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The filmmakers' new approach on The Lost World is most clearly evident in the picture's lighting style. While Kaminski did deploy large, soft lighting units for general key and fill, he augmented the look with a variety of more direct sources, including two very rare types of units — a pair of old-fashioned "sun arcs," and a vintage set of T-5 beam projectors. These unusual tools were tracked down with dogged determination by key members of Kaminski's lighting crew. Expert gaffer David Devlin recalls the quest: "We really played a lot of things in backlight, and we used these old sun arcs pretty extensively. We first heard that we were doing the project while we were still working on Jerry Maguire, and one day Steven visited us on the set and told us how much he wanted to use sun arcs, which he had previously employed on 1941. I'd never heard of these lights before; they're old searchlights that were used during World War II, and maybe even before that. They're basically arc units that project a beam similar to what you'd get with a Xenon light, but these use carbon arcs that feed right through the front of the lamp. They also have a mirror made by Bausch & Lomb that's right behind the flame — the quality of the light is beautiful, and the mirror really focuses the beam. It's a very interesting look.
"The problem was that these lights were in extremely short supply. At one time there were 30 or 40 of them, but they slowly died out in America. In the 1950s, movie companies would send them out on location projects like The Good Earth, and they'd just mysteriously vanish. I started looking all around for them, and I heard rumors that there were some in China. I even began searching for them on the Internet. Finally, my best boy, Larry Richardson, actually came across a pair of old, decrepit sun arcs at Sony. Steven agreed to have the units refurbished at Universal, and we used both of them on the picture."
Although the sun arcs proved to be effective as backlight sources, their sheer bulk — 275 pounds apiece and 43" in diameter — limited their usefulness in certain situations. This led the filmmakers to hunt down a set of T-5 tungsten beam projectors, which create a strong, searchlight-type beam. The production rented the only set of T-5's existing in the U.S. from ETC, a Hollywood-based manufacturer of theatrical lighting instruments. "The lights once belonged to Universal, but about 10 years ago they sold them to ETC, and they've been kicking themselves ever since!" Devlin states. "We had literally every one of these lights that was available in Hollywood."
The T-5 units proved to be invaluable in a variety of different ways. Says Devlin, "They're a bit like tungsten Xenons, but the look they create is more organic, because they're not computer-designed lamps. A Xenon has a hole in the back of the reflector where the bulb goes through, and you can see where that hole is because the reflector is so well-designed. The result is a beam that can sometimes look a bit like a doughnut. The T-5's utilize a mirror, which is not as precise and creates a smoother beam. In addition, the Xenon uses an arc bulb, which tends to jiggle, whereas these lights have tungsten filaments and a mirror; they create a very steady source with a hard, sunlike punch."
Kaminski and Devlin sometimes used as many as 20-25 of the T-5's while shooting night exteriors. "When we set them up one after another, they gave us a kind of broken pattern of light without using flags or cutters," Devlin explains. "On this film, the camera never stopped moving, which made it difficult to control the light in certain situations, because you can't just use huge flags all the time. That's where the T-5's really saved our skins. You can just set them up in a ring within a stage and sprinkle the light around without having an overall backlight everywhere. The look they created helped to give this film the more gritty feel that Steven and Janusz wanted, and they also allowed us to work really fast, which is the name of the game when you're working with Steven."
Elaborating upon his use of the beam projectors, Kaminski details, "I would stack a batch of them together and use them to outline the T. Rexes. To give the dinosaurs a key light, I used big soft sources. I had these huge softboxes built, which were covered with 12' x 12' sheets of muslin. I would shoot the light off the foamcore and into the muslin to create a beautiful soft source on a large scale. We had built the sets on Stage 24 around the T. Rexes, because we couldn't move the animatronic animals. We had our beam projectors and Dino lights hanging all around the stage, because Steven sometimes likes to change things and shoot from another direction."
Approximately 75 percent of The Lost World was shot on soundstages, but both Spielberg and Kaminski prefer location work. Says Spielberg, "If you're looking for reality, it's a lot easier to use God's light and just augment that with HMIs or arcs than it is to create that look 100 percent artificially on a soundstage. No matter how realistic the lighting looks on a soundstage, it still will look like a stage compared to the real thing. Personally, I like to be outside — or in practical interiors — as often as possible."
In creating "natural" environments on stage, Kaminski found himself "constantly making small improvements. I realized a few years ago that when I go on location to shoot night exteriors, I tend to light things a bit brighter to show them off. I light the forests and I light the environments to show that we're on location. I tend to do the same thing on a stage, but in that situation you have to be a lot more careful, because you're photographing an artificially created set. The moment you start lighting things brightly, it starts to look more fake. The lighting ratios are much different on the set than they would be on location. For example, sunny day exteriors are less contrasty on location and more contrasty on stage, because that helps to sell the illusion that you're in a real outdoor environment.
"On Stage 12, I had four Dinos facing each other on both the north and south wall. On the longer east and west walls, I had eight on each side. David Devlin put frames of muslin in front of the Dinos to create the effect of big softboxes, and we shaped the light with flags. So we had these big multiple units all around the stage, and depending upon the angle and direction of the camera, I would turn on the north bank or the south bank. I would get this really beautiful soft backlight. Working with a 500 ASA emulsion, I would get a stop of T2.8. I shot the whole movie at 2.8 because it's a good stop for night exteriors — about 70 percent of the movie takes place at night, in the rain. Depending on the situation, the fill light would be 1.4 or 2, but no more, because at that point it starts to look unrealistic."
Stage 12 served as the site of a major night exterior sequence in which a pair of the scientists sneak into the hunters' camp to cut their fuel lines and punch holes in their vehicles' tires. The sequence involved a large dolly shot which tracked the actors as they crawled under some jeeps, sabotaged the fuel lines, and then crept past the hunters' tents. "As they're going through, one of the lead hunters is staging a big conference with his associates," Kaminski relates. "We worked from the idea that the hunters had brought a lot of equipment with them, including practical fixtures to light their camp. I set up these portable lighting units that are often used for highway repair work. Each unit had its own engine, and consisted of four mercury-vapor lights attached to a small arm. I had four of those, and I placed them in four different parts of the stage. I kept them uncorrected to create this very dirty blue tone, and I pointed them straight down to create these ugly spots of light. Then I lit the backing and the trees, and also the tents — I put a bit of warm light in the tents and then backlit them a bit as well. I wet everything down and added a bit of fog, and it started to look very real without being too pretty. I also lit the jeep interiors with fluorescents so we'd have a bit of green light coming from underneath the vehicles."
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