The Third Containment was also one of many setpieces Biddle shot with actors against blue- and greenscreen. In one such sequence, the engineer of the Lewis & Clark is dragged into the sphere after touching it. "We shot a lot of that against bluescreen inside the set, and we took the sphere out and set it up against blue," Biddle says. "I worked very closely with [visual effects supervisor] Richard Yuricich on that. If ever I had a question, he helped me out."
Given Biddle's resumé, he's become something of an specialist shooting scenes involving special effects. It's an expertise which the cameraman says arose "probably more by accident. If you're going to do a movie on stage, effects are usually part of it. You have to keep an eye on that aspect when working on those movies, but a lot of it is up to the effects unit. I don't think there's anything too difficult about working with effects, because in the end, you don't want an effect to look like an effect. I think the way to approach it is as if it's not an effects shoot. Although the elements you film may be complicated, in the end, they're only going to go into a shot that is meant to look natural."
Biddle maintains that digital technology actually freed up his cinematography on the effects-driven Event Horizon, "especially with shots involving blue- and greenscreen, which we did quite often. We had a lot of wirework whenever we had characters who went out into the zero-gravity of space, so I was happy about the prospect of digital wire removal. We shot both blue- and green-screen depending on what the predominant color of the light was. If it was green, we used bluescreen, and vice-versa."
One of the film's more complex wire gags occurs when the Event Horizon's designer, Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill), tries to shoot Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) and misses, instead blowing a hole in a cathedral-shaped window. "Everything gets sucked out, including Sam Neill," Biddle laughs. "We did the shot inside the ship with a lot of wirework and practical explosions. It took forever to set up, and a couple of days to shoot. The area beyond the window was supposed to be outer space, but there was just black. Any shots of Sam Neill in space were done with bluescreen."
In the macabre world within the Event Horizon, evil manifests itself via visions of the most traumatic events in each character's past. Rather than using a stylized or surreal photographic treatment for these encounters with personal demons, Biddle deliberately chose a very matter-of-fact approach: "I treated them as if they were really there. It's up to the viewer to decide if the visions are reality or if they're just in the characters' minds."
Toying with the audience's idea of reality was exactly what the film's director was after. Since the Event Horizon's environment was already so extreme, Anderson feared that glowing visions would do little more than lend an artificial layer to something that was already unreal. "We wanted you to feel that the horror was right there in your face," he says. "There's no thin veil of dry ice between you and the nightmare."
This tactic is certainly effective in the soon-to-be-infamous scene in which Weir, driven mad by visions of his dead wife, rips out his own eyeballs. Notes Anderson, "He's standing in a brightly-lit medical bay; he isn't lurking in the shadows, he's right there in your face. I wanted show as much of it as was humanly possible without getting an NC-17 rating."
There are other, powerful glimpses of what will happen to the crew if they make their way through the black hole's gateway and into a literal perdition. Perhaps the most disturbing vision of all is the appearance of "the Burning Man," a spectral representation of an individual Captain Miller was unable to rescue on a past mission. Instead of conceiving this grisly vision with an actor in a fire suit, Yuricich and Biddle combined several different elements. "We did several passes on the same set," Biddle says. "Sometimes we used motion control. I shot some of that, but we also had a bit of a second unit. The Burning Man involved a lot of different effects elements. To get the proper color saturation and not let it blow out, we shot the fire at f8 or f11. We had to lighten it up a bit, but it's a really amazing composite."
The fire almost got a bit out of hand, however. "Setting fire to things is tricky," Biddle says. "We nearly burned down the First Containment set! It didn't all burn down, but we had a bit of an insurance claim. We had to clear out of the Bond stage and move on to something else."
The cinematographer maintains that he is actually most content when shooting under less-than-hospitable conditions. While Event Horizon was one of his more challenging assignments, the cameraman says it was less complicated than the Neil Jordan film he shot on location in Ireland last summer. "Even though The Butcher Boy will look like it was an easier movie, it's set in 1962, and it had to be absolutely real. We did a lot of evening and day scenes in this little two-up and two-down house. The huge Event Horizon set on the Bond stage was great. It wasn't easy, because everything was so big, but it was actually easier working in that set than it was working in a really small house where a family is having an evening sing-song."
