Since then, Ryan has cannily balanced his career between second-unit work on such big-budget features as A River Runs Through It (which earned an Oscar for Philippe Rousselot, AFC) and Something to Talk About (shot by Sven Nykvist, ASC) with his own director of photography assignments on smaller independent films, including Alan and Naomi, A Matter of Degrees and the recently completed Other Voices, Other Rooms.
Not unexpectedly for a low-budget film with no marquee names in the cast, Box of Moonlight endured a long period of development limbo before the filmmakers were given the proverbial green light to enter production. Ryan used the downtime to research and gather visual imagery for inspiration in committing DiCillo's idiosyncratic screenplay to film. "This story was really about the guts of Middle America, especially the Southern part," Ryan explains. "The film never defines what city we're in, but we ended up shooting in Knoxville, Tennessee, which is where we all felt this story could take place."
Ryan found key visual cues for Moonlight in the work of American street photographers. He details, "We were looking for that whole underbelly of America. William Eggleston's photos of the South certainly have that feel the obsessive observation of the trivia of America. Joel Sternfeld's book American Prospects would be another photographic reference. He has one picture of a burning house, with a fireman in the foreground buying a pumpkin at a pumpkin patch. To me, that's almost like Tom DiCillo's sense of humor why isn't the fireman putting out the fire?"
The bemused and surreal tone of those photos would later reappear in at least one scene in Moonlight, a relatively simple shot of Al Fountain's car as it drives past a junk furniture shop on the outskirts of Knoxville. "Part of the film is about this environment of junk shops and billboards," Ryan explains. "We found an old chair in a furniture store, and I remembered from Tom's previous films that he has this [fascination] with things on fire. There's a lot of primal fire and water imagery in this film, anyway. So we decided to buy the chair for $15, move it out to the side of the road, pour lighter fluid on it, set it on fire, and yell, 'Action!' In the shot, Al drives by in his car. As we're panning with him, the burning chair comes into the frame. It was never scripted or planned at all."
According to DiCillo, the mysterious shot was also a clever way to tweak a particularly vociferous member of the crew, who was steadfast in keeping the harried 34-day shoot on schedule. The director recalls with a chuckle, "Every time we'd barely finish a setup, this guy would yell, 'Hurry up, hurry up, let's go, next shot, next shot!' So after we had the shot of the car driving by which at that point didn't include the chair on fire this guy starts yelling. I just said, 'Hmm I don't know, I think there's something missing from this shot.' So we lit the chair on fire! It completely blew this guy's mind, because we didn't have the fire department there or anything. But to me, that's one of the most exciting shots in the film."
Ryan also tries to open himself up to indirect visual influences before starting a film. "In this case, I happened to attend an exhibit by [pop artist] Claes Oldenburg while I was getting ready for production," he says. "What Oldenburg did in this exhibit was take real objects that are steely and rigid, and collapse and soften them into a more visceral, messy form. To me, it made a lot of sense with what goes on with the main character in this film. Al Fountain is an engineer whose entire measure of life is how things fit together exactly, and how they're completed on schedule and on time. But as the film goes on, he expands himself and becomes a bigger person when he starts to loosen up and let go. The steely iron hammer becomes a soft, floppy hammer, as Oldenburg might make it."
Since Al Fountain's gradual emotional expansion was the fulcrum of the story, the filmmakers took particular care in the lighting and framing of actor John Turturro. "The idea was to make him look subtly larger than life," Ryan explains. "I think it was Tom who said that Al should look like Burt Lancaster as Leave it to Beaver's Ward Cleaver, a larger-than-life figure playing this very middle-American role. So we put a lot of kickers on him, which I usually don't like to do. I tend not to use a lot of backlighting unless it's really necessary, sticking to more of a soft half-light on people. I would put a kicker on John but not on other people, so that only he would have that slightly bigger-than-life look."
Regarding fixtures used to this end, Ryan adds, "I like to use Japanese lanterns and space lights quite often. For this show, I had a couple of mini space lights made up that each used two 1K globes. The lights were [surrounded by] cylinders of silk that were 3' deep and about 1 1/2' wide, and I had a series of black Duvatyne strips attached to them that could be hung down or picked up as necessary. It was like a big light source, only directional. It could make a soft light in one direction, then I could open a Duvatyne strip on the other side to let light come out the back side. Space lights are very mobile and can also be mounted to a boom arm so you can follow an actor with it through a shot. We also had to put a fair amount of eyelight on John with an inkie, because his eyes are very deep-set."
DiCillo and Ryan were also careful to utilize their Tennessee locations to help define the Fountain character. For the opening scene, in which the audience first encounters him at the construction site, the filmmakers happened upon the perfect graphic representation of his rigid, unyielding existence. "We shot John through a series of vertical aluminum studs," DiCillo explains. "That location was a real construction site and they let us shoot there for two days. When we scouted the location and shot-listed that scene, the studs weren't there. By the time we came back a month later, the construction crew had been working for a while. So here were all of these metal studs in this shot we'd already planned. I figured, let's use them!"
Camera movement was used judiciously in Moonlight, usually as a psychological exclamation point for important moments in the story. "Every single element of a film should serve what's going on in the film," DiCillo declares. "Not one frame should be purposeless, and the same goes for camera moves. What I try to do with the camera is surprise the audience in an enjoyable way just when they think something is going to be revealed in a certain way, we in fact reveal something else in a different way. It's almost as if there is even humor in the camerawork."
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