Throughout the film, Khondji subtly augments the story’s satanic overtones in his lighting of Depp. The actor is nearly always lent a warm, slightly reddish glow, even in otherwise cool scenes. The actor is also groomed in appropriately devilish fashion, sporting both an earring and a goatee. “I always take quite a bit of time before the film just to learn how to photograph the star,” Khondji says. “I start with photographs, and then I watch films starring that particular actor, just to see how his face handles different ambiances and angles of light. I need to see how he takes low light, how he takes very bright light, what direct sunlight will do to his face, how much light his face will bounce back with reflective light. Eventually you see a direction to take with the actor. I also had to take into account that Johnny was playing a character with two sides. We present the Dean Corso character as very ambiguous. He definitely has a dark, cold side, but at the same time there’s a side of him we don’t know about, so it was a simple decision to half-light him throughout the movie with some CTO, CTS or other warm diffusion on the fixtures. For me, the most important thing is the direction of the beam of light to a face, a scene or a landscape.”
Focus puller Eric Bialas’s skills were put to the test for one of Polanski’s trademark subjective angles, when Corso is knocked unconscious from behind while examining a possible copy of Balkan’s text in the office of a Parisian baroness. Bialas maintained perfect focus on the words, even the letters, of the page as the camera swerved right into the book. “Eric is an amazing focus puller,” Khondji says. “We used a combination of a dolly and a Dutch head, on which we moved an Arriflex 535. It was purely Roman’s idea — as far as shots go, he knows exactly what he wants.”
Corso awakens to the bizarre sight of the murdered, wheelchair-bound baroness rolling helplessly toward her front office, which is inexplicably engulfed in flames. “Inside the front office, I used several China balls with 2Ks and 5Ks inside them, all fitted with full CTO,” Khondji recalls. “I put them all on dimmers, and when the actress rolled through the door, I blasted the set with the very red light from the China balls. I also had a physical effects person on the set who lit up flame bars for some added fire effects.”
Corso’s investigations eventually lead him to a nocturnal gathering of occult worshippers inside a huge castle in northeast Paris. With participants in black robes chanting strange incantations, the scene’s overall aura of decadence gave Khondji a strange sense of verisimilitude when he viewed Stanley Kubrick’s final film. “I was amazed when I saw Eyes Wide Shut,” he laughs. “The orgy scene in that film was very close to what we were doing! But Roman, of course, takes a lighter tone than Kubrick. He constantly plays on the grotesque, comedic aspect of witchcraft, as well as the scariness. The better his work, the more there is of this mixture of the serious and the funny. The castle was a very difficult location because there was almost no place to light — it was a huge space with a big balcony all around it. We ended up lighting the whole room with helium balloons, which gave off a slightly cool, under-keyed toplight. We used the balcony for straight, simple backlighting of the worshippers. All of the red effects in the scene came from several China lights.”
As Corso closes in on the truth, the look of the film becomes progressively more baroque. Thanks to an unexpected assist from Mother Nature, a simple transitional scene of Corso hitching a ride with a herd of sheep through the French countryside was transformed into cinematic gold. “It had been raining and we just happened to capture a fantastic rainbow,” he says. “It was nothing more than an accident. These days, I’m sure that many people are going to think it was a special effect!”
The film’s final, nocturnal confrontation between Corso and Balkan was staged at still another breathtaking castle in southwest France. “It was an incredibly haunted-looking place,” Khondji recalls. “We used a lot of the red China lights for the warm look of fire inside. For the exterior, we used a crane with two Dino lights. I used straight 3200K tungsten light with no blue filtration whatsoever. I like my night scenes to be very dark, with a silvery white quality of light. I don’t like blue at all for nights, although there are a lot of really good cameramen who still use it. Their night scenes are often very beautiful, but where is this blue streak of light coming from? Maybe it’s a question of the stylization of the night, but when I look out the window at night, I see lights, silhouettes of trees and pools of color — I don’t see any blue.”
Polanski’s high-wire balance of horror and humor reaches its apex in an amusingly over-the-top, outdoor tryst between Corso and The Girl as the castle is engulfed in flames in the background. With the camera a substantial distance away from the actors, Khondji was forced to cleverly camouflage his lighting. “We hid several China lights very well behind rocks to illuminate the actors with warm light,” he explains. “The rest was done with a crane and two Dino lights on the castle. I used these huge lights, but they’re hardly readable in the finished film. I just see nights as very dark. I feel that 90 percent of the night scenes I see in movies are overlit.”
Khondji’s less-is-more attitude about night scenes mirrors his current approach toward cinematography in general. “The older I get, the more I simplify and purify,” he states. “Every time I do something that is a bit too complicated, I’m unhappy. Usually I’m frustrated with myself when I put up too many lights.”