American Cinematographer - April 2010 - 28

Above: Suffering a crisis of conscience after his retirement, Eddie attempts to save a lost soul. Right: To provide for his family, Sal begins stealing money discovered during drug raids.

he says. “A lot of her photos were made without a flash, so you see the real atmosphere of the places. On this film, I always tried to lead with practical and available light.” A good example of this approach is the film’s opening scene. It’s just past dusk, and the camera (on a Technocrane) looks at the Manhattan skyline in the distance. The camera slowly booms right, across a cemetery, and stops on a wide shot of a car parked on a desolate road next to the graveyard. The back of the car faces the camera. Dialogue is audible, but we can’t see who’s in the car. The only light comes from a streetlamp located several hundred yards in front of the car. In keeping with his available-light philosophy, Murguia wanted to create the illusion that all of the light in the scene was coming from this one source. In this case, his crew removed the bulb in the practical and hung a 2K open-faced Blonde behind it. “You tip it back just enough so that the spill glows the glass and makes it look as if the streetlamp is on,” explains Fortune.
28 April 2010

“We put Lee 232 on the 2K to match the sodium-vapor look of the original bulb. If you put 232 on a tungsten source, it will match sodium-vapor to a T — without the green.” Strings of bare household bulbs, all wired to a dimmer, were placed behind the car to create reflections on the vehicle and keep it from disappearing in the dark. A 10K was hidden behind a Dumpster located halfway between the car and the streetlight, and Murguia’s crew moved a 12'x12' frame of Ultra Bounce around the vehicle to bounce light inside — Murguia didn’t want lights in the car when the camera moved in for coverage. Behind the car, farther down the road, was a 10K that raked light across the fence separating the road from the cemetery. With the exception of the household bulbs, every fixture was gelled with Lee 232. The camera moves in to reveal Sal in the front seat with a small-time crook. Sal shoots his companion, steals his money and jumps out of the car. As he runs down the road, he casts an enormous shadow on the
American Cinematographer

fence and cemetery. To achieve this expressionistic effect, Fortune positioned a 10K some 50' behind the car and took the lens out so it would cast a hard shadow. It was a very humid night, perfect for an atmospheric, backlit scene. When the three policemen’s paths finally converge, in the last 45 minutes of the film, they do so at the housing project in a complex web of sequences. It begins with Sal pulling up in his car late at night. With a wide Steadicam shot, Acamera/Steadicam operator Mike O’Shea follows Sal as he climbs out of the car and walks under the elevated train tracks. (Astute viewers will notice Eddie’s car down the street, following a van.) The Steadicam, maintaining the wide shot, moves to Sal’s side as he walks past Tango, who is exiting his own car. (The two men don’t know each other.) As Sal heads towards one building, the camera leaves him and starts tracking backward in front of Tango, who is heading toward a different building. Murguia picks up the story: “The camera starts to pan with Tango, and as it does, we see a young man sitting in front of the building. We stay with the kid as Tango walks into the building. We cut to the kid’s POV as he watches Sal enter the other building.” To light this long Steadicam move, Murguia relied on the existing light cast by the streetlamps and hid a 2K open-faced Blonde behind one pole. The spill from the Blonde covered a wide area and served as the key light. According to Fortune, this ambient light was boosted by several other fixtures: a 5K on a 40' Condor beside the el tracks provided sidelight and backlight; a couple of 10Ks were positioned on the ground six blocks away, underneath the el; and a Dino and a 20K were positioned on a 125' Condor hidden behind a nearby high-rise. All of these fixtures were gelled with Lee 232 for a sodium-vapor feel. After Tango enters the building, we cut back to Sal and follow him into an apartment, where he murders two criminals. Upon entering the kitchen, he hears something, turns around and shoots a third man. Then the camera stops and observes as Sal tears the place apart, looking for money. “He goes in and out of frame, but the camera remains stationary,” says

American Cinematographer - April 2010

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