Those other units included four 10’ x 10’ lighting "pod" platforms hung with chain hoists, which allowed them to be easily raised and lowered, depending on the shot. Each pod held an lamp operator, two 20Ks, a 10K and additional lamps, and one was mounted in each of the Great Hall’s corners. "Each pod weighed about 4,000 pounds," Lukas estimates, "which limited how many we could have and how many lamps they could hold."
"The pods gave us a flexible option to put backlight and crosslight into the set and extend whatever was coming through the windows," Lindenlaub says, adding that 80’ and 60’ Condors were then positioned outside the set to light through the set’s eight 9’ x 5’ oblong windows. "For our daylight coming through the windows, we used eight Raybeams [each containing 30 Par lamps with NSP bulbs]. They gave us the best output and the widest spread by the time the light hit the floor in the Great Hall. Because our exteriors were going to be done in England, I didn’t want our daylight to be too hard, so we added some spotty 12-light Maxi Brutes in our Condors to extend and soften the spread on the floor." The sunbeams were generally one to two stops over the basic T4 exposure.
Helping to carry these beams through the Great Hall was a light layer of smoke, which Lindenlaub had initially planned to use throughout the film to add some fill to shadow areas and help with contrast problems. He notes, however, that "it was flu season and everybody was already having respiratory problems, so we cut back on the smoke as much as possible. With smoke, less is always more.
"For our moonlight effect, we instead used LTM 18K HMIs corrected with 3/4 CTO, because by the time we gelled our tungsten lamps 1/2 blue, we couldn’t get enough light out of them. We didn’t want the nights to be too blue, and the 5279 has stronger color saturation, so I felt that a 1/2 correction difference between warm and cold was almost too much for this film. Our warm end of the spectrum was usually around 2900°K and our cold was about 3800°K."
The predominant hues in production designer Eugenio Zanetti’s sets were brown and red, and these colors were especially strong in the Great Hall. "The sets didn’t need any more color coming from the lighting," Lindenlaub says. "That meant the light could be fairly neutral, but reds and browns are hard to light because they absorb so much light. You can’t see it by eye, but it was important to consider."
"The set was so richly decorated and layered with elements that we started to selectively de-emphasize areas by leaving them dark," adds Parks. "That helped keep us from broad-lighting the set, which would have looked flat, while also creating a moodier feel and leading the audience’s eye to where you want it. Walter and I have done that before, but not on this scale; selectively using Raybeams and 20Ks is different from doing it with Par cans or 5Ks."
Ghostly Greenhouse
Hill House’s dilapidated Greenhouse is a study in how sunlight cannot always dispel gloom and doom. With glass walls soaring to heights of more than 40’, the structure’s most prominent feature is a massive spiral staircase that serves as the basis for a key dramatic scene, as a similar set of steps had in the 1963 Haunting.
Driven by the mansion’s spirits, Nell climbs the unstable staircase, which was built in a configuration that resembles the double helix of a DNA strand. Fearful that Nell will throw herself from the top like previous victims of Hill House, Dr. Marrow races upwards to rescue her, as the structure collapses behind him.
Despite offering 270 degrees of floor-to-ceiling "window" space, the Greenhouse proved problematic to illuminate due to its poor positioning in the dome. Unfortunately, half of the hanger’s ample floorspace is taken up by the Batcave set left over from Batman and Robin. Meanwhile, it was believed that the Greenhouse should be attached to the Red Parlor (which itself was attached to the Great Hall) in order to facilitate camera moves between the two spaces.
With the Greenhouse wedged between two huge sets and shoved up against the overarching dome (which limited headroom), there was little space for lights. "It was a perfect example of how not to build a set," Lindenlaub says with a grim smile. "We never did a shot that physically linked the Greenhouse and the Red Parlor. Conceptually, the idea was exciting, but it wasn’t very practical. And because of the lack of space, the big lights we used for a daylight source had to be brought in close."
Parks looks on the bright side, saying, "Fortunately, we had a big opening in the dome so we could light in from one side, and another spot above the Greenhouse where we could angle in a Condor, but it was also only about 15’ from the glass. That at least gave us a three-point lighting scheme."
"Jan and I were both against frosting the glass, because then the room would feel like the inside of a giant ping-pong ball," Lindenlaub details. The glass panels in the Greenhouse were therefore painted and then scraped to look dirty yet transparent, allowing the camera to see just beyond them. "To create our daylight effect, our rigging key grip, ’G’ Dhiensuwana, put a 60’-tall white cyc backing and silks behind the glass, and we front-lit them with cheap tungsten flood lighting. Tungstens weren’t practical to create our directional sun source, though, so we brought in a BeBee light with 15 6K HMI Pars on it, gelled full orange plus 1/4 straw via a 20’ x 30’ frame hanging some distance away from it on another Condor—if we’d put the frame any closer, it would have burned up. That gave us about 3000°K. Behind the BeBee, we had some Condors with LTM 12K and 6K HMI Pars, also gelled but cooler, and then two emergency Condors with lamps that we could move around to fill holes."
Lukas adds that nothing could be hung from the Greenhouse itself, and there was no room or time for a truss system like the one built over the Great Hall. Instead, overhead ambiance was supplied by floating three 8’ x 12’ 8K tungsten Lights Up! balloons above the set’s open ceiling.
To create a moonlight effect, the white cyc was replaced with black material and the balloons were gelled with 1/4 CTB, while the practicals inside the Greenhouse were left very warm. The BeBee and HMI Pars on Condors were warmed with 1/2 CTO. Small warm sources positioned outside the glass helped give the illusion of depth beyond the set walls.
To cover Dr. Marrow as he climbed the failing spiral staircase, the crew deployed a Super Technocrane, which could be extended as actor Liam Neeson traveled upwards. A dimmer-controlled Chinese lantern mounted to the hothead added a bit of fill to Neeson’s face, and would even pan with the camera. "The action scenes around the staircase had the trickiest lighting because we were using the Technocrane and often multiple cameras," Parks says. "In total, we covered the scene from more than 100 different angles, so the lighting had to remain constant over a period of days. Also making it tough was the fact that the stairway’s collapse had to be shot in sequence, meaning that we had to revisit the same camera positions and lighting over and over again, running as many as five cameras at once. There was some high-speed work as well—40, 48, and even 60 fps—so our light also had to carry that."
Spirits Begone
Looking back on the 89 days that he and his crew worked in Hill House, Lindenlaub remembers the vampiric hours—entering the Long Beach dome before dawn, creating perpetual nights, and then leaving after nightfall—and the challenge of doing stage work. "I generally try to light stages to look like locations, but because time was such an issue on this film, having all of those lights burning was a bit of a trap sometimes," he describes. "At certain points I got nervous, and when that happens, a cinematographer will start to play it too safe and maybe overlight things. In retrospect, I wish I’d had five extra minutes on each shot to stand back, study the lighting and figure out how to make it look more natural. Nature never looks overlit; movies do. I think the film turned out well, but everyone always wants to do better. Hopefully, it will also be believable and scary for the audience we’ll see!" n
Additional reporting for this article was provided by Ron Magid.
