American Cinematographer - May 2012 - 45

other material was left up to Ryan. “That was brilliant,” he says. “Every lunch, I’d run away with the camera and shoot nature, whether it be a moth, a caterpillar or a dead rabbit. It was really liberating.” When snow came unexpectedly one day during the shoot, the cinematographer was able to grab all of the wintry nature shots in a single morning. He recalls, “I ran around and shot three rolls of white landscapes and snow. By noon, the rain had come in and washed the whole place clean of snow. The 2C was fantastic for that because I didn’t have to have a focus puller; I just did everything on my own. It was a lot of fun.” Ryan used a diopter to achieve some macro shots, like one of a beetle crawling through grass, but more often he used the Close Focus lenses. “The Primo Close Focus lenses are fantastic — they really get you into the detail,” he notes. Throughout the shoot, Ryan and 1st AC John Watters worked creatively with focus.“We played a lot with focus resting in unexpected places,” says Ryan. “That helps give the images a real organic feel.” He cites an example: “Cathy is sitting at the window, out of focus, and there’s this very fine dust that’s in focus in a beam of sunlight coming through the window. We just rested on that dust.” During prep, Arnold and Ryan experimented with several out-of-theordinary techniques. Inspired by Hido’s through-the-windshield photographs, they tried shooting through blown glass. For shots looking out of the farmhouse, Arnold “wanted to have all the distortions of the window and all the elements on the window, whether it be dirt or rain or whatever,” says Ryan. “She wanted to use it as a natural filter. However, we didn’t get as much of that as we’d hoped. I don’t think the glass was as warped as we’d have liked.” They shot a few exteriors this way, too, taking a piece of blown glass outside, but were dissatisfied with the results. “For one thing, it takes a little

Top: A frame from one of Heathcliff and Catherine’s rides. Bottom: The youngsters escape the drudgery of the farm to enjoy time together.

time to get the right balance of blur,” says Ryan. “But you also need to have a reason for something like that.” It seemed too artificial, and ultimately only a few of these shots made it into the final cut. Another test, inspired by the ghostly apparitions in Brontë’s novel, involved double exposure. “In every adaptation of Wuthering Heights except this one, there’s a bit at the beginning where a lodger comes to stay in Cathy’s room and is visited by her ghost in the night — she taps on the window,”
ww.theasc.com w

explains Ryan. “We didn’t have that bit, but Andrea loved the idea of that Gothic element, so we tried the double exposure to see the ghost against the landscape. We shot a whole load of that, but she didn’t use most of it because it didn’t suit the realism of the film we’d made. You see it very briefly in the film.” They also tested shooting blackand-white. “Andrea was keen on that at first, but when we watched the tests, they just seemed to be missing something,” says Ryan. “Color is very important to the world of the story. By the
May 2012 45

http://ww.theasc.com

American Cinematographer - May 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - May 2012