American Cinematographer - October 2007 - (Page 40)

Western Destinies The governor of Missouri, Thomas Crittenden (James Carville), addresses a gathering of citizens and supporters in a hotel ballroom. To augment the real fixtures and candles, Deakins suspended two lightweight ring-lights from the ceiling over the governor’s table and the bandstand. windows to create distorted views. Old glass has a kind of wavy texture, and it just seemed very evocative in some way. [Laughs.] There’s one nice shot where we’re craning up outside a window and the glass is kind of wobbling in front of Jesse’s face. We also used the glass to create patterns on the walls for a scene in which Jesse wakes Charley to have a nighttime chat with him. I lit that scene with 1Ks, and I removed the lenses from the lamps to create a really sharp, pinpoint source. When you put that kind of source through a window, you’ll get the pattern of the glass on the background. Was it tricky balancing the film’s interiors and exteriors? There are a number of shots where you can see the exteriors through the doorways of relatively low-key dwellings. Deakins: The hardest shot was when Jesse arrives on horseback at Ed Miller’s cabin, where they have this really eerie conversation. The cabin was built on location, and it was supposed to be an exterior scene, but the day we turned up there was 2 feet 40 October 2007 of snow outside. We discussed whether we could clear enough snow up to the horizon so we could shoot Jesse’s arrival through the door. Well, the horizon was about a quarter-mile away, so that would have taken a week! It was absolutely freezing, -20 degrees, and we ended up shooting only part of their conversation before packing it in. Weeks later we put the cabin inside a warehouse, and I had the set painter create a 20-by canvas with a little bit of a horizon line so we could shoot the rest of the dialogue onstage, trying to match what we’d done on location. We left the door of the stage open to keep the set cold, because we had to be able to see their breath! I’m amazed that scene works so well, because it was cobbled together over two different days of location shooting and an additional day onstage in the warehouse. There’s a major interior scene late in Jesse James when Ford attends an event hosted by the governor. How did you light the ballroom where that scene takes place? Deakins: The ballroom was actually a restaurant in a hotel, and it was a very big space. I couldn’t really rig much there, but they did let me put up a couple of lightweight ringlight rigs that I could hang from the ceiling. Those are basically concentric rings of household bulbs controlled by a dimmer. I hung the larger one over the governor’s table; that rig had a 10-foot ring of about 20 40-watt bulbs; an 8-foot ring with 60-watt bulbs; a 6-foot ring of 75-watt bulbs; and an inner ring with 100-watt bulbs. I also hung a smaller version of that rig off toward where the band was playing. It’s a quick, simple technique I use to create a big soft light when I don’t have any ceiling height. The rest of the lighting for that scene was provided by the little globe lights you see above the tables. For closeups, I might’ve bounced a light off a piece of card. Two scenes late in the film involve dramatic reflections. Just before Ford shoots James, the outlaw notices Ford’s reflection in the painting he’s dusting; in a subsequent scene where James’ corpse is on public display, the body is

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American Cinematographer - October 2007

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