To convey the story's epic scope, Armstrong insisted that Oscar and Lucinda be filmed in 2.35:1 anamorphic. "We used two Panaflex GIIs with E-series lenses," Simpson notes. "Bill Ross at Samuelson's in Sydney was fantastic in bringing all the equipment together from London and Los Angeles. He managed to get us a reasonable E-series lens package: 35mm, 40mm, 50mm, 75mm, 155mm and 180mm primes, plus 50-500mm and 40-200mm zooms. We also had a couple of C-series lenses for Steadicam work. We tended to rely on our primes, and we didn't do any true, moving zoom shots. But when we were shooting some of our bigger exterior scenes, we'd have two cameras grabbing stuff, and we did use the zooms [for convenience]."
Despite the fact that all of Simpson's previous features were shot in the spherical format, he and his crew quickly mastered the vagaries of anamorphic after a short trip to the school of hard knocks. "My only anamorphic experience, really, was doing second unit on The Road Warrior," Simpson admits, recalling his experience with cinematographer Dean Semler, ACS. "So this was really my first time using anamorphic, as it was for Gill and our focus puller, first assistant Sally Eccelston, who managed a lot of fantastic 100mm close-ups tracking in on faces. I learned a couple of really interesting lessons at some of the locations in England. The little cottage where Oscar was raised by his father was a great spot; the windows soared out onto the cliff and the bay there. I suppose I was thinking more in spherical terms when I said, 'Yes, it's going to be tight, but we can just shoot here.' We were doing a scene in which these two maids give young Oscar a Christmas cake, and the room was tiny: I could touch the ceiling with my hand and almost reach from wall to wall. We had the wide lens on to get the two-shot of the maids looking at Oscar, so the camera and everybody was jammed against one side and all the furniture was pulled out; we were really crammed together, and we had to get a bit of light in there as well. In hindsight, I think it would have probably been better to use a set it would have given us more flexibility to move the camera and get back a bit. One of the big lessons for me, in making the jump from spherical to anamorphic, was to allow myself a bit more room on some of those very small locations. The reality of using anamorphic lenses having that extra room in the frame and needing to get a decent stop made our interior location shoots really tight and very compromising. We tried to shoot all the interiors at about a T4, because of the usual problems with depth of field inherent to the anamorphic format."
Armstrong and Simpson had planned to use the natural climates of their locations to contrast the coldness of Oscar's England with the warmth of Lucinda's Australia, but reality once again diverged from expectation. "In preproduction, we said, 'Okay, we'll have this wonderful contrast: England has overcast skies and a gloomy look, and when we get to Australia, we'll have the bright Australian light," Simpson recalls. "Bizarrely enough, we actually got the opposite. We had a wonderful summer in England, but in Australia we were fighting the clouds. Lightwise, for a largely location-shot picture, we just didn't have any luck. We had to work hard to make it all happen."
Simpson had intended to sell the contrast via his choice of film stocks: "I hoped to use a bit of Kodak's [EXR] 5245 in Australia for the really bright, zappy sun conditions, but we often didn't get that consistency of sunlight. I ended up using Vision 200T [5274] for the exteriors. We used the Vision 500T [5279] for nearly all the interiors and night shoots, which was great. I'd never used it before. I'd been using 5298, but I wanted to explore the Vision stock, so I did some tests with it in London, and I liked it. Some of the contrast between the countries [in terms of light] happened anyway, but a lot of that was done afterwards, in the lab."
Beyond going halfway around the globe to England and back to Australia, Oscar and Lucinda was shot in so many diverse locations that Armstrong's company was rarely in any one place for long. The logistics threatened to wreak havoc with Simpson's cinematography. "Our photography was a patchwork, just like the book," Simpson observes. "Peter Carey's novel is a pastiche that strings the stories of Oscar and Lucinda together in a huge number of locations. We had a 70-day shoot with probably close to 50 locations, so there was massive movement. We'd be in one location, then it was 'Okay, load the trucks, pack, wrap, we're moving out.' And we'd be somewhere totally new the next day. The important thing was to produce a consistent, safe negative that could be tweaked slightly afterwards in the grading process, given that we had so many different lighting conditions. In Australia, we had one of the worst storms on record and had to pick up shots for the wagon expedition sequence in another location; I didn't want to be mucking around with filters too much."
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