American Cinematographer - March 2015 - 42

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Slave to Love

Top: Steele catches up with her mother, Carla May Wilks (Jennifer Ehle). Bottom: Taylor-Johnson,
McGarvey and crew prepare to shoot the car interior.

allowing for unrestricted tracking shots
as the room is explored from Ana's point
of view and through over-the-shoulder
shots, revealing a large brass rack with
restraining cuffs, a four-poster bed,
whips, ropes, canes and other accoutrements. Only for close-ups would
lights be brought near the actors; these
units included Lowel Rifa lights or a
book light directed into bounce and
diffused through 1⁄4 Grid, with 3'x4'
hard honeycomb grids to direct the
42

March 2015

light. "Keeping out the fixtures slightly
compromises the lighting but works for
the drama," the cinematographer says.
"The actors feel they are in a real place
rather than a set, and I think that makes
a difference."
The crew used MR16 cyc strips
diffused with Light Grid all around the
top of the set to pick up the wall's studded pattern, and built in 80 MR16s as
practical "puck lights" that provide
background hotspots and accent the
American Cinematographer

room's various sexual paraphernalia, visible in inset cabinets and on hooks.
In a later Red Room scene, sharp
overhead beams of ETC 575- and 750watt Source Fours shine through lighting grids, creating a gobo effect on the
floor. The rigging even appears on
camera when the viewer sees the floor
pattern shift; the scene cuts to a shot of
Christian lowering one of the grids, to
which he shackles Ana.
Taylor-Johnson and McGarvey
saved the most sensitive scenes for the
last couple of weeks of the shoot, when
Johnson and Dornan were most
comfortable. The director says, "We
stripped it down to bare bones in terms
of who needed to be around, and tried
to keep a sense of intimacy - although
that's difficult when we're all on set, staring at these naked people trying to
convey something sexual."
McGarvey started off operating
the A camera - as he usually does for
Taylor-Johnson - with 1st AC Doug
Lavender, while Norbert Kaluza
manned the B camera with 1st AC
David Lourie. But the two operators
soon switched. "Norbert is a much
better operator than I am," McGarvey
concedes with a laugh. "We would shoot
with two cameras side-by-side to minimize the number of setups and repetitions of scenes. We often used an
OConnor 2575 head so we could react
to the actors' movements. I'd be on
the longer zoom, more searching and
exploratory than Norbert's camera,
which would be looser and wider."
Kirilenko explains that for some
of the most intimate scenes, the crew
mounted the camera on a dolly, a
SuperTechno 15 crane or an Aerocrane
Jib - used in conjunction with a Libra
Head or Hot Gears remote system -
"so we could move freely through the
room and accomplish overhead or difficult angles without much time for
changeover."
Regarding the Hot Gears/dolly
combo, McGarvey adds, "It's great for
working in small spaces. It allows your
grips to be co-operators alongside you. I
used it to allow [the camera to be] a

American Cinematographer - March 2015

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