The production did carry a Cooke 18-100mm zoom lens, but it was used sparingly. "I like using prime lenses because it forces you to move the camera and think about where the camera needs to be," he maintains. "That's the way Joel and Ethan Coen work, and Marty is very much the same way. We really only needed the zoom for this one specific shot that we did, which occurs within a dream sequence that we'd talked about well in advance of the shoot. The camera starts in really close on the Dalai Lama's eyes, and then pulls back and tilts down to reveal him standing amid this array of dead monks in red robes. The camera then begins rising straight up until he's back in frame at full figure, surrounded by this sea of bodies. There was no way of tracking with the 75' Akela crane we used, so in order to get the size we wanted on the Dalai Lama's face at the beginning, and still have a move with a fluid feeling, we used the zoom to widen out at the end of the move. As the camera neared 50' and rising, the perspective shift on the wide end of the lens became very slight; this allowed the effects people at Dream Quest Images to continue the move even further while adding extra bodies to fill the outer edges of the frame."
Hewing to his desire to let real sources do as much work as possible, Deakins shot most of the film at an aperture of T2.2 or 2.5. "If you shoot at 5.6, the candles aren't going to do anything," he says. "We had some big night exteriors where I would have dearly loved a deeper stop, but using all of the HMI lights at my disposal, I could only manage a stop of 2.4 and still keep a thick negative. I always try for a thick negative because I don't like to lose richness in the blacks. I always overexpose a little, and I'm usually printing in the mid-40s.
"During day interiors, I was probably lighting to a 2.8 or even 3.2, and when high-speed work was involved in a scene, I would light the whole scene higher in order to make the matching easier. On exteriors, it really depended upon the kind of depth of field we wanted. In those types of situations, I like to have good depth, because to me that seems to be the more natural way of seeing things. I tended to use a .3 neutral-density filter and shoot at about 8 or 11 for bright exteriors."
The cinematographer exploited Eastman Kodak's Vision 500T 5279 stock for all of his interior and exterior night work; he switched to EXR 5293 for day interiors or dusky exteriors, and EXR 5248 for day exteriors. "The 79 is terrific, because it's so fast; it really is 500 ASA. I began rating the 79 at 400, but I found I could really rate it at 500 and not worry about losing the blacks."
Deakins notes that Kundun relies heavily upon its atmospheric staging and locations. "I think this film is very much a poem rather than a traditional narrative film," he opines. "It's more of a mood piece involving a specific time and place in history, so our main challenge was to capture that. Morocco is not at the same altitude as the spot we'd initially chosen in northern India, and the mountains aren't quite as present; it's also much more arid, which was kind of nice. The Tibetans were constantly saying how much it reminded them of their homeland, and they got a bit tearful at times, which was a pretty good gauge of our location's appropriateness."
Of course, Deakins wasn't alone in his quest to transform Morocco into Tibet; also joining the caravan was expert production designer Dante Ferretti, who did double duty as the film's costume designer. Over the course of his long and illustrious career, Ferretti has earned four Academy Award nominations (Interview With the Vampire, Hamlet, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Scorsese's The Age of Innocence). His impressive list of credits also includes another successful collaboration with Scorsese (Casino), as well as five films with Federico Fellini (The Voice of the Moon, Ginger and Fred, And the Ship Sails On, City of Women and Prova d'Orchestra) and a half-dozen pictures with Pier Paolo Pasolini (120 Days of Sodom, Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales, Oedipus Rex, Decameron and Medea).
Once the production had selected the town of Ouarzazate as its primary location, Ferretti supervised the construction of a second, larger soundstage at the Atlas Film Studio. "It was really just another warehouse," the production designer admits, "but we did all of our interiors there: the Potala Palace, where the Dalai Lama spent his winters; Norbulingka Palace, also known as the 'summer palace'; Dungkhar Monastery, the Throne Room, and so on. The stage we built was 300' by 200', and about 50' high. We also built a passageway to connect it to the smaller existing 'stage'."
Ferretti and his multinational team ("We had Italians, Moroccans, English and Americans in key crew positions") redressed an existing street to resemble the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, using the concrete shells of unfinished houses as facades for their exteriors. The production also hired hundreds of Moroccans to help fashion the entrance to Norbulingka Palace and its walled gardens, which were built on the shore of a large reservoir located 40 minutes from Ouarzazate. Later scenes set within Mao Zedong's Peking headquarters were shot at an existing building in Casablanca, while a field study center in the High Atlas Mountains, some 90 minutes from Marrakech, was converted into the exterior of the Dungkhar Monastery.
Ferretti concedes that his budget was not lavish; accordingly, he spent funds judiciously while still striving for sumptuous sets and costumes. "I did have a very low budget, but Morocco is not a very expensive place," says the designer, who first worked there 30 years ago on Pasolini's Oedipus Rex. "This is the kind of movie where the audience has to believe that they are actually in Tibet, so we built everything to be as real as possible. We used real flagstones for the floors of the sets, and I went to a factory in India to get the types of brocade, silk and fabric normally bought by Tibetan people. To do the construction, we hired a lot of Moroccan carpenters, plasterers and sculptors who did everything the old-fashioned way. Sometimes we had as many as 300 people working at once, but we could afford it because their fees were very low. There would have been no way to do it otherwise, because we had to build the big sets in about 14 weeks."
"Absolute authenticity" was Ferretti's ultimate goal. "I read a lot of books in preparation, and I had very good technical advisors. Namgyal Takla, the widow of the Dalai Lama's brother, helped with the costume research, and I even had some meetings with the Dalai Lama himself; he did some sketches and floor plans for me. I didn't want to make any compromises, and Roger did a good job of shooting and setting up his lights so that we could keep everything authentic."
Deakins admits that the meticulous accuracy of Ferretti's approach came with a price. "Because of the relatively low budget, it was difficult to have optimal setups," he says. "With the sets built in warehouses that passed for stages, there were no rigs, no gantries, and no greenbeds up in the ceiling. The roof just wouldn't support any real weight. I have to say, those sets were the most difficult I've ever dealt with, because of the situation we created. Dante really didn't have the money to construct the sets the way I needed to build roofs that I could work on, platforms I could light from, or structures to which I could rig lighting fixtures. The sets were built as inexpensively as they could be and still look good, but they weren't specifically structured to accommodate a director of photography. I sympathized with Dante, because he just didn't have the money to do it.
"When I got there toward the end of prep, I had the crew strengthen the ceiling in certain places, and put in trusses or wooden beams where I needed to place lights. I didn't see any alternative; we couldn't light those scenes from the floor."
[ continued on page 3 ]