David Lean, one of Armstrong's favorite directors, once observed, "Filmmaking is the last of the great traveling circuses." She agrees. "Because this was a terribly complicated shoot, my first assistant used to say that we were doing a 'period road movie.' We were really never anywhere for more than three days except at the end of the shoot, when we were on the river. Even in Sydney, everything was in a different period house, so every day we were in a new place that was being dressed."
Adds Simpson, "We were certainly a circus, and we traveled a lot. It was a big picture with a lot of locations. When we were in London and mainly in Australia, we used National Trust and National Heritage buildings. They were beautiful architectural pieces with wonderful furniture, so we had to be very respectful. In most cases, we were not allowed to paint walls or rig wall-stretchers or any of the normal things you'd do in practical locations. We also had this group in many of the National Trust places that I called 'the Furniture Fascists,' who glowered at us any time we came near one of their pieces. Their job was to protect things, of course, but it made our work very difficult. We had wonderful scenes where we were rigging lights off huge scaffolding poles, getting very close to incredibly expensive chandeliers. These furniture guys were dying, because they were afraid we were going to break things. We didn't, though; we were very good."
The wayward paths of Oscar and Lucinda finally cross aboard a regal sailing ship, the Leviathan, when Lucinda asks the young seminarian to pray for her. Oscar braves his all-consuming fear of water to make the journey up to her stateroom, and is rewarded when Lucinda confesses that she needs absolution for her unquenchable addiction to gambling. Oscar is overjoyed to find a fellow bettor and kindred spirit; throwing salvation to the wind, the two soulmates immediately crack open a deck of cards. This funny, touching scene is enhanced by Simpson's decision to render it in contrasting colors, juxtapositioning the cool blue of the stateroom walls with warm lamplight. He notes, "One of the themes of the film is Oscar's fear of water, so the color blue was a very strong thematic element in Luciana Arrighi's sets. We didn't want to muck it up by adding too warm a light, but we did want to suggest that the characters were heading toward the warmth of Australia. In Little Women, we had background colors that really worked with warm light, and we pushed the warmth a lot; here, we were going for a bolder, more contemporary look, and we used purer colors in the background. Too much warmth would've muddied them. On Little Women, I used a package of half CTO and a bit of yellow and some dimming to create warmth, whereas on Oscar and Lucinda I used a tungsten package and balanced the color temperature between the warmth of the 216 diffusion gel and a slight dimming of the lights. We sometimes double-framed the lights with 216 and 250 to make them even softer. So the difference between Oscar and Lucinda and Little Women was quite radical in terms of how much warmth we put on the light sources. The scene on the ship is a very funny and pivotal one, where these two characters connect through the passion of their addiction, and their love for each other begins. I really responded to it."
Further complicating Simpson and Armstrong's task was the fact that this pivotal dramatic scene, although far from an action setpiece, was loaded with movement. As Oscar and Lucinda giddily gamble, the sea grows wilder, tossing the ship around like a bathtub toy. "That's all there in Carey's book; those are the scenes you wonder if you're ever going to pull off," Armstrong admits. "We'd used that as an audition scene, so when the day came to shoot it, the poor actors had tested with it and Ralph had read it with other girls we had auditioned. Everyone was nervous about doing it for real; we were worrying, 'Oh God, this is it. Will we ever get the same magic?' Ultimately, though, Ralph and Cate gave fantastic performances."
The "seasick" effect was achieved by building the stateroom set on a gimbal, which enabled it to rock and roll violently at a nod from the director. "That was one of our few sets," Simpson says. "Ray Brown, our key grip, brought his big crane in with a camera remote system so the camera could be locked off and the set would rock around it. We had some very soft ambient light locked off to a grid above, and we also had specific lights directly on the set that were locked down so they wouldn't rattle and roll as they rocked with the set. It was all quite tricky, because the degree of arc got quite radical. We'd stand back from it and look at what we'd created, and it was just bizarre; we had all of the equipment and lights hanging off poles and scaffolding, and the whole thing looked like a funride gone mad. It was extraordinary."
That chance meeting between the two gamblers results in a life-or-death wager when Oscar proposes that Lucinda's glassworks should produce a glass church, which he will shepherd over land and water from Sydney to its ultimate destination: the small town of Bellingham. During this fateful voyage, the film's themes of water and glass, which Armstrong has so delicately woven into her tale by showing off Oscar's collection of buttons and Lucinda's paperweights, take center stage. "Those visual metaphors of water and glass are written into the original story; they're not something we've added," Armstrong states. "From the moment I began working on the film, the first question anyone asked me was, 'How are you going to do the church?' That was such a key image in the book that we knew it was one of those things we were obliged to live up to."
Transforming the glass church from an idea in Carey's novel into something that could be photographed was a daunting task. "During preproduction, we had all sorts of discussions about special effects and CGI and models and mattes," Armstrong relates. "As it turned out, all of the best computer animation people said that doing mattes with glass and water is the hardest thing of all, so they advised us that we really were best off actually shooting it for real."
But shooting for real created its own set of demands: not only did the locations for the climactic voyage have to be scenic, the river had to be able to accommodate the massive church and barge, plus the camera boat. "Oh God, you could almost write a book on the story of us getting to photograph that thing," Simpson says, groaning. "Finding the location took forever months and months of scouring rivers. Gill's brief was quite specific. She wanted 360-degree views with no sign of human habitation, with mountains at one end and not at the other."
[ continued on page 4 ]