Anyway, every time I watch Die Hard I end up thinking about elevators and how much I love them. More specifically I end up thinking about cinematic elevators. It’s made me wonder: is there a more cinematic object than an elevator? Why do they go together so well? There are any number of reasons, I think, but a few of them are both obvious and interesting. The first is that elevators are such a great cinematic object because they are, on the surface of it, so utterly resistant to cinema. Where do you put the camera? There’s no room! So you have to be creative - stick it up high or down below. Or maybe you mess around with the walls - maybe you shoot through a wall but leave the button pad visible. Maybe you rotate around the elevator and we all revel in the magic of this impossible shot? (Shoot face-on, incidentally, and you get a cool moment of theatre in your film - where is the line and is it being broken? You get to study faces, actors when they’re listening as well as speaking. It’s all strangely illicit.)
