The cinematographer says that the Kundun shoot required a very large lighting package. He initially planned to leapfrog his lights from one set to another, but modified this strategy to accommodate a schedule which to some extent reflected the chronology of the script. This meant that the composite Potala set stood for a large part of the schedule, while the appropriate lighting fixtures remained rigged and ready for shooting. Deakins explains, "I didn't want to be fussing with the lights while the actors were there preparing for a scene. On most of the sets, there were only minimal lighting changes from shot to shot, because I pre-lit the sets using the platforms that had been prepped beforehand.
"I did have a large lighting package, but it wasn't because I needed a lot of units on any particular set in many cases, I simply couldn't de-rig one array of lights and get it onto the next set in time to shoot."
Deakins felt that it would be better and more cost-effective to use tungsten sources on the sets, while maintaining a separate HMI kit for exterior work, night work and the few location interiors. He ordered his basic package from Cartocci in Rome, and made sure to schedule in the two-week delivery time to Ouarzazate. "I wanted to have the equipment in Morocco two weeks before we started shooting so we could do our pre-lights," he notes. "Working off of Dante's plans, I came up with an overall lighting package, and I added some extra gear to cover any problems, which I knew we'd encounter at some point."
The complete lighting package for the Atlas Film Studio stage work included approximately 58 Maxi-Brutes, 32 blondes, 24 10Ks and two 20Ks. "It was probably even more," Deakins hedges, "and that was just for the stages. We mounted 20 of the Maxis on the wall of our Potala courtyard set, and they stayed there for 10 weeks. We also had to have two generators. I couldn't have gone much further with the lighting package, because I wouldn't have had the generating capacity. At one point, we had everything burning, and both of the generators were in trouble! It was right on the edge of what they could handle, and I was still only shooting at T2.5."
Depending on the scene at hand, Deakins altered his lighting approach for stagebound setups to reflect the appropriate dramatic tone. "The first time we see the Tibetan assembly room is during a sequence in which the young Dalai Lama is walking around the monastery and checking things out," he relates. "He hears these voices from the assembly room, and when he looks in he sees all of these older men discussing the fate of Tibet in this huge, amazing room. I wanted our first view of the room to be really gray and kind of mysterious, so we used a soft, cool toplight; to get a soft wrap, I installed wide-flood bulbs in a number of Maxi-Brutes. We then bounced these lights off large Griffolyns which we tied to the roof rafters of the 'stage.' This light was then softened and cut as it entered the ceiling of the set itself, only 10' below. It was all a bit of a struggle; I must have lit that particular scene five times before achieving something that I was happy with.
"For a later scene in which the Dalai Lama is meeting with a Chinese general in a French-European-style living room, I wanted more of a low, direct sunlight look. I was basically using the same units, Maxi-Brutes, but I switched to narrow-beam spot bulbs to obtain a harsher look. A light brushed-silk diffusion erased the multi-shadow problem caused by the bulb array. If I was using a Maxi for a different kind of situation bouncing light off a Griffolyn or something I would occasionally install medium-flood bulbs."
The scarcity of state-of-the-art equipment made the film's larger night shoots a bit problematic particularly a key sequence in which the disguised Dalai Lama leaves his palace for the last time and wends his way through a throng of people beyond the gates of an ornamental garden. "There are no lifts or Condors in Morocco, and you can't have a Musco light with the type of budget we had," Deakins submits. "The only way to do that shot was to build a 60' tower rig, partly out of scaffolding we managed to find in Casablanca. All of that material had to be brought 400 miles from the coast to Ouarzazate. It took the crew two weeks to build the rig; there was no way it was going to move once it was up, so we basically had to light this entire series of shots with one high source.
"We built the tower in a very specific spot so it would be hidden behind the garden wall when the camera panned, tracked and craned around. I think we had six 12K HMIs up there to create a blue 'moonlight' effect. Those were not corrected at all, as I was going for a more colorful look than I normally would at night. We also placed some little oil lamps actually 1K bulbs on dimmers beneath the archway to add some contrasting color to the shots as the Dalai Lama and his companions went through the gate.
"We had an original HMI package of four 12K and four 6K Pars, but for the night shoots we had to bring in two extra lamps from Rome and a couple more 12Ks from this little commercial company in Casablanca. After we finished each night, we had a day crew move everything lights, generators and cables to the next location so that we could maximize our shooting time."
Smaller tower rigs were used for a subsequent nighttime sequence in which the Dalai Lama departs from Lhasa in a small boat. "We were shooting on an open lake, but it was meant to be a broad river in the story, so I tried to find a spot where I could have the feeling of a far bank. We found a place where the landscape curved so I could have a headland, about three-quarters of a mile distant, in the back of the shot.
"I was under some restrictions lighting-wise, because we were shooting on a dirt path by a lake; I didn't have a crane, and we couldn't build any large towers down there. Besides, all of the scaffolding we could find in Morocco was already in use at the palace location. When I first thought about lighting that scene, I was going to put all of my lights on a hill and just have a big wash. But then I thought, 'That's going to be one hard source, and I'm still going to have to fill faces as I move the camera.' There were quite a lot of moving shots, and a lot of shots to do [in general], so we didn't really have the time to mess about. I lit the background with Par lights aimed from the top of a hill, which gave us this gray wash on the far hillside. To light the characters in the boats and on this nearby jetty, I came up with an idea. There was one area of beach that I didn't have to have in the frame, so I put up four little 10' towers, each with an 8' by 8' reflector on top. Each tower had a 12K or a 6K HMIPar underneath it. Depending on where the camera was, I could line these reflectors up quite quickly to give a somewhat soft directional source. I was shooting wide open at about T2.1 with one of the slower, 32mm Zeiss lenses. It actually worked very well. Of course, if it had been windy I think I'd have been screwed!"
Deakins notes that the scene was later enhanced by digital artists at Dream Quest Images, who added mountains in the background and stars in the sky. "I looked at some of the test composites, and they were pretty good," he says. "The trick was to match the lighting of the background plate to my lighting in the foreground. Trouble was, I couldn't light the foreground with the same quality of light that could be created with the freedom of the computer. The computer-generated background looked softer and better than my foreground, and the difference between the two was a giveaway. To even it out, they had to make the lighting in the background a little more directional and from the side, rather than the beautiful soft moonlight that they started off with.
"There was no way we could have lent that scene a feel of the distant mountains before this sort of technology came along," he maintains. "We could have done a static bluescreen-type shot, but we'd have been very restricted. Digital technology has really freed us up; my only regret at this time is that we were unable to adjust all of the shots within that scene."
Thankfully, the film's daylight exteriors proved to be a bit less labor-intensive. "We basically shot with very hot light," Deakins says. "I suppose we made an advantage of the fact that we were shooting in midday sun; every day was hot and bright. We really didn't shoot anything in the morning or evening; I think low, golden sunlight tends to be a bit overused. We used the bright exterior light as a nice contrast to the interiors of these monasteries, which are naturally very dark."
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