Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC teams with director Tim Burton on SLEEPY HOLLOW, a sumptuous adaptation of Washington Irving’s famous folktale.
The year is 1799, and an evil aura has descended upon the normally peaceful New England hamlet of Sleepy Hollow. Its townsfolk have grown to dread the sound of hoofbeats, which could signal the approach of a strange and terrifying specter: a headless horseman who decapitates anyone heedless enough to cross his path.
Thus begins Washington Irving's classic American folktale The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Penned in 1819, this enduring myth has spooked both children and adults for nearly two centuries. It has also inspired a number of film adaptations; the earliest was Étienne Artaud's silent 1912 version, but the most famous is Disney's 1958 animated cartoon.
That may change with the release of Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, a highly stylized live-action feature that puts a new twist on Irving's fiction. In Burton's take, Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is a dutiful but eccentric constable who uses advanced and somewhat unorthodox methods to solve crimes. His expertise is put to a true test when his superiors send him off to investigate the recent spate of eerie occurrences in Sleepy Hollow. After his arrival, Ichabod falls for the fetching Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci), the daughter of the town's most affluent family. He soon finds himself vying for Katrina's hand with Brom Van Brunt (Casper Van Dien), under the watchful eyes of the young lady's parents, Baltus Van Tassel (Michael Gambon) and Lady Van Tassel (Miranda Richardson).
If ever a story seemed tailor-made for a specific director, Sleepy Hollow was it. Burton fell in love with the script (see interview beginning on page 54), and his creative sensibility seemed ideally suited to the material. Respected throughout the film industry as a truly imaginative visualist, the director sought to imbue his latest picture with the spirit of the classic horror movies he adored during his youth.
Intent on fashioning a Gothic atmosphere leavened with lyrical romanticism, Burton hired Mexican director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC, a rising star in cinematography circles. Known affectionately throughout the industry by his nickname, "Chivo," Lubezki has demonstrated his considerable ability with the strikingly beautiful images and lush lighting he has contributed to the Hollywood films A Little Princess (which earned him both Academy and ASC Award nominations), A Walk in the Clouds, Great Expectations and Meet Joe Black. He has also demonstrated versatility by shooting several comedies, including Reality Bites and The Birdcage, and earned three consecutive Ariel Awards (Mexico's equivalent of the Oscar) for his work on Like Water for Chocolate, Miroslava and Amber.
Lubezki was approached about Sleepy Hollow by the film's producer, Scott Rudin, who was well aware of the cameraman's sterling reputation. "Scott had already called me about jobs a couple of times, but I was always busy on other projects," Lubezki reveals. "I really wanted to work with him, though, because he produces great stuff. This time around, he told me he was doing a project with Tim Burton, and naturally I jumped at the chance.
"My first meeting with Tim was incredible," the cameraman continues. "He told me he liked the script because it was about one guy who lives entirely within his own head, and another guy who doesn't have a head at all. I wasn't sure if that idea would be enough to support a whole movie, but then he went on to describe all of these great 'Burtonian' images. It was really interesting to see how Tim's mind works."
Although Lubezki had gained valuable experience on his previous Hollywood productions, it's safe to say that Sleepy Hollow was the most ambitious undertaking of his career. "It was definitely a large-scale project," he confirms. "The day I met Tim, he said he was going to shoot the movie in upstate New York, at the real place that inspired Washington Irving's story. After he scouted the location, though, he told me, 'Chivo, forget it, we can't shoot it there. I don't want the movie to look completely realistic and naturalistic, like The Crucible.'"
Burton explained to the cinematographer that he wanted Sleepy Hollow to have a stylized, slightly artificial feel that would pay homage to some of his favorite horror films, which included various titles from the Hammer Films archives, as well as Mario Bava's atmospheric 1960 chiller Black Sunday. "I was familiar with the most famous Hammer films, like their Frankenstein and Dracula movies, but I've never been as big a fan of them as Tim is," Lubezki admits. "I find them to be funny and a bit campy, which I don't think Hammer intended them to be. Our biggest frame of reference was Black Sunday. That film is really interesting, because the images are very clear and strong.
"In actuality, I don't think Sleepy Hollow resembles the Hammer films, except in the way that it was made," he maintains. "We did a lot of work on soundstages, and we tried to emulate that 'classic movie' feel. The Hammer films were made that way because the filmmakers on those pictures didn't have a lot of money. We did it because Tim liked the idea of creating a synthetic, pictorial look. Shooting that way also gave us control of the various visual elements, such as the color and contrast, as well as the seasonal elements, like the fog and wind. Tim wanted the whole movie to be in a fall/winter season. We also wanted to control the amount of reality in the movie. It's not a historical reconstruction, it's a fantastic tale. One of the great things about the movie was making it on very stylized sets. We wanted to find our own reality within a completely theatrical world."
Toward that end, production designer Rick Heinrichs (Fargo, The Big Lebowski) worked closely with his old friend Burton to design elaborate sets—both in soundstages at England's Leavesden and Shepperton Studios, and on location in Marlow, a small town just outside London. During the preparation stage, Heinrichs constructed a series of highly detailed miniature models depicting the film's major settings, which include Sleepy Hollow, the spooky Western Woods, a stylized windmill, and various dwellings. "The models helped to capture the texture, the forms, and the colors that we were trying to get in the final sets," Heinrichs says. "They also gave Tim a chance to see the sets in three dimensions before they were actually built, and to work out the logistics of various scenes. A lot of ideas began at that stage of production, because it's much easier to deal with miniatures than full-sized sets. For example, if you want to chop something off a building, you can do it without spending $20,000."
Heinrichs describes the film's architectural style as "colonial expressionism. The look is not historically accurate, it's more a mish-mash of various styles. Since the story of the Headless Horseman takes place in a Dutch farming community in upstate New York, the film has a lot of Dutch architectural touches, but we also built some English Tudor half-timber structures with thatched roofs. We wanted Sleepy Hollow itself to seem like a very insular community, as if the residents and even the buildings were huddled together in fear, almost like a herd of sheep."
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