American Cinematographer - October 2008 - 58

Memoirs of a Spook and discovers she has changed the locks. Suffering this indignity in the pouring rain, his frustration is manifested under the glow from a sodium-vapor unit. Lubezki recalls, “When I went to Washington, I saw a lot of houses along those beautiful Georgetown streets with these horrible sodium-vapor lights outside.” Accordingly, O’Leary adds, “We purchased various sizes of industrialtype sodium-vapor fixtures, from small ones up to 1,500-watters. We just wired them with a plug and attached a stud so we could put them on a stand.” Sodium vapors also play prominently in Linda’s apartment (constructed onstage at Steiner), where their glow — provided by the 1,500-watt units aimed through her curtains — is a constant presence at night. “I thought it was a little depressing when she’s trying to sleep and this light is shining [through the windows],” says Lubezki. “She doesn’t really have true night. It’s a light that can make you crazy after a while. “When I first timed the movie, I thought the [sodium vapor] was probably too harsh,” he continues. “So I re-timed it, but when Joel and Ethan saw it, they said, ‘No way! Let it go ugly!’” “Let it go ugly,” “let it be banal,” “let if feel real”: these were constant refrains throughout the production. If the call was first heard at the gym, it clearly echoed into Linda’s apartment, not just with the sodium vapor, but also with the blank white walls in every small room. “I knew the walls had to be white,” says the cinematographer, “but I asked [Gonchor] if we could make them slightly darker so a big source wouldn’t bounce all over the apartment and become impossible to handle. He brought down the walls as much as he could so they looked white but slightly more benign. It’s still an ugly apartment, but that’s the way it had to be for To light Osborne’s reunion with his Princeton classmates, Lubezki and gaffer Bill O’Leary employed a large tungsten soft box. town, Harry spends an increasing amount of time in the Coxes’ home. Left on his own one afternoon, he discovers an intruder in the bedroom, and after he has a mishap with a firearm, Katie returns to find him nervously chopping carrots in the kitchen. To maintain a daylight feel through the kitchen window, O’Leary explains, the riggers “had to build a deck below the window, and we used that to position about half a dozen 18K HMIs.” Burying himself in his memoirs, Cox spends an increasing amount of time on his yacht. A working boat was used for a handful of shots on deck, but everything belowdecks was filmed onstage at Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios. “We had a row of heavily diffused 10Ks along the side of the boat coming through 58 October 2008 the portholes,” explains O’Leary. “Above [the set], we hung a series of 20Ks that we could aim in different directions through the overhead hatches.” After an afternoon tryst aboard the yacht, Harry and Katie discuss her imminent divorce. To create a soft glow on the couple, Lubezki and O’Leary rigged “covered wagons” above the actors and along one side of the bed. The fixtures, O’Leary notes, comprise “a strip light with household bulbs and a muslin wrapping. It makes a soft tube, and we had them in a few different lengths — 2, 4 and 6 feet. We could gang them up or put them on stands.” When Katie finally serves her husband with divorce papers, Osborne returns to the brownstone

American Cinematographer - October 2008

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