This mood is abruptly broken as the Titanic's hull is ripped open. "At that point, we're suddenly in a very different picture," Carpenter attests. "On some of the sets, like around the grand staircase and other key sections of the ship, we tried to keep that sense of opulence in the lighting until the very end, but the camerawork quickly loses that polite edge and segues into this very kinetic, sometimes violent movement. It's jarring and bumpy, which suggests the panic of the situation."
Recalls Muro, "I hadn't had a chance to read the script before I signed on to do Titanic, but I thought, 'Oh gosh, it's going to be a lot of Godfatheresque beautiful imagery.' But our producer, Jon Landau, said, 'No, no, no, when the ship starts going down, this film is going to rock! The audience needs to be there.'
"On Terminator 2 there was this scene we had covered several different ways: long-lens, dolly and then with the Steadicam. Watching the dailies, Jim was very excited by the Steadicam footage and said, 'Look at this, you're there, you're out of your seat and moving with the actors through the space.' That was the feeling we wanted on Titanic. When the ship starts sinking, we're in there in the middle of it with wide lenses. The ship is going down around us. Jim was very clear about that idea from the very beginning."
Despite his longtime collaboration with Cameron, Muro stops to ponder when asked to dissect the director's shooting style. He remarks, "Jim uses more wide lenses than most directors. On Titanic, we were making a film primarily about a ship; we weren't always shooting just the actors. The ship is a character in this story, so we're shooting a lot of the environment. Jim likes to see each corner of the frame. I remember one comment he made about True Lies that was right on the mark: he wanted to see the money up on the screen. Given that philosophy, we're not going to go really sketchy, especially when we're first establishing an environment. He wants to see half a mile in the distance whenever he can."
As he had on True Lies, Cameron relied heavily on the Vid Stick (a handheld video-transmitting viewfinder system designed by Mike Cameron) to devise shots and relay his intentions to Carpenter, Muro, and the rest of the crew. Muro explains, "With the Vid Stick, the frame isn't the sole domain of the operator. On T2, I'd sometimes see the lighting encroaching on the frame Jim wanted, and it would be like, 'This is beautiful lighting, but do I tell Adam [Greenberg] or Jim that this is a problem?' We ended up using the Steadicam as a tool for lining shots up and setting the frame then using the playback to let everyone see exactly what was going on. Not many directors can handle that, but Jim comes in knowing what he wants 90 percent of the time."
Outlining his general lighting approach on the film, Carpenter says, "Early on, Jim, production designer Peter Lamont and costume designer Debra Scott made decisions in regard to the period style, but there really aren't any set rules about what kind of lighting is or is not appropriate for a period film. Titanic will bear the stamp of Jim Cameron's very blue night lighting. But there's also a lot of amber in this picture, which is quite a departure. With the warmer tones, we sometimes added a bit of a sepia feeling to some of the light, without resorting to using antique suede, coral or tobacco gels. Of course, you will see more color in the scenes with Rose and in the first-class section of the ship, if only in the costumes. That's a natural effect which is dictated by the story. The photographic style was simple, in that I didn't use elaborate filtering systems or other techniques I had experimented with when shooting some screen tests for Jim in Titanic's early preproduction stages."
In preparing for these tests, Carpenter had considered the cinematographic approaches of several other period films, including Howard's End, Heaven's Gate and The Natural. Other influences included paintings by John Singer Sargent and Caravaggio. "We tried flashing the film very severely, but I didn't like what that did to the blacks," Carpenter remembers. "I also tested several filter packages, looking for something that suggested a 'period look.' Knowing that I might be in situations where there would be 12 or 13 cameras rolling at the same time, though, I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and went with a much simpler filter pack. For most of the movie it was just a Tiffen White ProMist. That way, the actors, costumes and scenery would be telling the period story, as opposed to something I was doing with the lens."
Cameron's desire for extensive camera movement led him to suggest that practicals be used throughout the ship sets, which would keep the frame free of offending motion-picture fixtures. As a result, the top decks of the ship set had twice as many practical lamps as the actual Titanic. Carpenter explains, "I know Jim never really thought that practicals could aesthetically light the picture, but his premise was that we should have enough lighting to get a decent exposure just by flipping a switch. That way, when things began breaking loose at the end of the film and we couldn't put a light exactly where we wanted it, we would still be able to get an exposure."
