Another large night exterior, also augmented by Digital Domain, shows the large Central Park Hooverville settlement. This sequence was shot in a Toronto park and lit with what Totino and Fortune dubbed the “mother ship” of box lights, representing a soft moonlight glow. “It was a 40-by-40 grid box truss that held 36 12-light Maxi-Brutes and 24 Nine-light Fays going through a silk,” says Fortune. “We hung it from a 120-foot construction crane and could swing it left or right to cover specific areas.” Adds Totino, “It always bothers me when characters in a film are outside at night, and it’s really bright for no reason. I was very, very conscious not to fill too much in the shadow areas at night. Most of my night exteriors were warm or a little neutral. In the beginning, Ron talked about making it cool to suggest the Depression feel, but I thought it would be interesting to bring warmth into the film, to use a lot of tungsten lights on dimmers to set a depressing story against a warm, sultry background.”

In general, Totino strove to keep the light levels as low as possible, and he cites this as the chief reason he filmed Cinderella Man in Super 35mm 2.35:1 rather than anamorphic 2.40:1. “Much as I’d love to do an anamorphic film, I tend to work in the toe of the negative, so I need lenses that will look good wide open, and you can’t shoot most anamorphics wide open,” he says. “A lot of our interiors and night scenes were shot at T2.” In the shadows, the stop was even lower: “When Jay’s light meter goes below T1, it reads ‘E,’” the cinematographer laughs. “We would joke about that being ‘E for Enough’ — the meter says it’s enough, so let’s shoot!”

Totino’s tendency to work in the toe is most noticeable in scenes set in the Braddocks’ basement apartment, where the only light comes from a few high windows and possibly an open door during the day, and from a few scattered practicals at night. At one point, when the family’s electricity is turned off, candlelight is their sole illumination. The apartment set was actually scouted as a location, but was then re-created on a soundstage to allow for greater flexibility. “Wynn built an incredible set,” says Totino. “It was totally wild. The ceiling and all the walls came off, but I worked really hard to not take any of those walls out. I felt it was extremely important to work within the parameters of the room. I could have moved the wall, I could have gone to the longer lens, but I wanted to feel like I was in the room, not somewhere else, looking in. Working like that added realism to a set that already looked quite real. It was kind of creepy; when you walked on the set, you felt like you had walked back in time. The ceilings were low, and for structural reasons, there was a little curve that made it challenging to [rig] lights.”

For night scenes in the space, the most commonly used instruments were bat strips, custom units with clusters of small tungsten bulbs. “I used those with Dante Spinotti [ASC, AIC] on The Insider and other films,” says Fortune. “I use spot bulbs in them so the light doesn’t leak all over the place, and I can bring them way down on a dimmer for a nice warm ambience.” In a scene that shows Braddock and his wife seated at a candlelit table, “I had two bat strips on both of them kept at such a low level that you don’t notice they’re actually lit from above,” says Fortune. In day scenes on the set, he continues, “we had 10Ks rigged for the window and the door, but we really wanted it to look like it wasn’t lit, and we tried to keep it as low and dirty as possible.”

The courtyard outside the Braddocks’ apartment was shot as a location, one that presented quite a challenge to the filmmakers when it became necessary to shoot it under snow cover in August. The major problem for Totino was achieving the proper quality of winter light for the sequence. His solution was to blot out the sun: “We erected a huge construction crane in the street to hang a 60-by-60-foot silk over the courtyard. It just barely made it!” To accentuate the winter look, Totino used an 82A filter on the lens to cool the images.

The cinematographer tested a number of new Kodak film stocks for Cinderella Man, and he ultimately decided to use Vision2 Expression 500T 5229 for all of the boxing sequences and all night scenes. “But I decided that two older stocks, EXR 100T 5248 and EXR 200T 5293, were best for day scenes. They’re a little less color saturated, and I like their grain structures; they seemed to suit the period.”

The film was processed at Deluxe Laboratories in Toronto, where color timer Diane Cappelletto worked closely with Totino on such special sequences as a black-and-white film of a Baer fight that the filmmakers wanted to sell as period footage. “I wanted to do it in camera, not in the DI or as an effects shot,” he says. “We shot it on  Eastman Double-X 5222, force-developed it 11⁄2 stops, and then Diane did a series of interpositives and internegatives and did some force-developing on those. That gave us the look we wanted.”

Totino notes that he did alter his approach to some scenes with the project’s DI in mind. “While we were filming, I knew that rather than taking an extra hour on set to flag off a corner of a room, I could pay attention to it later in the DI suite.” He also used digital tools to correct some minor “mistakes” — in one scene, a shot of Zellweger walking down a street in the snow was marred by a reflection of the sun in store windows. “I was able to neutralize that during the DI, and without that ability, we would’ve had to either live with the warmth in the windows or go back for a reshoot, and when you’re tying up city streets, a reshoot isn’t going to happen.” In another sequence, a Steadicam shot follows a waiter carrying a silver tray, and the camera was clearly reflected in the tray. “It was a great shot, and we were able to take the reflection out in post,” says Totino. “If you view post tools as an additional paintbrush, they allow you great freedom.”

TECHNICAL SPECS 2.35:1 Super 35mm and 16mm Arricam Studio, Lite; Arri 435; Bell & Howell Eyemo; Canon Scoopic Cooke, Angenieux, Century and Nikon lenses Kodak Vision2 Expression 500T 5229, EXR 100T 5248, EXR 200T 5293, Ektachrome 7239, Eastman Double-X 5222 Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383