Director Tom DiCillo and cinematographer Paul Ryan, ASC weave a quixotic tale of life, liberty and lawn ornaments.
While preparing to shoot Box of Moonlight, writer/director Tom DiCillo and cameraman Paul Ryan, ASC came to an agreement that was perhaps a first among director/cinematographer partnerships: they decided that the film they were about to make should, at all costs, look cheesy.
Moonlight depicts a transitional week in the life of Al Fountain (John Turturro), a steadfast, disciplined but uptight electrical engineer experiencing a mid-life crisis signaled by peculiar hallucinations in which he sees ordinary events moving backwards. When the construction job he is supervising is called off, Fountain is left adrift in Drip Rock, a tiny rural town many miles away from his suburban Chicago home. For the first time in his life, he finds himself without deadlines or responsibilities; intent on doing some solitary soul-searching, he tells his wife that the job is progressing as planned, and begins touring the area.
While driving his rental car aimlessly through the countryside, Fountain encounters The Kid (Sam Rockwell), a freespirited and slightly disturbed young man dressed in a secondhand Davy Crockett outfit. At first, the two opposites mix as poorly as oil and water, but after a series of shared misadventures and personal revelations, an odd but meaningful friendship is struck. The Kid's joie de vivre rubs off on Al, while Al's innate sense of personal responsibility similarly affects The Kid. By the time he goes home to his family in the suburbs, Al Fountain is a changed man.
"I didn't want this film to be 'southern romantic,'" DiCillo explains. "I didn't want it to be 'Americana.' I didn't want it to be 'trailer park sleaze.' I didn't want it to be 'pretentiously hip.' As we looked at our locations in Tennessee, talked to the art department and referred to still photography, we kept on coming around to something that had the word 'cheesiness' attached. That word just excited us all. Visually, I kept stressing to Paul that the world in this film should have a 'tattered Christmas ornament' feel to it.
"Take someone's house, for example," he elaborates. "It could be just a normal house, but out front they have something they are obviously quite enamored of, like a plastic flamingo. It's not even a good plastic flamingo, but a cheap one that's barely painted. It's that element of 'cheese' that we really responded to the careful placement in every frame of stuff that was verging on ugly. But our placement of [the objects] had an ambiguity to it, so that these things became almost beautiful."
Ryan has earned a glowing reputation for bringing out the beauty of natural environments in his second-unit work on such films as Days of Heaven and A River Runs Through It, and as director of photography on Where the Rivers Flow North. He says that Box of Moonlight, on the other hand, offered him a refreshing chance to subvert his natural aesthetic instincts. "A lot of the films I've done have portrayed the environment as a magical place," he comments. "But in this picture, Tom wanted to bring out the sloppiness of parts of middle America, the messiness. I had to keep that image in my mind. I thought that this movie should look like the kind of American postcard you can buy after a bad lunch at a diner on a two-lane blacktop road in the midsection of the country. Every now and then, I would start to make things look pretty and Tom would come up behind me and whisper, 'Cheesy cheesy '"
Box of Moonlight is DiCillo's first film since Living in Oblivion, his acclaimed satire on the humorous and occasionally surreal tribulations of an independent film production (see AC Sept. 1995). The New York University film school graduate was well-versed in that frantic environment, having served as a cinematographer on eight independent films before writing and directing his own first feature, the quirky Johnny Suede. DiCillo, however, downplays his sojourn as a director of photography. "I fell into cinematography completely by accident when [director] Jim Jarmusch and I became friends," he stresses. "He asked me, as a lark, if I would shoot his first film, Permanent Vacation. I had never shot anything before or even intended to shoot anything. But we were both so pleased by the results that we proceeded to work together again on his film Stranger Than Paradise. I put all of my energy into cinematography when I was doing it, of course, but I never actively sought work as a cinematographer and always thought of it as a detour."
Paul Ryan's route into cinematography was considerably more circuitous. A Newton, Massachusetts, native, Ryan studied aeronautical and mechanical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Upon graduation, he put his engineering plans on hold to pursue one of his lifelong dreams, competing on the national ski racing circuit out of Aspen, Colorado. During his year on the circuit, Ryan developed an interest in still photography, eventually landing a job as a staff photographer at a ski area.
Fueled by the revolutionary changes occurring in film during the late Sixties, Ryan went on to enroll in the graduate film school program at San Francisco State University. The young filmmaker was subsequently given a rare opportunity to combine his twin passions when he was commissioned to make a documentary about the European ski racing circuit. "The first plastic ski boots were invented by a company called Lange," he recalls. "They were so far ahead in their industry that literally 80 percent of the ski racers in the world wore their boots. They had more money than they knew what to do with. I already knew a lot of the guys in ski racing, so the Lange people said to me, 'Why don't you make us a film about it? Show the boots every now and then, but just go and do it.' So I basically had a blank check to go to Europe and follow the racing circuit for six weeks! Nowadays, no one would give a green kid just out of film school that kind of freedom."
Ryan used the opportunity to break away from the previously staid conventions of sports filmmaking and experiment with the gonzo visual ideas that were invigorating the greater film world at the time. He cites the cinema verité styles pioneered by Jean-Luc Godard and the Maysles brothers, replete with jump cuts and other non-traditional film language, as inspirations. The result of Ryan's efforts, Ski Racer, went on to become a classic of the nascent ski documentary genre. Ryan's success led to further documentary work, with subjects ranging from the Hell's Angels in San Francisco to artist Salvador Dali at his home in Spain.
After landing a job shooting production stills on George Lucas' classic American Graffiti, Ryan's appetite was whetted for feature-film work. He got his opportunity when director Terence Malick asked him to handle second-unit direction and cinematography on the film Days of Heaven (shot by Nestor Almendros, ASC, and Haskell Wexler, ASC), which earned an Academy Award for Best Cinematography.
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