American Cinematographer - November 2011 - 22

Top: Martha’s sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), and brother-in-law, Ted (Hugh Dancy), provide refuge after Martha escapes from the cult. Middle: Martha’s fragile emotional state devolves into paranoia as she adapts to her new surroundings. Bottom: Lipes (white shirt) and members of the crew block out a scene with director Sean Durkin (far right).

work on together. Finishing often gets rushed through on many of the productions I work on, so it’s great to know that there is someone behind the scenes who knows where things are going to end up, and that he has the knowledge and ability to rough things in very well before I get to the lab. “On Martha, Sam was in close touch the entire time, telling me if I went a little too far here or not far enough there,” Lipes adds, noting that he wasn’t always able to
22 November 2011

glean such information from the ProRes dailies. “When you’re rating 2 stops under, film can get very temperamental and unpredictable, so I was often surprised.” In the digital timing, the main concern was maintaining consistency in the blacks. “That was tricky,” says the cinematographer. “When you’re underexposing that much, a slight difference in how much you underexpose can really affect the quality of the image. If we were losing light and
American Cinematographer

I opened up by 1 ⁄ 3 when I shouldn’t have, it was really hard to match between takes — just 1 ⁄ 3 of a difference in stop! “With this degree of underexposure, black actually looks more gray than black, and it can look like a different film stock [from shot to shot], so you have to make those shots come together. Sam did that really well, which took time.” Lipes and Daley also worked to avoid clipping the highlights. “I think having a huge latitude accentuates the film look, so I try to emphasize that even further in the digital realm,” says Lipes. That latitude was particularly important in the lake-house interiors, where the object was to create an environment that would underscore Martha’s vulnerability and paranoia. Balancing interiors and exteriors in the predominantly glass house was a priority because the filmmakers wanted the outside environment to be visible. Helping Lipes in that regard was the need to have something dark in the frame. “So if we’re doing day interiors and there were windows, keeping the foreground subject dark was a way to activate the smoky black look,” he says. “The Godfather Part II was a really important reference for those situations. I’ve watched that movie over and over for my entire life. Gordon Willis [ASC] is, without question, my favorite cinematographer, and my approach to a lot of the lakehouse stuff with the big windows comes directly from studying the feeling of his work, particularly the Godfather films.” Lipes estimates that he shot more than half of the film with no movie lighting at all. For the other half, he took pains to contrast the lighting of the farm and the lake house. “I wanted the light at the farm to feel like [fixtures that] were rigged and improvised by the cult members,” he says, “whereas at the lake house, I wanted it to feel like high-end lighting integrated into the home. I think there are two kinds of ‘rich-people lighting’: the kind that’s classic and nice, with a lot of small lamps around, and the kind where the fixtures are recessed and bounced, with no visible bulbs or hard light.” Lipes opted for the latter strategy. “We didn’t know exactly what we were shooting at the house,” he continues. “We had almost no prep time on the location, so almost none of it was planned

Bottom photo by Drew Innis.

American Cinematographer - November 2011

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