Q&A with director of photography Brian Tufano, BSC
The new Danny Boyle film A Life Less Ordinary is a darkly comedic romantic thriller about Robert (Ewan McGregor), a down-on-his luck Scottish janitor who kidnaps pampered American debutante Celine (Cameron Diaz) only to fall madly in, and out, of love with her. Unbeknownst to the would-be sweethearts, two conniving angels (played by Delroy Lindo and Holly Hunter) have been delivered to Earth by their superior (Dan Hedaya) to carry out a miracle of sorts — the seemingly hopeless task of getting these two social misfits to live happily ever after. In the following interview, director of photography Brian Tufano, BSC (Quadrophenia, Shallow Grave, Trainspotting) details the process by which he achieved the picture's rather bizarre take on the afterlife, which appears as a celestial police station.
In the original script did the "Heaven" scenes read as being in an all-white police precinct?
Upon first reading the script, it appeared to me as though there was no set, scenery, or any type of reality at all — just a completely white space with the actors existing almost in limbo. Danny, however, wanted to set it in the precinct of a New York police station — and he wanted it to be white. I suppose you can describe it as being just the same as life on Earth, only you're supposedly in Heaven, or somewhere where people are being charged with similar offenses as they would be back on Earth.
This, of course, led to many discussions about shades of white, how objects would look when they were painted white, and did everything have to be white. We began a long process of testing materials and what turned out to be dozens of shades of white. We were particularly concerned with the way these different whites reacted with different materials when you couldn't acquire white materials, or if objects had to be painted, dyed or bleached: this was interesting because the white reacted differently depending on the materials and textures.
Did you try to achieve a uniform "whiteness" or did the different textures make this a moot point?
Initially, the idea was to make everything the same shade of white, but it quickly became apparent that this wasn't going to be the case. And in any event, a uniform shade of white ends up giving the various textures a definition all their own. We spent a few days testing different wall coverings, which, in the final print, were not that obvious, simply because we printed the footage lighter than actually photographed to get more of an "unreal" effect.
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