Because Morocco's altitude is not as high as Tibet's, Deakins found himself dealing with the country's dustier atmosphere on exterior shots. "I tried to get rid of that with Pola screens, and I didn't filter anything because I wanted to keep everything as sharp as possible. There isn't a single diffused shot in the film; I did use the odd grad, but not too much."
Deakins did make frequent use of gels on his lights, however. His use of color is illustrated by a scene in which the Dalai Lama moves through a snowswept passageway and enters the Throne Room, which was decorated with a huge golden statue of the Buddha and cylindrical cloth tapestries known as thangas. Within this majestic space, the young boy is officially enthroned.
The passageway in question underwent several changes during the course of production. In addition to serving as the entrance to the Throne Room, it also doubled as a corridor in both the Potala Palace and Dungkhar Monastery. The passage was open to the elements on each side, and also featured three skylights along its 70' length one large opening, and two smaller versions. "If I had been in a studio, I probably would have put a big white bounce cove above the skylight and bounced the light from outside the set walls," Deakins says. "There was no way I could do that on this show, because there was no place for me to rig that kind of setup. I talked about that with the key grip, Tommaso Mele, but it would have involved rigging up this huge construction, and the wind probably would have blown the whole thing down. There were 20 miles of flat desert on either side of our corridor, and every afternoon at three o'clock, 50 mile-an-hour winds would come howling across the desert, blow our lighting frames away, completely trash my rigs and fill the whole corridor with dust! In the end, we erected a more modest grid above the skylights a wooden truss surrounded by some piping. The only way to get the look we wanted was to hang Maxis above the skylights. We had six Maxis over the biggest skylight and two over each of the smaller openings. The Maxis generally had 1/2 CTB on them, and the mixture of this light and the natural daylight that percolated through these openings was further softened and corrected by two layers of 250 diffusion and 1/2 CTO gel.
"For the scene in question, however, I wanted the passageway and the Throne Room to offer sharply contrasting color temperatures. We had a snow effect coming from overhead in the passageway, and the floor was covered with piles of the stuff. For that part of the sequence, I created a cooler look by removing the 1/2 CTO gel on the skylights. The mixture of 1/2 blued tungsten and raw daylight from above looked great on the fake white snow, and heightened the dawn effect."
The Throne Room, by contrast, was lit to be completely warm. When the Dalai Lama reaches this area, he discovers a crowd waiting to witness his coronation. "The people were sitting on benches, facing the Buddha," Deakins recalls. "It was going to be hard to light the set from below, and the roof of our 'stage' wouldn't hold very much weight. I rigged up a bunch of lightweight 10Ks on dimmers, just hoping the room could take them. These lamps were bounced off some 8' by 8' gold reflectors positioned in the rafters. Each lamp carried 1/4 CTO and was dimmed to about 60 percent to create a warm, golden look. I also positioned gag lights behind butter lamps on the floor 1Ks or 500-watt bulbs dimmed down to around 2200°K.
"Of course, we could have lit everything straight tungsten and printed warmer, but I never think that really works as well. When you do something like that, you're exposing the emulsion in the wrong balance. Attempting to change that balance in printing will only alter the contrast and grain in the final print.
"When I'm told about a set, I draw it out and sort of sketch in what I think I should do," he adds. "On that particular set, I thought I was going to use a direct-light effect, but when I looked at the actual space, I decided that I wanted it to be a bit softer, so I wound up bouncing all of my lights."
Deakins says that the nature of the shoot, and its authentic sets, led the filmmakers to use Steadicam more often than expected. Although Scorsese has used this device sparingly in the past (mainly for meticulously staged sequences like the bravura tour of the Copacabana club in GoodFellas), he and Deakins decided to take advantage of English operator Peter Cavaciuti's considerable expertise. "Prior to shooting, when Marty and I went through the script and talked about camera moves, there were only two preplanned Steadicam shots. I had worked with Peter on The Secret Garden, though, and I knew he was a great operator; I had a feeling we'd be using him more on the actual shoot. We eventually worked out that he would be there the whole time, and we also negotiated to have his equipment there all the time. Once Marty saw how good Peter was, he gained an enormous amount of confidence in him. The moves didn't have the floaty feeling that Marty doesn't like; when Peter ends a move, it's rock-solid.
"The sets, by their nature, were built to look very real," he points out. "The floors were stone; we couldn't do the old trick of pulling the rails away as the camera passed by, because there was no place for the people to get out of the way in these narrow corridors. Quite often, the only way we could do a sequence was with the Steadicam and the Moviecam SL."
