produced. The next year Scorsese hired Ballhaus again for The Color of Money, for the same reason: "If I could get Ballhaus, I knew I could do it again" (sos 107). Compare Mean Streets, where "the economics dictated the style" too (sos 47).

Go on, then

idea The keys nearly killed Griffin Dunne To get the point of view of a set of falling keys, the crew dropped a camera platform four storeys on climbing rope and stopped it just above the star's head. The footage was out of focus.
idea Tim Burton stepped aside Before Scorsese, the producers of After Hours wanted a Disney animator with a six-minute cartoon to his name. They could not raise the money with Tim Burton, and then Scorsese's big film collapsed.
film After Hours (1985) A word processor goes downtown for a date, loses his last $20 out of a cab window, and cannot get home. Scorsese's comedy of paranoia, shot in forty nights for $4 million after Paramount killed The Last Temptation of Christ.
scene After Hours — the keys A cab ride in fast motion that eats Paul's only $20, then a set of keys dropped from a loft window with the camera riding them down at his face. The point-of-view shot as a joke, a threat and a stunt that nearly went wrong.
idea Paul was nearly born on the West Side Highway One planned ending had Paul climb inside June to hide from the mob and be born again, naked, on a Manhattan street. David Geffen, who was paying, asked if they had lost their minds.
context SoHo before the money, 1984 After Hours was shot at night in a neighbourhood of artists' lofts that money was about to discover. The film catches the moment, and treats the uptown visitor as the intruder.