"When the slideshow begins, the practicals switch off to provide a visual reference that the lights have been turned off. The lighting change made this more difficult, because everything had to be lit by the projector. The Italians brought a big, Austrian-made, 2500-watt HMI projector by Parni, the followspot people. It was something I was quite familiar with from doing a lot of rock ’n’ roll projects. It had to be bright enough to outshine whatever else was in the room, because if you start lighting around a screen with an image on it, it starts to milk out. There is a coldness to the projection, and since the room is tungsten, we corrected only a tiny bit with 1/8 CTO. I put some additional HMI bounce on the people in the foreground watching the slideshow [to suggest light reflecting from the screen], using a piece of poly and a 1.2K HMI that was scrimmed down."
Two additional 1.2K HMIs were used on either side just out of frame to throw light onto the audience members who were farther back. Those lights were also gelled with 1/8 CTO. "As Lecter changes slides, the boys on the crew had to stand there with flags [to mimic the projector’s lighting shifts]. Of course, that was a recipe for disaster," he says with a chuckle. "I used two 4-bank 4-foot daylight Kino Flos on some close-up work, but I didn’t click them on and off, because there were long periods when only one slide was up."
Throughout that scene, Hopkins worked a smaller prop projector that sat atop the larger projector. To cast light onto Lecter from the vents, one domestic daylight-blue bulb and a few stick-up lights no bigger than packs of cigarettes were placed around the projector.
A few close-ups were shot from the outside looking in as Lecter prepares to toss Pazzi off the balcony. The rest of the event was to be shot at the actual location. "I was trying to guess what we were going to do two weeks later," Mathieson admits. "It was like shooting a close-up, then a wide shot. Normally one would do the outside first and work in. I was using some 2Ks and 5Ks on the floor through the wrought-iron work of the balcony. I still had to make gobos for my lights to project the bar pattern onto Anthony’s face."
Because those shots were filmed first, Mathieson notes, "there are a few minor continuity fluctuations" in the lighting, but he adds, "I think [the audience] won’t notice because they’ll be so involved with what’s going on in the scene."
The matching nighttime location work outside the Palazzo Vecchio required extensive lighting setups. The Palazzo’s orange sodium-vapor lighting had to be switched off because it was the wrong color, and Mathieson’s crew had to light the palace from scratch with 5Ks and 10Ks raking up the walls to simulate floodlights. "We tried to give it some kind of design by scooping the lights and shaping them to make it look like part of the installation," he details. Nine-lights and 10Ks were positioned farther back to illuminate the upper portion of the palace façade. The Palazzo’s tower was lit with Full CTO-corrected 6K Pars placed on the other side of the square. Dinos placed on lifts simulated moonlight. To light the street, the art department constructed about a dozen large enamel dishes with naked 2K tungsten bulbs that were hung on hooks jutting from the walls of buildings. Five years ago, the city had removed the original light fixtures but left the hooks in place. Placed wherever needed, the bright 2Ks were designed to draw a viewer’s attention away from highlights on the cobblestone streets caused by the Dinos. (For an idea of the sizable area that required lighting, see the diagram on page 45.)
"As the camera moves around," Mathieson expounds, "I was switching lights off and playing with the separation. For Pazzi’s drop from the balcony, he actually falls out of the light. We took the light off him and let it play through to Hannibal on the balcony. The Pazzi character was left in silhouette against the rough-hewn brickwork. We also had one camera underneath him, so as he fell down, you saw his guts spill out. A lot of it fell into the mattebox, [but] those shots didn’t make the final edit!"
Next on the shooting schedule was a company move across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. "It was so wonderful to be in Florence and so dreadful to go to Richmond, Virginia, for various reasons the food, the light and the ice cream," Mathieson laments with a laugh.
Bad weather forced the first unit into its rainy-day alternate location Starling’s basement office earlier than they had planned. The set was literally thrown together in a matter of hours, according to Mathieson. "The crew hung up a milkboard opaque white Perspex with bits of wire, and I put some Kino Flos behind it," the cameraman recalls. "We stuck odd pictures of murdered people and medieval stuff on it the more obscure the better. Lester Dunton, who handled video playback, used his laser recorder/printer to print out pictures of Hannibal from various scenes, and we put those up. They held up really well with the 79 stock; they were the brightest things in the room, but the light dropped off fast, so I’d have to follow the actors around with a 3-by-3 poly bounce.
"On the desks were lots of old fluorescents, which added a bit of green/magenta because we didn’t correct all of the tubes. I quite liked having that on Clarice’s hands while she was opening envelopes; the lighting had a sallow, artificial, nasty basement feel about it. For lighting the side walls, I had sent for a cosmetic aqua-blue gel, but we found a blue bubble wrap that was the same color and we hung a large curtain of that. That provided an emerald-green look that was rather beautiful.
"We used a lot of bat-strips with domestic bulbs. Many times we’d see the ceiling, so we had to put something on a back wall to give it some distance. We’d put a nice row of bulbs on a dimmer on the floor, and the light would just wash up and die away. There were always tables and chairs and clutter in the way to hide them. I don’t think we used anything bigger than a 1K in that room."
Near the end of Hannibal, Starling rescues Lecter from the pigs’ feeding frenzy in a barn on Verger’s estate, and she takes a bullet during the action. Lecter’s captors are devoured by swine, and the doctor nurses Starling back to health with the dubious aid of psychotherapy drugs. He also treats her to an exotic dinner of brain fritters, and joining them at the dinner table is Starling’s nemesis, a drugged but alert Krendler, who unwittingly supplies the fresh brain pieces while maintaining consciousness.
This scene also featured a major lighting shift. Mathieson explains, "The sequence starts out all candlelit and warm an intimate dinner for two and a zombie. Starling is kind of drugged, and the scene unfolds from her point of view. When Lecter pops the top of Krendler’s head off, I change the lighting with dimmers. We take out all of the background, and when that happens, we are in close-ups, which makes the change less apparent. We lose all exterior and interior lights, and the only thing left on is a bright lamp over the table a ring light of Photofloods wrapped up in some spun. It’s skirted off so that the light lands just on the table and the characters have an overexposed, fearsome white toplight, while the rest of the room disappears into darkness. You are descending into Hannibal’s hellhole, and Starling is focused on what’s happening suddenly she’s with this complex, powerful, sinister guy and this other guy who’s becoming a cabbage very quickly.
"It’s a fantastic story about Lecter and Starling," Mathieson concludes. "It was a great film to be asked to do." For completing such a complicated shoot, Mathieson praises his fantastic crew: gaffer Bill O’Leary, key grip Mitch Lillian, A-camera/Steadicam operator Klemens Becker, 1st AC Simon Hume and B-camera operator David Dunlap.
Because the filmmakers didn’t quite buy the ending of Harris’s book and felt audiences wouldn’t either the author helped Ridley Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian conjure up a different ending for the film. In fact, Mathieson says, three endings were filmed: one for Scott, one for De Laurentiis and one for Harris. Mathieson gave AC a few hints as to which ending winds up on the screen, but why spoil that wonderful dinner?