Peter Menzies Jr: Night Exteriors Approach

From American Cinematographer, A Few Bad Men by Jay Holben (July 1999)

Due to the film's considerable number of night scenes, a major consideration was how to define the night look. Both Menzies and West chose to forsake "Blue" moonlight for a more practical approach.

"I wanted every scene to have that oppressive feeling of muggy Southern heat and I thought that any cool colored light would kill the feeling. As a result, we worked in warm tones. We chose locations that we would paint in darker colors like reds, ambers and oranges, and we stuck to Peter's main night plan, in which moonlight never came down from above. All of the night sequences were lit as if the illumination being generated purely by practical sources on the ground."

- Simon West

"In keeping with Simon's warm look, I went with a more sodium-vapor approach for all of the night sequences. We colored all of our lights to have that yellowish sodium feel. [Given the widescreen frame] a lot of the lights on the ground were going to end up in the frame. Obviously, they were not real streetlights, but film lights placed off in the distance and simply gelled to look sodium colored. Simon loved that idea, and once we defocused them, they became these wonderful background elements that resembled anything-- other buildings, streetlights. They created fantastic visual expanse without us having to light everything with Condors. Speed was the other added benefit. By keeping everything out of the air, and not minding that lamps were in the shot, we were able to move much more quickly and cover a lot more ground in a short period of time."

- Peter Menzies Jr, ASC

James L. Carter: Color Temperature

From American Cinematographer, Tuned In Talents by Christopher Probst (May 1999)

"I'm a heavy mixer of color temperatures. I truly believe in letting things go. If the outside was slightly blue and the inside was really warm, that was great. When I did daylight scenes, I'd make the sunlight slightly warm. When we'd go out on the streets at night, every so often I'd let things in the backgrounds go that fluorescent blue-green. I felt that made things look a little more real, a little more like New York, instead of always trying to correct everything out. I have a gel pack for a sodium-vapor effect that I call 'moldy pumpkin.' Depending on how I feel on the day I'm shooting, it consists of 1/2 CTO and pale or light salmon. I like that weird orangy-pink color. I remember reading a study about streetlight colors, and it said that there is more crime in areas lit by sodium-vapor lights. With that in mind, whenever things got really gritty, or we were in a scuzzy area, I would use those sodium-vapor colors. I think it's an oppressive look."

- James L. Carter, ASC