Not surprisingly, the filmmakers suffered their biggest location headaches at Texas Stadium in Dallas, the site of the film’s climactic game. The oddly-designed domed stadium has an open top, resulting in brutally harsh contrasts of sun and shade during the daytime. “That dome was supposedly designed so that God can look down on his team,” Totino chuckles. “It’s a Dallas thing — the people there are very proud of the Cowboys. We joked about how we had to cover the hole so God couldn’t watch what Oliver was doing!”
Hoping to avoid the supremely frustrating scenario of collecting shots on the rare occasions during the day when the field was evenly lit, Totino and his crew decided to attempt the near-impossible: close the dome and light the vast interior themselves. “The hole looks a lot smaller on paper than it does in reality,” he admits. “We didn’t have much rigging time, but we got some structural engineers involved and decided to cover up the hole with baffled blacks so that air could come through. It was all supported on its own, rather than from the stadium. We were only able to close about a third of the stadium, and we erected two huge 100' by 150' lighting trusses, each of which held 98 space lights. We had a bit of daylight mixed with tungsten light, which gave the scenes a good look, but which was difficult to time. We shot in April, which was the only time of the year to avoid the huge light gap in there. Oliver also wanted to avoid shooting night scenes in Texas Stadium. It was really tough — we still had to work around when the sun was on the field, and as we got later into the month, the sun creeped onto the field even more. I avoided direct light at all costs. It was the only way for Oliver to have any continuity.”
Totino was careful to visually delineate the Sharks’ locker room, built by Kempster deep within the recesses of the old Orange Bowl, from the colder feel of the modern stadiums. “Victor came up with a very 1930s/’40s, industrial stadium interior,” he details. “He left a slight sense that the locker room had been updated since that time, that maybe the lockers had been changed. The newer stadiums were very utilitarian, and I kept them that way using top-lit fluorescents. I felt it was important to give those stadiums a realistic feel. But the Sharks’ locker room was different. I wanted it to weigh heavily on the audience. We had 3' incandescent tubes called Linestra lights along the walls and down the hallway. They’re very warm and soft units, with a color temperature of about 2800� Kelvin. I mixed them with very heavy downlighting and some Kino Flos. It made for an interesting, heavy vibe. The Sharks also wore dark uniforms that really soaked up the light.”
The Vince Lombardi-like character of Coach D’Amato is philosophically at odds with the “sharklike” individualists all around him, so Totino decided to augment that theme with a special lighting strategy for Al Pacino. “I wanted the audience to perhaps relate more to Al’s character and feel a closeness to him,” he says. “I think using warm light tends to bring viewers closer to a character. For a lot of Al’s scenes I used just Linestra bulbs, which are already warm to begin with. Sometimes I’d add a 1/8 or 1/4 CTO, depending on what light I was using.
“For D’Amato’s home, we shot in a very interesting house in Fort Lauderdale that was built with old beams from an 18th-century factory in the Carolinas. It had a Frank Lloyd Wright feeling but with a modern, tropical vibe. There were windows everywhere that were very green. We couldn’t really take out the windows, so it became a bit of an issue. I relied a lot on Joe Violante of Technicolor in New York, who did our dailies. He worked very hard to keep up with the amount of film we sent through there, and some of its inconsistencies.”
Many of these inconsistencies were the direct result of the extremely concentrated production schedule, which called for more than a few thorny night-for-day and day-for-night situations. “We actually used [Miami Dolphins quarterback] Dan Marino’s house as [Sharks quarterback] Cap Rooney’s house in the film,” Totino says. “In one scene, D’Amato visits Rooney while he’s barbequing with his kids. They take a walk around his veranda and end up next to a little lake at his house. We did a lot of wide shots, but then it got dark and we still had two or three pages of dialogue to do. The problem was making it match. I ended up using a huge construction crane with a 60' by 60' muslin hanging from the driveway above this pond; we bounced 18Ks up into it to create an ambient feeling. I used another 18K as the sun source, and other 18Ks and 4K Pars to add depth to the vegetation behind them. We were covering it from different angles, but that approach worked out pretty well.”
Totino’s resourcefulness was tested during the very first week of principal photography, when the whole cast was gathered for a scene involving a mayoral benefit at the nine-acre Sky Mansion in the Coconut Grove section of Miami. “The key grip, Doug Cowden, and his crew only had three nights to rig around the mansion, and we only had permission to shoot there for three nights,” the cameraman relates. “We finally did the last scene at dawn after the final night, so we had to shoot dawn-for-dusk! It was that down-to-the-wire. I couldn’t actually rig inside the mansion, so I floated round helium balloons with four 1K tungsten bulbs inside of them, and lit the whole party from above. The balloons were white, but we kept them on dimmers to keep them a bit warm. They have an effect that’s similar to Chinese lanterns.”
While the focus pullers were constantly challenged during the lightning-quick football scenes, their skills were put to perhaps their toughest test during a demanding night dialogue scene outside the Sky Mansion. “James Woods and Matthew Modine, who play the team doctors, have a long dialogue scene during which they walk away from the mansion,” Totino details. “As they proceed, the mansion gradually fades into the background. I held a soft Chimera light on a pole as I walked with the actors, because I literally didn’t trust anyone else to keep the light at the right distance. We were wide open at T2 on the scene. We started the scene using a 40mm and a 75mm on a Steadicam. Then Oliver said, ‘Gimme the 150!’ I saw [camera assistant] Mark Williams turn white — the actors had to walk and talk for about 75 yards! Mark and Steve Meizler, our focus pullers, both did an amazing job on this film. It was a real survival test.”
Clearly battle-hardened by the whirlwind experience of Any Given Sunday, Totino still marvels at Stone’s willingness to entrust a first-time feature cinematographer on such a sprawling project. “Oliver took a very big chance on me,” the cinematographer concedes. “I really like how willing he is to take chances, because I’m the same way. In my work I always take a chance — sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. But that’s how you learn. Taking those chances pushes you to the edge and adds an excitement to what you’re shooting.”