Filmmaking techniques that reflect the medium’s progress since The Silence of the Lambs are evident in a ghastly flashback sequence in Hannibal, which occurs while the disfigured Verger describes his last psychiatric session with Lecter. The good doctor doses Verger with an Angel Dust cocktail and suggests that he cut off his own face and feed it to his pet dogs. The high-flying Verger happily obliges.
An Arriflex 435 was used for this sequence because of its shutter accessibility. Mathieson went so far as to disconnect the camera’s shutter and use his own shutter in front to create a flickering, strobe-like quality at manic speeds such as 3 fps, and when the camera conducts a push-in on Verger’s face, the image streaks. "Using the 435 with Swing-and-Tilt lenses gave the images a soft, old feel," the cinematographer says. "We used all kinds of tricks to get nightmarish flashes rather than sequences of things. We also shot on Video 8, which we rephotographed onto film to give it a home-movie, porno feel."
On the rest of the film, multiple cameras from Joe Dunton Cameras were used whenever possible, with the two primary workhorses being a Moviecam Compact and an Arriflex 535B. Arri IIIs were added for action sequences that required extensive coverage. "Many times we’d use the second camera to set up the second shot so we could leapfrog along," Mathieson notes. "It wasn’t a big, multi-camera film because a lot of the plot involves sleuth work, tapping away on the Internet and investigation. In Florence, the two units could fit in a couple of small vans, which we’d drive to locations. We even rode bicycles, and we’d stop along the way for an ice cream!"
The cinematographer em-ployed an eclectic array of lenses, including fast zooms, Cooke S4s and T2.2 Zeiss Variable Primes. No filters were used, yet each lens had its own, subtle nuances. An Angenieux 10:1 T3.5 zoom and a new Hawk 3:1 150-450mm T2.8 zoom were used, as well as an old Cinespeed 10:1 28-280mm modified by Dunton. "The Cinespeed had a large element on the front that opens up to a T2.5, and it had a great look to it that look might be a bit woolly for some people, but the lens was very fast and slightly longer than the Angenieux," Mathieson notes. "It was good in low light and better on the long end than the wide end.
"We used zooms a lot while shooting with two cameras, since we needed one lens to be much longer than the other to get different framing. The slower Angenieux was a better lens, but it didn’t have the others’ amazing speed. The Variable Primes were good, and Ridley liked those. They were on the A camera, and zooms were on the B camera."
Because of the location difficulties, Mathieson selected fast film stocks that he rated normally. Kodak Vision 500T 5279 was used for all night exteriors and interiors and some difficult day interiors. Vision 250D 5246 was used for daylight exteriors and interiors in Virginia. In elegant and sunny Florence, where production began, EXR 50D 5245 was used for interior work; Mathieson occasionally pushed it when necessary. Technicolor in Los Angeles handled the processing.
"The windows are always shuttered in those rooms in Italy," Mathieson recollects. "I’d open them quite a bit to let this lovely light come in, and Ridley would close them so there would be only these 3- and 6-inch-wide strips of light coming into a room. There we were, in this beautiful palace, and we had six windows with only three inches of light coming through each one! But it gave the room shape. There were a few items placed in the way for example, a white bust that we dragged in front of the window, so there would at least be a focal point on which the light could land."
Employing a strategy he had used on Gladiator, Mathieson floated Leelium balloons in both interiors and exteriors in Florence because of their portability and minimal intrusion. "They have good shape; they’re easy to use, they don’t use much power and they don’t set fire to things," he attests. "You can change quickly between HMI and tungsten lights, and they are dimmable. A lot of the palaces have very high ceilings, so we could tuck balloons up there.
"That’s how I turned Lecter into two characters: playing with warm and white light on his face. I would light the top of his head with a soft, yellow light and throw a brighter stripe down his face. Lecter is always so nice and polite. By using two sources, he almost looks as if he has two faces at once. Is he nice, or is he terrifying? The pallid, yellow light came from a dimmed HMI balloon, while the white 4000° Kelvin light was usually generated by 18K HMIs outside the windows, which I had warmed up to be closer to 3200°K.
"Anthony Hopkins has lines that run up either side of his forehead from his eyebrows," he continues. "They look like devil lines, so I had fun picking those up at other times. I also tried to get a reflection off his eyes or his teeth those very teeth he bites people with."
The shoot in Florence presented Mathieson with the most difficult sequence of the production. Lecter, posing as a candidate for the museum curator position, gives a slideshow lecture to the Studiolo historians inside the Palazzo Vecchio. Investigator Pazzi attends the event in an attempt to set up Lecter’s capture. The lecture proves to have a prescient focus on the pre-Renaissance relationship between avarice and hanging, and once it comes to an end, Pazzi finds himself alone with his prey. But Lecter swiftly turns the tables and guts the investigator. He then hurls him off the balcony, leaving his eviscerated corpse dangling from a noose for all to see.
What made the sequence troublesome for Mathieson was that the interior and exterior portions were filmed in different locations. The Palazzo Vecchio interior was one of only two sets constructed for the picture (the other was Hannibal’s cell), and it was built inside a theatrical warehouse. The interior portion of the sequence had to be shot first, and a dramatic lighting change had to take place when the lecture began. (See lighting diagram on page 47.)
"The thing with that room was that the spectators come in and have a ’fish and goose’ soirée before Lecter starts his slideshow, so the lights have to dim down," Mathieson explains. "That’s an immediate problem because you are starting with a room that is kind of lit, then you have to switch off the lights to go down to an ambient level where it feels dark enough for a slideshow, while still retaining the form of the room. And it wasn’t a bright room to begin with.
"A lot of practicals made of clear, bare bulbs with a cast-iron leaf arrangement around them dotted the arches, and those gave better highlights," he details. "We used a lot of polys [polystyrene] in the ceiling and bounced 1Ks into them, because we were doing very wide shots where we could always see the columns and the ceiling. Sometimes the polys had to be removed and a ceiling piece dropped back in place. There’s a central aisle and two smaller aisles to either side. Depending on which side of the room we were on while looking across the aisles, we would switch off the lights around the camera or perhaps have a slight glow, and we’d light up the far aisle to lend the room some ambience. There were a lot of dimmers. We were trying to light from outside a little bit, but not like daytime. We aimed 20Ks through the windows, but the apertures were very small, so the light only landed on certain small areas.
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