"While we had lots of practical lights at eye level, the only way to actually get what I call a clean shot, throwing light across the set, was from up high. One of the advantages of shooting in anamorphic is that it gave us great frame width and not too much height, which actually allowed us more lighting options. I usually framed the headroom pretty close to the top of the actors' heads, so we weren't using a lot of the top of the set, which meant we could lower lights on scaffold tubes just above frame line. My gaffer, Chuck Finch, had several scaffold bars that could plug into the ceiling. When we needed them, he dropped the chains down, attached a scaffold and up went our little backlight rig.
"We could do a great deal of camera movement in there the sets were designed with that in mind. Felt and rubber pads under the floor deadened the sound of the dolly moving and the crew walking about. My English dolly grip, Colin Manning played the dolly like a violin. The first thing the English do when they go into a soundstage is put down a dance floor for the whole set. They never use track; they just put down the marks and off they go. One shot was so complicated that Colin turned to me and joked, 'I've got more marks than a German banker!'"
Regarding the differences in American and English camera crew protocol, Levy notes, "After working in Hollywood for so long, I began to find the English crew system fairly cumbersome. Fortunately, I was trained using that system in Australia, so I was used to it. But this was my first time going back to it in about 10 years."
Due to LiS screenwriter Akiva Goldsman's complex time-travel plot, the interior of the new and improved Jupiter 2, like many of the film's sets, required a number of different, contrasting looks. "There weren't many scenes where we had the same lighting," Levy confirms. "Something new happens in almost every scene set on the bridge of the Jupiter 2. I used a sort of film noir style when the spaceship was underway and under control, because Steve wanted to see the bridge and the actors. After takeoff, the Robinsons get into their cryotubes. I had green neon tubing built into them so that when the lids closed, I could add a green light and sell the idea that they were being frozen. At this point the ship goes on 'autopilot,' so it's dim and quiet. I tried to make the spaceship interior look normal so we wouldn't telegraph the sense of danger too heavily. Later, when the Robot tries to wreck everything, fires break out and the lighting changes again all of the warning lights are going off and there are flashing lights everywhere. After the family travels through time, the spaceship is wrecked and its systems are down, so I used a more theatrical style of lighting to pinpoint what we wanted the audience to look at, and to keep attention off those things we wanted to avoid."
For a sequence in which the Jupiter 2 hurtles out of control toward the sun, Levy again used extreme overexposure to create interactive lighting on the bridge set. When Professor Robinson and co-pilot Don West open the spaceship's viewport blast shield, Levy hit them with everything he had: "I poured every Dino, Wendy and 20K through the window, creating a searing hot light. There had been little fiery explosions on the bridge itself, so I also put some smoke in the air. Besides my lights, what they saw outside the window was a greenscreen, which was going to be replaced by visual effects. That was actually very hard, because I was eight or nine stops over and it was edging into the film. During preproduction, I told Angus Bickerton, the visual effects supervisor, that I could not guarantee that I could give him searing hot interactive light in the spaceship and still protect the greenscreen outside the set. I knew that at such a high light level, we'd be getting so much flare and ambient light that it would wash out the green and the effects team probably wouldn't get enough to key from, which turned out to be true. In the end, they took a hard matte line off the edge of the windshield itself. While we were shooting that scene, I had a very funny encounter with William Hurt. He asked, 'Just how bright is it supposed to be out there?' I told him, 'William, it's f-ing bright, the sun's filling the whole window.' He said, 'Give me something I can work with.' I said, 'Look, I'm sorry, William, but this is my first time hurtling into the sun as well!"
All told, the Jupiter 2 spacecraft interiors filled four Shepperton soundstages. "Besides the bridge, we had the below-decks areas and robot lab on a second stage, and the living quarters and the various labs on yet another stage, plus the Hyperdrive set," Levy remembers. "I made the living quarters as homey and as domestic as I could, in contrast to the below-decks sets, which I kept fairly cold by using a lot of fluorescents built into the set design. The robot lab was a workshop area where I had cold light bouncing off hard shiny surfaces. In there, my Kino Flo racks included the 50/50 — in which half the tubes were tungsten and half were daylight — which gave us a very nice bluish, cold look.
"The Hyperdrive — in essence, the engine room — was an industrial-textured, vertical cylindrical set, three or four stories high and very narrow, no more than 40' across. I told my gaffer, Chuck Finch, 'Just give me what you can on the wall, some highlights here and a glow there,' so he put practicals in every nook and cranny. I had 10Ks in the ceiling coming down as a cold backlight, or what I like to call a separator, because there were supposed to be holes in the ship leading to the outside at that point in the story, the vessel has crash-landed on a planet. I kept the lighting down and suggestive wherever I could, which stood in good contrast to this warm golden lighting effect I had coming from 5Ks and 10Ks I'd placed down below floor level shooting up. The golden light was supposed to represent the interactive lighting from the time portal."
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