[ continued from page 2 ]
"Working with Bo is great because he creates opportunities so you can figure out what kind of lighting will work best," Peterman attests. "The lighting he imagined is very graphic, using certain shapes throughout the set. For example, there are a couple of scenes where the characters are walking down these long hallways. The lighting is built into the set as circles and lines. It's an architectural lighting dream. The halls have these 8'-wide circular skylights cut into the ceiling every 10 feet, but Bo only gave them an 8' ceiling, so these lights are right on top of the actors. Spaced out properly, they add depth and drama as people walk through them. We covered the openings with muslin and then backlit them, which created these glowing soft circles.
"Bo then had these lines of fluorescent tubes built in the walls, just along the floor, which added to the sense of perspective."
Says Welch, "It's incredibly important to integrate lighting into the design of any set, and Don was the first person I asked about certain ideas to see if they were beneficial, good-looking and doable. Those circular skylights also carried over the circle motif that I used throughout the set and the rest of the film. Circles are very futuristic and suggest all kinds of things. I really wanted the audience to imagine those skylights to be flying saucers zooming over people's heads as they walked through those corridors."
This motif was echoed throughout the various sets built to create the MIB lair, including a small room in which new recruits are tested by the agency's gruff chief (see photo on page 64). Again, the ceiling featured circular skylight openings but "instead of the muslin and diffused light, we used very hard light. From up high above the openings, I used super-hard Fresnels, so the shafts project down to make these hot, crisp-edged pools. I might have liked the effect better if they were little hotter, but to get each pool to overexpose further I'd lose some control because the lights would have to be up higher and be so much brighter. Also, because we had 25 or 30 of these circles to do, it was impossible to overexpose that much. There was just too much ambient light.
Noting the main hall's cool, institutional lighting, Peterman says, "We started out with it looking much colder. But Barry isn't really big on blue and neither am I. It's been overused and is becoming kind of a cliché. We did some tests and decided to up warm it up in the printing stage. I didn't want to have to change the gels on all of these lights! But the cool feeling is also appropriate for the room — it's a government workplace.
"To create some contrast, we also have these little halogen desk lights that we bring up really high. They're so hot that we can only turn them on just before we roll. They're about 3200°K, while the rest of the room is around 3600°K. I tried to get them about two stops over, to roughly T5.6, because I wanted the color to change on the desks, spilling onto the wardrobe and the hands of the people sitting there."
In the end, Welch and Peterman's approach to the MIB headquarters set helped keep the production on schedule. "We didn't spend a lot of time relighting," he says. "And that's what Barry wanted. We tied up a lot of lights, but he also spent a lot of time on the set floor in order to get it smooth enough for us to dolly without having to lay down track. I had to make a lot of lighting decisions before the action was blocked out, but if we'd walked in here cold and tried to light this whole set, especially using such wide lenses, we'd never have gotten through it."
Interestingly, the Modernist themes found in the MIB headquarters and other sets designed by Welch were later echoed in location work shot at the conical Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. The production designer remarks, "The Guggenheim has the same architectural vocabulary we had already been dealing with; it looks almost like a stack of spaceships. I had been looking at it since day one, trying to figure out how it could be worked into the film. In my opinion, movies that have a visual consistency are more successful, and I thought that shooting there would definitely help create that feeling."
"There were tremendous restrictions at the museum, however," Peterman recounts. "They had an exhibit going on, so they wanted to know everything about our lights, particularly how much UV light HMIs throw out. We couldn't even put lights on certain floors. We ended up primarily using fluorescents, which they loved, and prerigged it all the day before the shoot.
"The Guggenheim is basically a giant incline spiral. In the scene we shot there, Will Smith runs from the ground floor to the roof, with two cameras looking straight down the center from the top — starting with a 10mm and going longer for tight shots. We attached Optima 32 tubes to the bottom of the railing, which is this solid wall to the left side of the ramp, so Will was underlit all the way up. Then I turned on their house lights and just bounced some more light off the ceiling. It's all just ambience, but the interior is entirely white and we could shoot with 5293, so we had about a T2. It's a wonderful building, so it looks great, but we were only in there for about an hour."
The Guggenheim's roof was also used in the sequence, with its permanent lighting (uncorrected fluorescents) primarily illuminating the scene, augmented by ball-shaped practical lamps.
[ continued on page 4 ]