Oliver Wood: Flashlights and Sparks

From ICG Magazine, Watership Down by Pauline Rogers (May 2000)

As the American sailors make the perilous voyage home, the captured U-boat gets rocked by explosive depth charges, which knock out its power source and plunge its innards into darkness. Here, the cinematographer did his best to exploit the limited throw of a portable, practical source. "We faced the challenge of lighting so the audience could see, but not so that we interfered with the reality of the situation. So we lit the rest of the picture with flashlights," declares Wood. "It became a progression of lights breaking down as the sub got more and more water inside-- that made the shots darker and darker. For a while, we could use 'sparks'-- created by special effects-- to illuminate some of the shots. We would cue the lights or sparks by punctuation in the dialogue.

Karl Walter Lindenlaub: Emotional Lighting Contrast

From American Cinematographer, This Old House by David E. Williams (August 1999)

Shadows and darkness were definitely going to be key components in the film’s visual plan, but strong daylight sources were also important in order to create emotional contrast in certain scenes.

"We didn’t want the audience to feel as if they had been sucked into two hours of darkness. Psychologically, people don’t like to be in the dark, and 120 minutes of darkness can become depressing to watch. Also, the impact of any extreme lighting effect will wear off after a certain point. For example, if an entire film is shot with green-tinted lighting, the effect may seem imposing at first, but the eye will adapt, and after a while the audience won’t even see the green anymore. The same thing happens with light and dark. If there is no alternation between light and dark, there is no relief, so the dramatic tension of being in the dark is gone."

- Karl Walter Lindenlaub, ASC, BVK

Robert Primes: Shadows & Darkness

From American Cinematographer, Big City Girl by Stephanie Argy (February 1999)

"The reason why most cinematographers like things to be dark is that if you show everything there's no mystery. And if there's no mystery, you're not compelling your audience to be curious. If a face is dark and rim-lit, except for a little gleam off the lips, your eyes are going to be looking at the lips. A lot of the art of cinematography is what you hide and what you reveal. Without shadows, you can't hide."

- Robert Primes, ASC

Janusz Kaminski: Exterior Lighting, Negative Fill & Smoke

From American Cinematographer, The Last Great War by Christopher Probst (August '98)

"For the most part, we really didn’t light much on the invasion. When the actors were in the Higgins boats, we did add some light with white and silver bounce cards to up-light the actors a little so we could see their eyes under their helmets. The ’lighting’ was more about how the negative was being exposed, the lenses and the use of the ENR. The great thing about war movies is that almost everything is drab, dark and dirty, so we weren’t fighting those elements. In fact, the actors’ eyes become [comparatively] bright because their faces are so dark and dirtied."

- David Devlin, Gaffer on Saving Private Ryan.

Kaminski determined that with constant overcast light, he could suitably control the film’s look with the aid of the Panaflasher and the ENR process. Additionally, he incorporated the heavy use of smoke which obviously was a key component in selling the "war" visually as an essential ingredient in his photography. Dense black smoke also offered the added benefit of blocking out any unwanted sunlight that might have sneaked through the cloud cover.

"One of the most amazing and awful things I’ve ever seen were these big drums of diesel fuel that the special effects guys were burning to create huge clouds of black smoke. They also designed a system for making white smoke that was mounted in the bed of a pickup, which was attached to a trailer with a 200-gallon tank of diesel fuel. They had about six of these pickup trucks that could drive up and down the beach as a self-contained unit. The lighting for that whole sequence was more about taking the light away, and when they turned those smoke machines on, it would cut down three or four stops of exposure."

"For closer shots, we’d sometimes bring in a bounce card or solid for negative fill. One of the things I’ve learned over the years while working outside is that if the cinematographer wants to control the sunlight — and the production can afford it — you should have a crane and a large frame standing by. That way you can cover a large area and get the lines [of the overhead’s coverage] out of the shot. Because we used a 30’ by 30’ silk and smoke on Private Ryan, the smoke would cover any of the lines made by the silk. Between those two elements, the ’lighting’ was consistent and it worked great."

-Key grip Jim Kwiatkowski

Gabriel Beristain: Subtracting Light & Darkness

From American Cinematographer, Paging Machiavelli by Eric Rudolph (March 1998)

"In that office set there were places where I could not put any lights, [which led to] gigantic gaps of darkness. We tried, were possible, to use darkness in this film the way a playwright might use silence, where the lack of words says something very important. I've always believed that sometimes lighting, as opposed to illumination, is more about subtracting light."

- Gabriel Beristain, ASC, BSC

"There are moments where Campbell Scott is in almost complete darkness. Then he steps out of the shadows and delivers a powerful line. One of those moments is actually a turning point for his character, where he goes from being pushed around to standing up for himself. He steps out of the darkness and into the light and says 'How dare you, after what I've done for the company?' He challenges his boss for the first time."

- Gabriel Beristain, ASC, BSC