The Thin Red Line  (1998)

"It was pretty much a wide-angle movie, so we shot mainly with wider lenses, like the 40mm and 50mm. Our close-ups were mainly done with the 75mm or 100mm. We were constantly fighting to get as much of the geography into the frame as we could. Every time we put on a tighter lens it just felt as if we were missing something." - John Toll.

"It was primarily a day exterior shoot, so I used Kodak's [100 ASA EXR] 5248 outside. For the lower-light situations and interiors, I used the Vision [500T] 5279. I would basically switch to the faster stock when we started to get a light reading below 2.8; I didn't want to shoot 48 wide open on anamorphic lenses because of the lack of depth. I used the faster stock to maintain my depth of field." - John Toll.

"I don't normally like to work deeper than an f/8, and I never work wider than f/2.8 in anamorphic. I feel much more comfortable working at around f/4. Shooting wider than 2.8 in anamorphic is pointless, I think, because at that stop there's just not enough information in focus." - John Toll.

On the use of filtration for this film: "No, we shot everything clean. Every once in a while we'd throw in a grad filter if we got into some heavy, burned-out backgrounds, but we had so much camera movement that we didn't use them a lot." John Toll.

Sources: American Cinematographer, February 1999.