Director Paul Verhoeven and cinematographer Jost Vacano, ASC, BVK take a new stab at the theme of invisibility in HOLLOW MAN.
While photographing director Paul Verhoeven’s latest work, Hollow Man, cinematographer Jost Vacano, ASC, BVK was challenged to meticulously execute the lighting of nothing — so to speak. "Hollow Man is a film about invisibility," states Vacano, who was collaborating with Verhoeven for the seventh time. "For a director of photography, that presents an interesting challenge, because cinematographers are normally hired to shoot things we are supposed to be able to see. In CGI-effects films, you usually shoot something that is not yet there, like the bugs in Starship Troopers; but in Hollow Man, we shot something already there that was supposed to not be there."
Hollow Man follows a team of scientists, led by the brilliant but radical Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon), that is secretly working for the government on a formula to induce invisibility. After the group successfully tests its invisibility serum on lab rats and an ape, the overzealous Caine decides to defy the Pentagon’s orders and test the serum on a human and who better than himself? "Everything seems to work fine," explains Vacano. "They make him invisible, conduct research on him for several days, then try to bring him back [to visibility]. But of course, since it’s a movie, they cannot make him visible again. Their methods had worked with the ape, but for some reason they don’t work with a human. They’re now faced with the problem of how to bring him back."
Initially amused with the novelty of being transparent, Caine quickly becomes bored with the lab environment and his partners’ incessant poking and prodding, and decides to test out his omnipotent power in the real world. Freed from the burden of accountability for his actions, the scientist quickly spirals into an unchecked foray of petty amusements, decadent indulgences and debauchery that is, until the government and his partners threaten to end his revelry.
Set in a not-too-distant future, Hollow Man presented the filmmakers with ripe cinematic opportunities, given that the production could tap into new technologies that would allow a level of visual trickery never before achieved on the screen. Not wanting to mine the clichés of the invisibility genre such as having a person fade into invisibility, or demonstrating that he’s invisible by having a glass of water "float" in the air the filmmakers developed a more aggressive visual strategy.
Caine’s transition to invisibility would be much more elaborate, showing the various anatomical layers of the body skin, veins, muscles, tendons, internal organs and the skeleton being literally peeled away by the serum. Likewise, the filmmakers sought a much more eye-popping treatment of scenes that occur after Caine has been rendered invisible; during the course of the film, his presence is partially revealed when he enters a smoky room, walks through a sprinkler system and dives into in a pool. Another way the film "reveals" the invisible Caine is through the use of a heat-sensitive camera, according to Vacano. "I was ’lighting’ my shots by ’painting’ with heat, mostly by using hairdryers," he says. "The stage was cool in the morning and hotter during the day, so it was a challenge to keep the thermal images constant.
"As always with Verhoeven," he continues, "we used Steadicam a lot, but in this film we had to use the POV of the invisible Caine as well, as a different way to ’show’ him without seeing him. These POVs had to be different, not so smooth, so we built a ’Shakycam.’"
Verhoeven has a penchant for pushing the effects industry to support his fertile narrative imagination, and all of the film’s participants were eager to tackle the tale’s ambitious and groundbreaking visuals. Vacano joined the production fairly early in the prep phase and focused primarily on the technical requirements involved in lighting the many sets that would be constructed for the film. "I used to go into a lot of my films thinking, ’Maybe this should be a long-lens film,’ or ’Maybe it should be a diffused film, or a harshly edited film,’" he relates. "However, my experience was that whenever I had these wonderful thoughts about how I was going to do a film, most of the time they didn’t work as expected; the film itself went in another direction. What I believe now is that a film is like a living structure, a living being it depends on the director, the cinematographer, the editor, the art director and the actors to determine which way the film will go. My approach these days is therefore very different. I don’t spend so much time thinking about how we should do this [or] that, and I especially do not try to think about what style the film should have. Rather, I’ll say, ’Let’s just start the film and see where the film wants to go.’ It’s a much more organic way for the story to be told; you’re not trying to force [an approach] upon it. Because I’ve done so many films with Paul, we don’t need to talk so much about the artistic aspects. We both [know] we will feel the right way to go.’"
That said, however, it should be noted that Vacano was heavily involved with the design of the lighting and its integration into the production design. "In a film of this nature, the art direction plays a very crucial role," the cinematographer points out. "When I got involved with the project, I began working closely with production designer Allan Cameron, who had also done Showgirls and Starship Troopers with Paul and me. Allan and I began talking about the sets and developing our ideas.
"The main set in the film is the scientists’ laboratory," Vacano continues. "The lab is supposed to be built inside an old atomic shelter from Cold War times; it’s located 20 floors or so below the Pentagon. [According to the script], the shelter had not been used since the end of the Cold War, and the government decided to build a high-tech laboratory there and set up a group of scientists to work on their most top-secret projects. When I read the script, I immediately began thinking, ’Okay, this is a modern lab and it’s very secret. It should not have any access, and when the one access is blocked, people are trapped inside." (Naturally, this aspect of the lab’s layout eventually factors into the narrative.)
The lab set was constructed on the Sony Pictures lot within one of the world’s largest soundstages, Stage 15, which measures approximately 360’ x 160’ and more than 40’ high. Production designer Cameron and his crew created the enormous, snaking underground lab as a series of modular rooms connected by mammoth tunnels. "Allan and Paul had come up with the idea that this was a new structure built within the old atomic shelter," Vacano relates. "I therefore started thinking, ’How can we make this idea visible during my participation in preproduction?’ Allan and I came up with the notion of using a lot of glass in the lab, so we would always have a layer of transparency between the modern foreground and the old background. The design also factored in the idea that while most of the corridors were rebuilt as part of the new structure, there were also some sections that still looked as if they’d been built 40 or 50 years ago."
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