Did this aura of whiteness have any effect upon the type of film stock that you used?
Not at all. I always used Kodak's 5293 up until its discontinuation. When coupled with my usual choice of Zeiss lenses, I found that this stock could cope with almost any condition thrown at it. One aspect that did concern a lot of people was how I was going to cope with the skin tones of Delroy [Lindo, who plays an angel and is the scene's sole African-American actor] in all that whiteness. It didn't concern me at all because my way of photographing dark skin is to use large areas of soft light that actually get reflected in the skintones — to my eye, this technique gives a very beautiful effect. I knew that there wouldn't be a problem because all this whiteness would automatically be reflected in Delroy's features.
But ironically the situation turned out to be quite the opposite: the rushes showed that since there was no color in the set at all, the only reference point for the human eye was the flesh tones of the Caucasian actors — which had hundreds of shades of pink! Some actors appeared to have a ruddy complexion, looking bright red as if they had been out in the sun too long — and given their all-white outfits, the whole scene looked extremely surreal.
That must have been even more the case in the scene which involved Dan Hedaya and Holly Hunter, because Hedaya's skin is a bit darker.
By comparison, Holly was in fact quite pale, but on film her skin had this beautiful translucence. After seeing these rushes, I had long consultations with the makeup designer Katherine James. We had some local actors come in and model some of the clothes [for the angel uniforms]. At this point, she had them made-up normally, a situation that had produced this rather surreal red look in their skintones. So after doing some research into ways of toning down this redness, Katherine came back with three basic foundation colors with which we experimented: purple-violet, yellow, and green. We had the actors made-up with these different colors — which really weren't that overt — but looked very strong to the naked eye when set amidst the white set. But due to translucence of Holly's skin, she was one of the few Caucasian actors who didn't need any of the green-based make-up.
How did you determine which shading to place on the skintones?
First of all, we had to decide which base to use. We had these three basic foundations with this hint of color in it to see how the actual fleshtones would react on film. Well, it turned it out that the green one gave the most natural look — within the white set — so we continued to experiment with that shade. The green-based foundation worked really well at taking the redness out of the fleshtones. Under normal circumstances, one would never consider doing something like this, but until faced with a situation in which all the reference colors are removed from the set, one never knows what both the eye and brain will compensate for.