The value of the Steadicam is illustrated in a key scene near the end of the film, when the Lord Chamberlain informs the Dalai Lama that foreign governments have refused to support Tibet as an independent nation, in effect siding with China. The sequence was blocked out as a Steadicam shot that would move backwards as the two characters walked through a long, winding corridor and into a study, where other Tibetan noblemen awaited them. "That sequence was initially broken down into a lot of different shots, some involving the Steadi-cam," Deakins notes, "but we wound up doing one Steadicam shot walking backwards in front of the guys, and another little piece of Steadicam over their shoulders as an intercut.
"We pre-lit the entire corridor for that," he explains. "There were some small side windows in this monastery set, and we also had several skylights to work with. The whole thing was lit in this soft, gray, cool and naturalistic way. I didn't use a lot on the floor at all, although I occasionally put some butter lamps down there with gag lights around them. We used big soft sources like Maxi-Brutes for the overall lighting through the windows. You need a big soft light outside the window so it wraps through the window; if you put a small unit directly through the window, you'll just get a shaft of light in one spot. Outside the windows I'd have a 20' by 20' light gridcloth with a row of Maxis going through it. The scene started off in darkness, lit just by butter lamps, and then the actors went through this side light from a little terrace area, which became a backlight as the camera pulled back. Next, they passed beneath a little skylight; we had some Maxi-Brutes aimed down through a gridcloth and then through another, lower piece of diffusion to provide a really soft toplight. After moving down some steps, the actors came into this much bigger and softer toplight source. Ironically, it can sometimes take longer to set up if you're trying to do something naturalistic, because you have to use more light! You're not trying to be stylized with fewer units and some hard shadows."
For other scenes designed to simulate the young Dalai Lama's POV, the Steadicam was used in low-angle mode. "A lot of the film is seen from the child's point of view. We did a lot of the earlier scenes with our main camera, an Arri 535B, at a really low angle, and we also followed him quite a bit with the Steadicam. We used other motion systems to get that effect as well. There's a big scene where the boy is pronounced to be the new Dalai Lama in this outdoor ceremony under a tent. All of the people from the surrounding countryside have come to see him, and he walks down this red carpet with rows of people along either side. Marty wanted one POV shot that started on the blue sky and then tilted down past the tent and this throne, which are glimpsed in the distance. The shot continues down until we see the kid's feet walking along the carpet, and then it tilts back up again to reveal these people looking at him. We had the camera offset on a little PowerPod remote head on an Aerocrane jib arm, and we used a slightly wider lens to catch all of the people in the frame."
To lend a dreamlike effect to certain scenes involving the Dalai Lama's point of view, Deakins executed a number of old-fashioned speed/aperture changes with his camera of choice, the Arri 535B. "It's harder to do than a shutter change, but I liked the idea of doing those shots with a stop change," he says. "If you change the running speed of a 535A, the shutter will change to compensate the exposure, and it doesn't affect the depth of field; when you change the aperture, it does. I like slow motion where you've got a very shallow depth of field, because it sort of isolates the thing that's slow in the frame."
Reflecting upon Kundun's overall visual style, Deakins notes, "This picture really isn't an epic; it's more of an intimate look at the life of an extraordinary person. During the prep period, Marty and I talked about The Last Emperor a bit, and how it was so vast and overpowering. I hope that our film is somehow more naturalistic and earthy. The story is really about the child, and it's seen primarily from his point of view. We generally didn't show much that he didn't experience firsthand. The invasion of Lhasa, for example, is mostly heard in the distance; we do have some shots of Chinese soldiers marching along, but that's it. As the Dalai Lama grows older, he becomes more aware of the political situation around him.
"In general, I used a lot of sidelight and toplight on this picture," he adds. "I started off thinking about creating shafts of sunlight through windows, but quite honestly, it was just impractical. Instead, I chose specific scenes that I would light hard; there are some scenes where people are sitting and talking amid this light that is just blasting in. Overall, though, the lighting is less showy and more subdued.
"Working on this show reminded me of some of the documentaries I've worked on," concludes Deakins, whose work on Kundun recently earned him awards for Best Cinematography from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Boston Society of Film Critics. "It was a bit like camping: we just had to make sure we took everything we were going to need! We had a complicated schedule, difficult sets, and a remote location. But in the end, I'm very pleased with what we accomplished."
