The variety of outdoor locations Ryan faced during the production compelled him to juggle several different film stocks. "I carried too many stocks on that show!" he admits with a laugh. "I used Eastman Kodak 5245, 87, 93 and 98. I had never shot the 200 ASA 87 before, which was a low-contrast film [that has since been discontinued]. I thought it would be great for this film since we had so many scenes in the woods, which is one of the worst lighting situations possible. I figured I wouldn't be able to control the light coming through the trees all the time. The 87 was pretty good, although it had a tendency to create a sort of 'golf ball grain,' especially if you were shooting a mid-toned wall with no texture. But for all of the scenes in the woods, it would really dig into those deep shadows. That grain problem has been solved with 87's replacement, the Vision 320T."
When the production didn't receive a shipment of 5298 stock needed for a night dialogue scene between Turturro and Rockwell in the woods, Ryan was forced to substitute the 87. "I had to open up a stop more, but it was really good," he remarks. "If I had known that earlier, I might have used that film more for night exteriors with people in them. Turturro has these deep shadowy places in his face, and the 87 really gave a kind of softness to it. It wasn't as harsh, and the grain structure was tighter than the 98."
Perhaps the most heavily planned and discussed scene in Box of Moonlight, from a visual standpoint, was a lengthy aerial sequence for the opening credits, in which the camera swoops over and through Tennessee's Smoky Mountains in just a few shots. As well as being a pilot himself, Ryan has extensive experience in aerial cinematography from his second-unit work on films such as A River Runs Through It. "We knew we wanted the sequence to be long, continuous shots, two or three at most," the cameraman explains. "That meant the locations had to be very specific, so we did a lot of scouting by airplane and by helicopter. The aesthetic questions about the shot were whether it should be a straight-ahead, purposeful search or whether the camera should have a more exploratory feel. I actually thought that a sense of exploration would be better, in which the camera would look around, stop and pause, and then move on somewhere else, as if it were looking for something.
"Eventually, we thought, 'It's the beginning of the film maybe we don't want the wandering yet.' So we decided on a more straight-ahead eye, looking but not really wandering. We achieved that by using variations in altitude, coming down low, then going up high and coming down low again. At one point we were about five feet off the water! We ended up using an Arri III with a 16mm Zeiss lens on a Tyler nose mount, which definitely gives you a sense of going straight ahead. You could tilt down and tilt up. We filmed the whole sequence in an afternoon."
For a melancholy scene in which Fountain revisits the site of his lone happy childhood memory frolicking at the now-polluted Splatchee Lake Ryan was forced to reconcile DiCillo's fetish for wide-angle lenses with the shifting light of an all-day shoot. "We only had one day at that location," Ryan recalls. "We shot from sunrise to overhead sun to sundown. The tricky thing was making it all match, since the scene is supposed to take place in 10 minutes. We changed film stocks from 45 to 98 by the end of the day. We used big silks when we could, but by the end of the day we had to bring in a couple of 12Ks to add the light that just wasn't there anymore.
"A lot of times you can cheat by moving people 15 or 20 feet, but that wasn't possible at this location. Also, Tom tended to go much wider with the lenses than what I would be thinking! It's just the way he sees the world he doesn't like to tell the viewer how to look at things. When you're shooting a close-up with say, a 100mm lens, you can position people anywhere if you need to cheat a shot, since the background will be less recognizable. But with a 25mm, we had to use other means, especially because the compositions are more defined the audience will be aware of every element in the background, as there is a greater angle of acceptance and more depth of field. Because of that, the characters have to work in concert with these other elements. This was a theory that Henri Cartier-Bresson worked with if you take the human element out of the picture, the frame should still have a graphic composition. Of course, the real trick is still trying to decide where to hide the lights."
In general, however, the makers of Box of Moonlight preferred to bypass strict realism, paralleling Fountain's journey into the world of the illogical and fantastic. In one brief but striking scene, Fountain returns to his hotel room after a troubling day and peers out the window as he takes off his tie, only to see an older man going though the exact same motions in a similar room in an adjacent tower. Both are bathed in an eerie glow. "That was a very unnatural lighting setup, unabashedly so," Ryan laughs. "It's actually the same window in both shots, from reverse angles. The man across from Al Fountain is meant to be a picture of him in the future. We had Kino Flos inside the room for a soft crosslight, and we used a 5K to the right of the camera, spotted full-on and cut with some flags so that it was a narrow beam hitting the actors. It was totally unrealistic lighting, but we were trying to get across a state of mind."
When asked about the importance of logic in the look of his films, DiCillo's answer strikes at the thematic core of Box of Moonlight. "I don't think logic has a place in the movie business," he asserts. "I said to Paul, 'Let's throw out logic before we set up this world, but once we do set it up, let's keep that world.' So there is a sort of crazy logic that wants to work.
"For example, there's a scene in a coffee shop in which a waitress is coming on to Al. We put neutral density on the windows, because it was the middle of the day and we wanted it to look like night outside. We kept putting ND on, and suddenly I noticed that the windows were turning this incredible shade of purple. It was completely illogical, and didn't look like any night or twilight I'd ever seen. But the color was amazing! So I said, 'That's good let's shoot it.'
"At least in this particular stage of what I'm up to, I like to create worlds that are in a way like adult cartoons," he concludes. "There's always something a little odd around the edges, yet there's still a strange, illogical beauty in things."
