For Queen and Country
by Michele Lowery
In an era rife with religious persecutions, royal court conspiracies and factional fighting, Elizabeth follows one woman's journey from naiv� maiden to monarchical maven. This dark period piece is marked by beautiful, often brutal imagery, and is the first feature which Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur (Masoom, Mr. India, Bandit Queen) has helmed in the Western world. In terms of directorial style, Kapur says that he had to decide whether or not to "become English, in the way that [Chinese filmmaker] Ang Lee did when he made Sense and Sensibility, or to make Elizabeth through the eye of my own culture, which is very Eastern." Out of consideration for the turbulent and savage incidents that led to Elizabeth Tudor's ascension to the throne in 1558, Kapur opted for an Eastern aesthetic. "By being English, I would have had to seize the melodrama and soften it. By being Eastern, I could play up the melodrama in its colors, light, behavior patterns, storytelling and sense of chaos — I could make it a little mythic."
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| Queen Elizabeth I (Cate Blanchett) enters the royal court, backed by her ladies-in-waiting. |
Even though they were protected by fireproof suits, the actors had to withstand considerable discomfort amid an inferno of gas-controlled flames. Cinematographer Remi Adefarasin, BSC recalls, "The heat was so hot that in the rushes you could actually see steam rising from the costumes. On one downward looking shot, the flames actually got so high that the filter on the camera cracked. In the last shot there are three stuntmen wearing [fire-retardant] masks over their heads to allow them to be totally engulfed in flames. We had to digitally enhance the flames to mask the shape of their heads and make it look as if they were really frying."
Adefarasin, whose credits include Truly Madly Deeply, Sliding Doors, Hollow Reed, the upcoming Eugene Onegin and second unit on The English Patient, began his career in 1968 working for the BBC. He earned two BAFTA nominations for his work on the BBC productions Christabel and Memento Mori. The cameraman is currently on location in Turkey shooting a new version of The Arabian Nights.
Beyond his appreciation for Adefarasin's cinematographic abilities, Kapur found that he and his cameraman shared the same sense of the tale's emotional philosophy. "The first time I met Remi," the director remembers, "I told him about the pains of being Elizabeth, and he actually sat down and cried. On that day, I decided that he would be my director of photography."
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| Her highness enjoys the affections of Lord Robert Dudley (Joseph Fiennes), a would-be suitor who succumbs to treachery. |
A co-conspirator in this cloak-and-dagger visual style is Adefarasin's shady lighting design: faces are cast in shadow; faint firelight hails from torches and candles; and blown-out sunlight streams from windows set within blackened stone walls. "We had flame bars powered by propane gas fixed to the wall with little invisible pipes," notes Adefarasin. "For my candlelight, we used large sources that we dimmed down. We also used varying amounts of CTO to make the film lighting the exact same color as the candle flames — sometimes using nearly a full CTO on a tungsten light. [A flicker effect] is not very realistic when you have more than one source. If you had only one candle lighting a room and there was a draft, then the light would flicker. But the light doesn't really flicker if you have five or six candles. Any flicker that you see actually comes from real flames that are in or just out of shot."
As a blueprint for lighting Elizabeth, the director drew Adefarasin's eye to a mode of contrast conceived by 17th- century artist Rembrandt. The Dutch painter would often brighten the middle of a canvas for dramatic intent, letting surrounding areas gradually fade into blackness. Explains Kapur, "Your eye is focused on the center, which is very dramatically lit. But moving away from the center, you find yourself going into areas of darkness and infinity. With that infinite area, Rembrandt is saying that perhaps God is in control and human beings are not. Of course, the lighting patterns change as Elizabeth overcomes the conspiracy. And at the end [during her coronation, when she's clad in couture of pure white], she emerges out of bright light."
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| The uncrowned Elizabeth undergoes interrogation by her crazed half-sister, Queen Mary Tudor (Kathy Burke). |
Besides shooting through fabrics, Adefarasin also softened the sheen emanating from fixtures with such clothing materials as wool, silk, lingerie and hand-made lace. "Very simply, what it does is to make the shot look not lit — it's like breaking up a steady stream of light into different particles, so that light and textures cross people's faces. I propped up or draped the fabric on Century stands and flags. That cuts the light from the walls so that the eye [of the viewer] goes to the character rather than a detail in the wall. I always use silks when I want to make people — especially women — look softer. It's a more practical material because tracing paper rattles and crackles."
Shooting with Arriflex 435 ESand 535 cameras, Adefarasin employed two Cooke zoom lenses (the 5:1 and 10:1), but found his Zeiss T1.3 Superspeed primes to be most useful because of the way they accentuated the soft quality of his lighting. A penchant for realism also extended to the types of filters Adefarasin used — 1/8 and 1/4 Black ProMists and an 1/8, 1/4 and 1/2 Harrison Double Fogs. However, the cinematographer still feels that the most effective filter is a thinned-out layer of smoke, which he used to differentiate objects in larger spaces (stages or locations), particularly Durham Cathedral. "It gives an effect better than any filter," Adefarasin says. "Objects close to camera are quite defined, and blacks hues become really black. But when an object is 10 feet away, the blacks are very light and have a slight haze to them; at 30 feet away, the blacks have a mid-gray tone. The smoke gives your eye a good indication of depth in the room — you can judge how far away objects are by how gray they appear."
Scenes requiring a harsher tone — such as Elizabeth's interrogation in the Tower of London after she's been arrested for treason — were shot without filtration. The inquisition cell itself was quite small, even after production designer John Myhre (Lawn Dogs, Anna Karenina) elongated it as much possible; he designed it around a circular track which left barely 18 inches to spare, not even enough room for the director's presence. Offers Adefarasin, "Those scenes were shot to be very annoying. We used circular tracks in both directions — sometimes on one person, or panning from one person to another. I deliberately overexposed the windows so that when the camera tracked past one — the panes were all symbolically cross-shaped — the light just bled into the lens and burned out. "
For a bio-pic on one of the most revered monarchs in British history, traditionalists might find the pairing of an Indian director with a black British cameraman to be somewhat unconventional. Quite to the contrary, Kapur felt that fusing an East-meets-West aesthetic was an appropriate creative choice in depicting the life of Queen Elizabeth the First. Says Kapur, "I was attracted to this character because she was so far away from me in terms of time and culture. I knew that I would have to make very bold creative decisions to bring her closer to me. The bridge I had to build between us was long, but also very adventurous. It was about adapting to theories of chaos rather than being controlled by preconceived notions."