American Cinematographer - July 2009 - 56

Terror on the Tracks Above: Schliessler (far left) and the crew prepare to shoot at Garber’s desk in the controlroom set. Below: Custom LED panels were built into the desk to light Washington from below. ceiling. (Schliessler avoided pulling out sections of the ceiling in an effort to move efficiently between wider and tighter coverage.) Lighting Washington from below were custom LED panels that production designer Chris Seagers’ crew had built into the desk; these could be dimmed up or down. “Denzel looks better in slightly warm light,” notes Schliessler. Pelham’s other main setting, the subway tunnel where Ryder has parked the hijacked train, is the visual opposite of the control room. The practical tunnel, where all train exteriors were filmed, contained little practical lighting, so Seagers whipped up small, authentic-looking light boxes that were mounted on the tunnel walls every 50' or so. Each box held a 150-watt sodiumvapor bulb. “They’re a slight stretch, because those kinds of lights don’t exist down there,” notes Schliessler. O’Leary adds, “The real tunnels are almost pitch-black, with only the occasional incandescent lamp every 100 feet or so and various colored signal lamps and exit lamps. But this was the most logical idea we could think of; the lights were easy to wire and move, and we felt they looked like they belonged in the environment. This gets back to working in New York: play the hand you have!” The sodium-vapor fixtures bathe the foreground in warm, orange light, and Schliessler took the opposite tack in backlighting the train. “Tony wanted to play around with color separation, so we used a cool, green backlight and spread it around to silhouette the train,” he says. O’Leary explains, “We used Nine-light Maxis and Par lamps; the Maxis were a ways back from the train, and we squeezed the Pars in below for the rails or above for the ceiling to light the areas the Maxis didn’t reach. They were gelled with Lee 242 [Fluorescent 4300°K] to match the color of the tubes on the station platforms — the logic was that this backlight was coming from a station farther down the tunnel. We didn’t change any of the MTA tubes; we just matched what existed. So 4100°K was the standard look.” Overall, the lighting in the tunnel was very low. “I knew where the limits were, and we definitely played it on the borderline,” says Schliessler. “When you get to a level that low, you battle, because to your eye it looks like more light.” Inside the train, a heavy, slightly teal hue was used on the lights; this was motivated by emergency backup lights that kick in when Ryder’s crew kills the power. “Normally, you don’t want your actors to have a blue-green cast on their faces, but it works for this story,” says Schliessler. “We had some of that sodium-vapor light coming through the windows, and the colors all came together. It seemed like the tunnel could have that atmosphere.” The MTA had strict regulations about mounting lights inside the train. O’Leary recalls, “The real trains had a couple of 20-amp outlets, so we used fluorescents matched to the existing tubes and mounted them to the bars [the passengers hold] or taped them to the ceiling. 56 July 2009

American Cinematographer - July 2009

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