American Cinematographer - October 2007 - (Page 44)

Western Destinies Right: Initially hailed as a hero, Ford sees his name and reputation slowly turn to mud. His low point arrives one night in a bar, where, unrecognized by the other patrons, he must endure the humiliating lyrics sung by a strolling troubadour (played by reallife rocker Nick Cave, with guitar in the deep background). Below: After coming to terms with history’s verdict, Ford opens a saloon, but he can’t outrun Jesse’s vengeful admirers. and I just hired him on a hunch. He was as good a gaffer as I’ve ever worked with, and the key grip, Rick Schmidt, was equally so. They were just brilliant. Lighting Jesse James was quite tricky because of all the practical work and the need to create that firelit feel without it looking fake. Through much of No Country, Moss is holed up in motel rooms, but you managed to create a lot of suspense through your lighting. Deakins: The lobby of the big hotel was a location in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and we shot those scenes at magic hour to get the feeling of dusk outside. The hotel room itself was a set because we had so many specific shots to do there. Inside that room, I wanted the feeling of the streetlights coming through the windows so that when Moss turned off his bedside lamp, we’d get this reddish sodium light coming through the windows. Then we had white light under the door so we could show Chigurh’s shadow creeping down the hallway toward the door. The shot of Moss diving out the window was done on a set, but the shot of him landing in the street was done on location. During the big shootout that follows, Chigurh seems like an invisible force, because you never really get a clear look at him. Deakins: In the book, Chigurh is the personification of evil, and it’s implied that he’s almost like a ghost. So throughout the film, we wanted to make him a very shadowy or indistinct figure. When you first see him, he’s been arrested and is sitting in a police station in handcuffs while a deputy is on the phone in the foreground. Chigurh is just a soft-focus shape behind him, but you can see him starting to wriggle out of the handcuffs. The big shootout was pretty complicated. We had small rigs of four or five 1Ks bunched up on rooftops, and we had little gag lights on streetlights to create more defined pools of light. I stuck with the orangesodium look for that chase because I wanted it to feel pretty grim. There’s also some interesting lighting in the subsequent scene, where Moss crosses the border into Mexico and dumps the money off a bridge. Deakins: That was one of the trickiest setups in the movie because it was staged at a freeway crossing. The art department put in the border 44 October 2007

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American Cinematographer - October 2007

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