American Cinematographer - July 1992 - 40

to hide him

how much to make
him a shadow/' he says. "I avoided
letting light fall on his face. Some¬
times I let you see who he is, de¬
pending on which part of the story
we were at. I didn't want to over¬
dramatize the lighting. I get tired of

doing the
but there

-

same

thing

every

time,

certain

things that
worked, like putting a little
kicklight on the side of his face. The
hard part was to not become too
formulaic about it. I thought he
were

looked best when he first met the

Penguin."
As that fateful
occurs, Catwoman

meeting

decides to make

her own impression on the caped
crusader by reducing Shreck's De¬

partment Store (a wry homage to
German actor Max Shreck, who

played the lead in the silent vam¬
pire classic Nosferatu) to bombedout rubble. When it came time to

start
Above: The

oppressive
architecture of
Gotham City -
Kafka meets the
Third Reich.

Right: The
sinister, surreal
nature of the

film's visuals is

apparent in this
juxtapositioning
of a deus

ex

machina and the
Schreck's cat.

blowing things

up,

Czapsky

scenes. "We were so
overwhelmed by Danny's perfor¬
mance that we didn't have to think
about what to do visually," he says.
"When I watched him in rehearsal,
it became very clear what the ap¬

Penguin's

proach should be.
"The only problem had to
do with the paleness of the
Penguin's makeup, although the
whiteness of the character was less

difficult than

dealing with the

blackness of the sets," he adds. "It
was

just another part of the contrast

control. Since I was shooting the 48

film, the makeup had a tendency to
orange. But af¬
makeup tests, I real¬
ized I had to keep the light right at
3200 or else blue it up some, and
that helped the makeup photo¬
graph white."
And what of the Penguin's
come

out

warm

-

ter I did two

sleek, seductive, leather-clad cohort
in crime, the nefarious Catwoman?
"I lit her like a car!" Czapsky
laughs, assessing the problems in
lighting the glossy costume of the

38

bash her with light from behind
and really didn't worry about over¬

exposing it."
While

Czapsky

shot

Catwoman as a perpetual motion
machine who was always moving,

slinking and slithering, he says that
Batman himself was usually cap¬

villainess. "We had to watch for

tured in

things we could see in her suit -
lights and the camera - which is
literally the same thing I run into
when lighting a car. I was able to
use that to
my advantage; I'd just

ing almost as a sculpture. So when
Batman began to reveal his dark

American

July 1992

Cinematographer

a

posture or pose, appear¬

found

working with the slow film
plus. "It was really good at hold¬
ing the information," he opines.
"Since I was shooting at 2.8 or 4,1
was using a lot of
light anyhow. We
set up a few cameras and we evacu¬
a

ated most of

our crew. We used
doubles in the shot and we had the
fire department there. There was a
tremendous explosion, a full-on
fireball in this giant set. The flame

side to Catwoman, Czapsky de¬
cided to keep the caped crusader a

shot way, way out

mystery. "I wasn't sure how much

doubled for Michelle Pfeiffer.

there; I think it
singed the back of the woman who
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