"That usually isn’t the best way to shoot a movie, because the cinematographer should first be involved with the camera placement and then determine the lighting from there. There was certainly no point in arguing with Jan all the time, but he also chose a lot of angles that were different from what I would have selected. Of course, this movie allowed for strange angles and lens choices. The most ’obvious’ choices were not always the right ones, so I was happy to do things a bit differently than I ordinarily might have. It resulted in a lot of interesting setups, some of which violated a lot of the ’rules’ I grew up with. But again, if the photography gives the audience an added sense of uneasiness, I think that will help the story."
While few directors still approach coverage with the traditional Hollywood master-shot method, "Jan doesn’t shoot overlapping action at all, except for static dialogue scenes, and there are only two or three of those in the film," Lindenlaub explains. "Also, we would rarely do matching setups or cross coverage Jan thinks that’s boring. Basically, we were shooting exactly the way most people try to avoid shooting! For instance, if an actor was to move from point A to point B, we would cut the action into 10 shots, and they would hardly overlap except at the cutting point. Shooting like that was difficult for the actors, and for me as well, because I had to maintain continuity in the lighting over those 10 setups. But Jan was happy working like that. He reasoned, ’Why shoot more if I don’t need it?’" Lindenlaub adds that a single camera was used for about 80 percent for the shoot, with De Bont calling for a B- or C-camera only for complex scenes involving physical effects or stuntwork.
Another aspect of De Bont’s coverage strategy was demonstrated during AC’s visit to The Haunting’s Long Beach sets last January. In one of the scenes that was being filmed, Nell, Theo and Luke enter Hill House for the first time, and are greeted by Dr. Marrow in the vestibule. The three new arrivals are visibly shaken by the scale and ghoulish decor of the mansion, and Marrow leads them through the grand entry room. Nell lingers behind, transfixed as she stares upward at the ceiling.
The sequence was first covered at eye level, with Scott Sakamoto operating the Steadicam. As the action began to unfold, he preceded and then ran parallel to the actors as they moved through the grand entry hall and past a central fountain. This shot would reflect the film’s general, objective point of view.
After a few takes, the crew quickly reset and a Lenny Arm 2 Plus mounted with a Hothead II was wheeled into position. While the lighting was adjusted, a new shot was blocked out: a bird’s-eye view beginning at about 40’ that swooped down through a cluster of practical chandeliers into a close-up on actress Lili Taylor, isolating her from the others. This would represent the film’s second distinct POV, that of Hill House and the twisted soul of Hugh Crain. "This is the first film I’ve done in which such high-angle shots are used to good effect," Lindenlaub attests. "Other directors have suggested them, but there was never a reason to do such shots, because they can actually take the audience out of the story by being so subjective. In this case, Hill House is a major character, and it watches the other characters very closely as they get lost in its maze of rooms. Cutting to that second point of view helps remind the audience that there is danger always looming over everything. These shots were generally done with a crane and a wide lens, usually a 35mm, which distorted things correctly and emphasized camera movement if there was any."
While these shooting tactics might lead some cinematographers to use an overall, "environmental" approach to lighting their sets, this idea did not appeal to Lindenlaub, who states, "I’m not a believer in lighting a room and then letting the actors walk into it. That doesn’t work, especially if you’re doing close-up photography. However, I did sometimes have to do that. Our crane shots were always compromises, and we had many of them. If we began with a 35mm anamorphic lens and then craned down into a medium close-up, there was just no way to have the lights close enough to the actor to be very cosmetic.
"My general lighting approach for the entire film was to be relatively soft on the front of the faces, and then use backlight to give things shape and direction. That method helped quite a bit, given what we were doing with the camera. It would have been interesting to try more dramatic techniques with the lighting— using higher, more frontal lighting and cutting more—but we didn’t have the time to do it. Jan wanted between 18 and 20 setups a day, with one camera, while constantly switching between Steadicam, cranes, normal 35mm cameras on dollies, and VistaVision for effects work. With that many setups, we had about 20 minutes to light each shot, so we ended up doing much more pre-rigging than I normally would."
Phantasmagorical Quarters
Due to space limitations in Long Beach, sets depicting Nell’s dingy apartment, her opulent Hill House bedroom, and a bathroom adjoining Theo’s quarters were constructed at Raleigh Studios. Since the shoot began at Raleigh, the show’s construction and rigging crews, headed up by rigging gaffer Brian Lukas, had seven weeks of ’round-the-clock work time on the larger sets in the dome before the production would arrive there.
The film’s visual effects requirements, overseen by Phil Tippett, also benefitted from this schedule. Many of the film’s most complex shots depict ghostly action taking place in Nell’s bedroom, and given the production’s tight post schedule, shooting these sequences first gave Tippett and his team a head start.
In describing Nell’s bedroom, Lindenlaub says, "One of the most unusual aspects of all of our sets was that every room was circular, usually octagonal, which created some tough lighting situations. I first experienced that type of thing when I lit the Oval Office scenes for Independence Day . It’s hard to cut things properly because the light falls differently on curved wall surfaces."
Gaffer Dino Parks, who first met Lindenlaub in 1989 when the cameraman was in the U.S. to shoot footage for the sci-fi film Moon 44 , and worked with him years later on Red Corner, remarks, "Our first day in Nell’s bedroom was mainly spent problem-solving and finding positions to shoot from. The space had these eight curved palmetto sculptural elements built into its joints, rising to very small ceiling spaces between them. The doors were normal-sized, but small considering the size of the room itself. It was like lighting the inside of a sphere."
The room’s windows offered the only logical lighting source, but "they were placed in a way that we couldn’t light the bed with sidelight," Lindenlaub says. "Also, because of the requirements of the effects crew, the bed’s headboard was positioned too far into the room to bring in any light at a right angle. That meant we had to do a lot of cheating—more than I would have liked."
For daylight scenes, Parks increased the output from the windows by using multiple sources—20Ks, Dinos and Maxi Brutes—coming in from slightly different angles to broaden the light’s spread in the room and pinpoint certain areas. "Unfortunately, that meant the shadows fell differently than they would have if the light had been single-sourced and positioned further away," Lindenlaub says. "The moonlight effects were especially difficult; those shots required us to hang lights inside the set, much closer than they should have been."
Because of the picture’s visual effects requirements, VistaVision cameras were used extensively on this set, and throughout the rest of the film. "The trend now is to use VistaVision for better negative quality, although for a while it seemed that 4-perf was good enough," Lindenlaub confirms. He adds that an additional benefit of using the 8-perf/35mm format for effects work was that he could continue shooting with his primary stock on the show, Kodak’s Vision 500T 5279, instead of switching to a slower, finer-grain stock (although Vision 200T 5274 was used for the film’s few exteriors). Lindenlaub recounts, "Using VistaVision was more cumbersome, but we had two good camera bodies that were flexible—one for Steadicam and a studio model."
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