In one crucial scene early in the film, the introverted Fountain convinces himself to join in his workers' nightly poker game, only to arrive outside their hotel room and overhear loud insults at his expense. "Fountain's entire world is shattered," Ryan comments. "He realizes that the guys he works with hate him. Instead of keeping the camera stationary as he walks back down the hallway, or following him, the camera pulls back from him to highlight the isolation he feels at that moment. Tom called that move a 'Chinese dolly.'"
According to DiCillo, the shot was an homage to one of his favorite films, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist. "In that film, Vittorio Storaro [ASC] did a shot of Jean-Louis Trintignant coming out of an elevator," he recalls. "just as I was expecting the camera to follow him down the hall, it did the opposite and pulled back! I was utterly surprised, and yet it was so perfectly elegant for that scene. I always remembered that move and figured it would be perfect for this scene in Box of Moonlight."
DiCillo tries to keep himself open to "happy accidents" on the set that might elevate a standard scene into something interesting and unique on its own terms. In one instance, the filmmakers were faced with a potentially dull transition shot that follows Fountain's car as it pulls into a motel parking lot. "What I had in mind was to move the camera past a boy and his sister lounging around the motel pool in the foreground,"the director describes. "Then I noticed that the boy was very, very fat. Figuring that he was going to say no, I asked the boy if he wouldn't mind taking his shirt off. With the biggest, most cheerful smile, he said 'Sure!' I don't know why, but it struck me as so interesting that I just said, 'Why don't we have him chase his sister around?' What it did was lend a really interesting foreground action to what would have been just a dolly shot of a car going into a parking lot.
"Film tends to remove spontaneity from the audience in some ways," DiCillo attests. "So whenever something real happens right in front of you, it's very exciting and it adds an energy to the film that's just crucial."
What initially excited Ryan most about the script were the small touches of surrealism sprinkled throughout, exemplified by Fountain's queasy hallucinations, in which commonplace events such as a waitress pouring a pitcher of water into a glass, or a child riding a bicycle are seen moving backwards. Ryan chose to shoot Moonlight with a Moviecam Compact (obtained from Clairmont Camera) for its light weight, quietness and ability to film in reverse without needing a special configuration. "Technically, we could have done those shots as opticals," the cinematographer points out. "But I wanted to keep them as first-generation as possible."
Even with the ease of operation afforded by the Moviecam, Ryan and his wife, Priscilla Cohen, had to spend an entire day rehearsing video tests of the scene in which Turturro watches water travel back into a waitress's pitcher. "Previsualizing things in reverse is difficult. The problem wasn't so much the pouring, because that was in a cut where the water goes back into the pitcher," Ryan explains. "The tricky part was all in the motion of the actress. If she comes in frontwards and pours, that's not going to work, since the camera is filming backwards. I had to have Priscilla back into the test scene, pour the water, and then back out again. In real life, you end up with a full glass and an empty pitcher, so on the screen, in reverse, you have an empty glass and a full pitcher."
For the scene in which Fountain watches aghast from a bus window as a child appears to be riding a bicycle backwards, Ryan suggested an extra compositional element to add to the POV shot's believability. "During tests we filmed in the parking lot at Clairmont Camera, I had another kid walking through the shot forwards, to play off the kid riding the bicycle backwards," he describes. "So that meant the actor would have to walk backwards during the filming. We ended up not using him for the shot in the final film, but the interesting principle is that it's very hard to walk backwards and make it look natural. So during the test I had the kid carry a big heavy load, so he would look unnatural and awkward anyway!"
As The Kid's anarchic spirit becomes infectious and Fountain begins to open himself to new experiences, Ryan subtly altered his composition to free Turturro's character visually. "We opened up the frame and created more of a sense of space around him," he explains. "In one scene where Al gets into a tomato fight with The Kid, you've got these confining, rigid stocks of tomato plants, which are similar to the steel construction at the plant in the beginning of the film. But now he just starts breaking them all down and throwing tomatoes. We also tried to break down those kind of barriers compositionally. We used a Steadicam for the tomato fight scene, operated by Jim McConkey, with first camera assistant Drew Gianetta pulling focus. In the second half of the film, we also tried to play off the Al's sense of wonderment. After the scene in which Floatie [Catherine Keener] slips Fountain a nondescript drug, we just poured light into his face from a lower angle to create that sense of openness."
Fountain's self-imposed world of order finds its sloppy antithesis in The Kid's ramshackle mobile-home abode, which is half-open to the woods. Production designer Therese DePrez festooned the area with garish Christmas tree lights and bizarre lawn ornaments. "My gaffer, Mick McNeely, and key grip, Andrew Farley, did a great job rigging that area," Ryan comments. "We had to use that location for day and night scenes, and we couldn't take the time to rig it every night. We did a high-wire rigging of the trees with three 6K space lights, which each held six 1K bulbs in a 4' x 2 1/2' cylinder. The space lights were all on individual dimmers, so that we could take them down as needed. We could accentuate the overall ambience provided by the space lights with more specific units, like 2K juniors and seniors. I would often put double 85 gels on those lights for the actors, as if the light were coming from the warm-colored sources all around the Kid's backyard. All of the little lights you see in the backyard are practicals, set up all over the place. We just supplemented those where we needed it.
"When trying to light night backgrounds over big areas, I'd generally paint little areas with Fresnels on full spot, which fell off nicely. That was a tip I picked up from Conrad Hall [ASC], who had used that effect on Searching for Bobby Fischer [see AC Feb. 1994]."
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