American Cinematographer - January 2008 - 74

A Rogue Politician they walk around the room. Arnot preceded them, dancing around the furniture. “I was on quite a tight twoshot, and the trick was to grow away from them and get wider fairly quickly in order to include a huge, painted portrait of Joanne that’s hanging on the wall.” Wilson and Bonnie stop in front of the painting for a few moments. “They cut in for coverage at that point,” reports Arnot, “then cut back to the Steadicam shot as Tom and Amy move away from the portrait to another spot, where they come to another stop. Cut in with more coverage, and then another Steadicam shot brings Julia into the room from the garden. We had made almost a full circle around the room.” Goldblatt shot the scene as one long master using a 27mm lens. He didn’t want Arnot to “do it on the cheap” by throwing in even slight zooms; instead, Arnot unobtrusively kept stepping back to get farther from the actors, side-stepping not only the furniture but also keylights hidden on the floor. “You don’t get your best look when [lights] are above people unless you get just the right angle,” notes Goldblatt, who was contending with a practical set and a solid ceiling. Arnot notes the lighting design was a big help to him: “Stephen did it mainly from one side and much of it with negative fill.” Goldblatt grimaces slightly as he recalls the white-satin dinner jacket Hanks insisted on wearing in the scene; Roberts wears a long, black gown. “Whenever Tom moved, there were people with nets and little flags trying to keep light off his shoulders,” says the cinematographer. “Once Julia enters the frame, the focus is on her, but Tom is in the foreground and the white blooms more than it should. Our wonderful wardrobe designer, Albert Wolsky, made sure Tom’s jacket had a beautiful patina, and he made it slightly yellow rather than white, which Goldblatt peers into a hot tub while preparing to shoot a scene set at a party in Las Vegas. The water was lit by four 1K HydroPars placed at the bottom of the tub beneath a piece of Plexiglas. you can only refine it. Shoot as if you will never have the DI. Do everything you possibly can during principal photography and [consider] the DI the icing on the cake.” Goldblatt extolls Scott’s contributions to Charlie Wilson’s War, which was his third collaboration with the colorist. He also praises Edlund, another previous collaborator. “Richard is great; he follows the mood of the original photography so closely you’d never know it was bluescreen. He and I both prefer bluescreen to greenscreen because if you get any spill onto a face, even just a slight discoloration, blue is much better than green on a complexion.” One of the film’s most demanding sequences is a lavish, black-tie party thrown by Herring (Julia Roberts) at her Houston mansion. A stately home in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park neighborhood served as a practical set, and very little could be hung from the walls or ceiling. The backyard consisted of a patio, a swimming pool and, beyond that, an expanse of manicured trees and bushes. A “slave girl” auction was being conducted on a platform at the rear of the yard. Goldblatt wanted a soft backlight to illuminate the whole area, but the neighbors wouldn’t allow a Condor on their property. Two sausage-shaped helium lighting balloons were used instead; electricians secured them to a metal rig to keep them from drifting over the adjacent property. A number of softboxes filled with 5Ks and 10Ks gelled with either 1⁄4 CTB or 1⁄4 CTO gently crosslit the crowd. A spotlight on a conveniently located terrace cast a soft keylight on the slave girls. The scene opens on the backyard activities, with the Steadicam inside the house, shooting through a sliding door. Viewers don’t realize they are looking through glass until the camera moves left and discovers Wilson, who is standing in the living room gazing out at the yard. “The tricky part of that shot was avoiding our reflections as we moved,” recalls Arnot. “The grips were behind us, holding up blacks. It created a big black wall that enabled us to look through the glass without seeing our own reflections.” Wilson’s aide, Bonnie, joins Wilson at the door, and together 74 January 2008

American Cinematographer - January 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2008