American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 40

◗

Going Rogue

Cruise and the
crew tackle a
night exterior
in London.

travel of the camera and the arm that
was moving Tom and Rebecca back and
forth. [HydroFlos were used to light the
greenscreen backings.]
Beyond the underwater scene,
Walters tells us you frequently built
LEDs into sets and used 500-watt,
650-watt and 1K Tiffen Rifa 88s for a
soft backlight effect. He also
40

August 2015

mentions that, for major nighttime
stunt sequences, you relied heavily on
two 24K tungsten Fresnels to bounce
light into 20-by-12 bleached muslin,
and for day scenes you would replace
those lamps with Arrimax 18Ks. How
would you describe the movie's overall
style of lighting and camera movement?
American Cinematographer

Elswit: We didn't want it to feel
overlit, but at the same time, everything
is lit so that the actors look good, even
in stressful situations. In that sense,
although the lighting was scene-dependent and location-dependent, it was
also Tom Cruise-dependent. Whenever
his character walks into a room, we try
to make the viewer understand the
space he is in. Usually that means the
space is not flatly lit - it has just a little
bit of shadow and a little bit of contrast.
You want to feel what his character is
feeling. Everything revolves around
imagining what is going on with his
character.
Beyond that, there are different
worlds - Casablanca, London,
Vienna, D.C. - and for each location,
there are extreme contrasts in the quality of light. It depended on the place,
the architecture. We went with what
was there automatically - in that sense
we didn't have to create anything. There
aren't really any sunny days in the movie
until we get to Casablanca; that part of
the movie feels contrasty and harsh, and
we ended up blowing out highlights
more and making it feel less controlled,
like they really were in an exotic loca-



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - August 2015

Contents
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - Cover1
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - Cover2
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 1
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - 2
American Cinematographer - August 2015 - Contents
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