Richardson's primary camera was a Panaflex Platinum, complemented by a high-speed Panastar for slow-motion shots, and two hand-cranked cameras a 35mm Mitchell and a 16mm Cine-Kodak. His Primo lens package consisted of primes (most often the 21mm, 27mm and 35mm), zooms (11:1, 4:1 and 3:1) and an old, broken prime which first assistant Gregor Tavenner assembled from spare parts in the Panavision inventory. This makeshift lens produced distorted imagery.
Through shutter-angle manipulation and deft timing, Richardson used the hand-cranked cameras to produce an accordion-like "staccato" effect that stretches actors across the frame in linked multiple exposures. Richardson describes these shots as "impressionistic, expressionistic, non-parallel moments which are an interior rendering of a character laughing at you." Bobby Cooper's first sighting of Grace, for example, becomes just such a hallucinogenic mirage. This effect is also used when Bobby hauls his broken-down Mustang into the local garage, only to see "an extended slash cut to the garage attendant [Billy Bob Thornton], who is holding a gasoline pump and looking straight into camera. It's literally a hand-cranked portrait shot that double-exposes itself, and then there's a strange music cue over [the footage]. We also applied this effect when Bobby first arrives in Superior: it's a vision of moving from one end of the town to the other all four blocks. We dollied down Main Street, hand-cranking, racing and panning across the town, double-exposing, rewinding back and ending in a close-up of Sean Penn."
Unlike most of Stone and Richardson's recent collaborations, U-Turn was shot in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio. One might surmise that Superior's stark environs would be best tailored to widescreen framing, but the filmmakers opted against repeating the artistic route taken in the 1954 small-town desert thriller Bad Day at Black Rock (photographed in CinemaScope by William C. Mellor, ASC), which they viewed during preproduction. The spherical format also facilitated the film's ample handheld shooting, which is meant to signify Bobby's erratic psyche. Richardson explains, "Neither the story nor the town lent itself to anamorphic: U-Turn is not a large-scale B-Western, and it certainly isn't in the vein of Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns [which were shot in Techniscope]. It made no creative sense to go with anamorphic, and the short schedule required us to shoot handheld and with zooms."
A visual reference to the Leone aesthetic is evident, however, during a scene in which Bobby ambles aimlessly across the desert after being beaten by Jake, who had discovered him in Grace's arms. The camera's POV angled up at Bobby from a very low, slightly dutched position creates a surreal composition of him against an expanse of blue sky. In Nixon, such perspectives were used to convey presidential power, but Richardson says that in U-Turn, this technique served as "a reflection of Leone's idea of what a gunfighter was in the West: this lone figure dwarfed by his need to carry so much magnitude and strength of character into a small arena. I was trying to pull the hard blues from above to elevate Sean Penn's character into the sky, while getting the edges of green cacti at the very bottom of the frame. At that point in the story, Bobby's anger is overwhelming. Those scenes were also shot with the staccato effect provided by the [hand-cranked cameras and] a reduced degree of shutter."
Richardson used varying shutter angles at other points in the film to invoke Bobby's disorientation within the wacky world of Superior. As he moves into town after leaving the garage, for example, two motorcyclists cut off his path in choppy frames shot with a 45-degree shutter angle. Later, as Jake offers him a ride through the desert, a melee of images shot with a 90-degree shutter including characters' faces clashing with the background begin to appear.
Certain in-car conversations that Bobby has with Jake and Gloria, on separate occasions, were photographed primarily in macro shots of specific body parts. The footage was later edited to form a montage of cutaways often partial facial close-ups of the two speakers. Richardson notes that this technique recalls artist David Hockney's still photography of desert landscapes, in which he formed portraits of the vistas by piecing together dozens of separate Polaroid snapshots. Richardson explains, "All of those little pieces we shot create attention a shot of an eye, Gloria's hair whisping across her face, a hand on a stickshift, Bobby's eye, Jake's teeth, and finally the speedometer. These fractions tend to fill an atmosphere much more than, say, the sum of two over-the-shoulders and close-ups. In combination with soundtrack music, this technique raises the atmosphere to a more pitched level. Again, it's a textural thing not texture in the way that film grain is texture, but texture in terms of adding to the composite image."
Though the majority of U-Turn occurs in daytime exteriors, there were some practical locations that required artificial illumination. Bobby's early travails include an incident in which he barges in on an armed robbery at Superior's local grocery store. Lit practically with overhead fluorescents, the store's interior has an aquamarine tint. According to gaffer Jonathan Lumley, the mini-mart's existing 4' and 8' fixtures were "adapted to take Kino Flo bulbs and ballasts so that they could shoot square-wave, high-frequency, off-speed and at the right color temperature." Background illumination was provided by a few HMI lights.
The actual stickup was shot in a jittery, handheld style, with lots of cross-cutting and rapid pans that evoke the restless POV of someone seeking escape. The tone of the scene changes when the criminals are gunned down in slow-motion. Notes Richardson, "I shot that scene on 98 and pushed it two stops. The [rapid movement] was essentially Oliver's idea; it was a Godardian style. He thought that we should work with a slightly longer lens and make snap moves to and off all the action. Sometimes we only had fractions of a sentence of dialogue before we left a shot."
Principal photography on U-Turn extended to four days over the 36-day schedule, due to the difficulties of shooting the climax on location within a series of nearly inaccessible canyons and cliffs. Stone views the high-octane conclusion a perilous standoff between Bobby and Grace as an homage to Duel in the Sun. "We were trying to maintain a Hitchcockian intimacy in a very rugged setting, and that takes time," he says.
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