American Cinematographer - October 2007 - (Page 51)

character, and it also created one of my biggest challenges, because that look had to be maintained outdoors for two weeks when we shot the film’s climax.” Another inspiration was Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings. These established the palette in Hong Kong, which Lee describes as “tropical, wet and colorful.” By contrast, Shanghai features mixed, desaturated colors, conveying a sense of lost innocence and disillusionment. Prieto elaborates, “Hong Kong’s color palette consisted of blues, greens, cyans and a touch of red, mostly in the bougainvilleas.” Shanghai has two looks, beginning with a drab, monochromatic palette (achieved through costumes and production design), and progressing to a more colorful look as Chia Chih infiltrates the Yees’ privileged world. “Ang wanted [the colors] to look less designed in Shanghai than they do in Hong Kong, so it’s a little more haphazard,” says Prieto. “We wanted to contrast the decadence of the Yees’ lifestyle with the war-torn city where they live.” Prieto used Kodak and Fuji film stocks to underscore the cities’ visual differences. For day scenes set in Hong Kong, he used Kodak Vision2 200T 5217. For night scenes in Hong Kong and all scenes in Shanghai, he used Fuji Eterna 500T 8573. “Fuji captured all those blues and greens very well,” he notes. “Kodak’s 5217 is harder, maybe a little more contrasty, but it felt a bit more innocent — pristine, direct and unfiltered. Fuji, being a little softer with slightly more grain, felt a little more decadent. That softness also worked well with the shallow depth of field.” Prior to Lust, Caution, Prieto had used Arri Master Primes just once, for a nighttime desert scene in Babel that was lit with a single flashlight (AC Nov. ’06). At that time, the lenses were just hitting the market, and he couldn’t get a complete set. This time, he planned to use them for the entire movie “so we could work wide open, and also for contrast.” But when the team viewed the first set of film dailies, they realized the lenses were a bit too sharp. “[Production designer] Lai Pan said, ‘These lenses are designed for the scientific photography of ants!’” Prieto recalls with a laugh. So despite his general antipathy toward diffusion, he added a 1⁄4 or 1⁄2 Tiffen Black Diffusion FX filter to the lens throughout the shoot. Lust, Caution was filmed in the standard 1.85:1 format, and Prieto always had two cameras on hand, an Arricam Studio and Lite. His lenses stayed mostly in the midrange: 27mm for wide shots; 40mm, 50mm and occasionally 32mm for medium; and 75mm for close-ups. “We’d use a 50mm if we wanted a close-up to be more intense or uncomfortable, moving in closer with the camera,” says Prieto. “We only used longer lenses for some of Chia Chih’s points of view when she’s paranoid and feeling she’s being followed on Nanking Road. Unable to sleep one night, Chia Chih walks into another room in Yee’s home and finds him burning some documents. This is one scene where Prieto used a source dubbed the “Killer Pizza Light” — red, yellow and white Christmas lights secured to a cardboard square with transparent plastic. “For this scene, the Pizza Light was hidden behind the desk along with a cluster of 12 100watt lightbulbs on dimmers gelled with different degrees of CTO and Straw to create a flickering fire effect,” says Prieto. “Later, when the fire dies down, the embers’ light was created with the Pizza Light and the 1⁄2-stopunderexposed top ambient light — which Ang [Lee] called ‘Ambionic Light’ and I called ‘No-Light Lighting’ — provided by 10 2K Blondes through two 12'x12' frames of Full Grid with Lighttools Soft Egg Crate over the set, teased off the walls with black material. The lights are off during the scene, and we wanted to represent the darkness of the encounter. I pushed the Fuji 500T one stop, rating it at ISO 1000; got an incident reading of 1.0 from the toplight; and set the lens to T1.3, so the set was quite dark indeed!” American Cinematographer 51

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American Cinematographer - October 2007

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