Aiding this lighting approach was the use of the Super 35 format, which would demand far less light than an anamorphic camera system. It's notable that Titanic will be Cameron's first feature in which the Panavision logo appears in the end credits; his previous films had been principally shot with Arriflex or Moviecam gear. The change was in part due to the merger between Panavision and Cameron's custom equipment/R&D company Lightstorm Technologies, as well as the positive experience the director had with Panavision while preparing for his deep-water dives. Carpenter submits, "I alternate between using Panavision and Arriflex, and I had just come off a show on which I'd used Panavision. I really like the Primo primes, but we used the 4:1 and 11:1 Primo zooms quite a bit on Titanic, and I found them to be just as sharp as the primes. The zooms also helped because we were constantly massaging our focal lengths throughout scenes changing from, say, a 27mm on one shot to a 35mm and then to something else for the rest of the coverage.
"We primarily shot with Vision 5279 500T, which I really love. It's a fantastic stock. The blacks are excellent and seem to have a certain luster that I hadn't seen in other Kodak stocks. The 79 is certainly one of the best stocks that I've seen in terms of contrast and shadow detail, and it really holds the bright areas; it's very difficult to blow it out. However, I did expose it very conservatively at an ASA of 320 instead of the recommended 500, and I later took care to avoid any wild changes in the timing that would skew the black areas. These considerations were all related to the Super 35 process, especially the overexposure. You really want to have a meaty negative so that when the optical squeeze is done, you aren't going to see an appreciable increase in grain.
"We wanted to give our focus puller [Mark Jackson] something, so we tried to keep things at T2.8," Carpenter adds. "On True Lies, we'd shoot our interiors at a T2.8/4 split, which gave us plenty to work with. We continued with that on Titanic, and I also tried to give the very large night exteriors at a little more intensity when I could because I was supporting the 11:1 lens, which has a maximum aperture of T2.8. But we still had to build up the stop."
This meant supplementing the practical lights. "One of the biggest challenges of working with Jim is that he uses such a kinetic camera, which can very often be in several places during a take," Carpenter says. "Most of the places where one would put lights are simply taken away. As a solution to that on this film, we often used very mobile lighting which could move in and out during a take. Some of it was even handheld. At the end of the picture, when the camera really gets moving, we'd have an army of electricians acting in concert with the actors and the camera to bring in an eyelight, add some fill, or even pull the key if necessary.
"In very tight situations, running up and down hallways and narrow corridors, we resorted to various configurations of 2' or 4' Kino Flo tubes mounted to fish-poles or sound booms. The 4' wand was called the 'light sabre,' and a pole with two tubes on the end [in a 'T' configuration] was dubbed the 'hammerhead.' Another rig had a daylight tube and a tungsten tube on one pole, so we could switch color temperatures instantly without using gels, or even make the transition in the middle of the shot. We'd have an army of guys with these things, running around and dipping them into position if the camera stopped. Each would then become our key light until the camera started moving again and it had to be yanked away.
"We also made a slight modification on the lightbrush design that Dean Semler [ACS] had come up with [see AC Oct. 1996]. We used a Xenon flashlight instead of a Mag-Lite for our source, and we constructed a slightly larger diffusion box, with thicker paper, for the end of it. We often used these 'mega-lightbrushes' just to get some fill in, moving them in an out of shots. It's funny: we had all of these tremendous lighting resources at our disposal, but the final touches for many shots were often added with a wisp of Kino Flo or a flashlight.
"For example, there's a scene in which Jack and Rose have their first kiss down in the boiler room of the ship. There were steam effects, and the lighting in general was very warm. In one close-up, I'd backlit them with a Mini-Brute that had two layers of full CTO on it. But I wanted the light to wrap around them, so we had an electrician handholding a 2' Kino Flo on a pole just out of frame to the side of the actors. I was standing in front of the actors, directly to the side of the camera, directing him. In my hand, I had a very powerful flashlight, a Laserlight, with a little CTO on it, and I just got it right there in their eyes. The camera position at this point was actually the end of a Steadicam shot, so we were all curled up hiding in various places until the frame was tight enough so that we could reach up and get these smaller lights in there." [Ed. note: This scene has since been deleted from the film.]
The R.M.S. Titanic an 883'-long, 92 1/2'-wide behemoth displacing some 60,000 tons promised to be a difficult object to render realistically onscreen, particularly since extensive sequences involving hundreds of extras would be taking place on her wooden decks. While considering this problem, the production initially floated and torpedoed ideas involving large-scale miniatures and redressed freighters. It was eventually agreed that a nearly full-size (774 1/2') ship stage would be constructed, with the top two decks (including cabins, radio room, and wheelhouse) finished in intricate detail and used as practical sets.
[ continued on page 3 ]