Foley believes the high-risk nature of mainstream filmmaking pushes creative people toward the safe center. "There is an unconscious tendency toward the center and tremendous pressure to do things the correct way," he says. "You're expected to shoot the master and then the close-up, so everyone will be happy with you. Once in a while, we'd get a call from the producers of The Corruptor after they'd seen dailies, and they'd ask, 'Where's the close-up?' Sometimes, my response was, 'Who says there is one?' Fortunately, despite occasional questions of that sort, [our distributor,] New Line Cinema, was very supportive of our unorthodox approach."
Foley, who went through New York University's film production program in the mid-'70s, looked back to those seat-of-the-pants filmmaking days for ideas that would enliven the visual landscape of The Corruptor. "We imagined that we were back in film school and starting over," he explains. "This came partially out of my desire to reinvent myself as a filmmaker; I was getting kind of stodgy and had been working with the camera in a formalistic way. On The Corruptor, we tended to be a little crazy with the camera; we tried to avoid being locked down by the weight of the Panaflex, and Juan took off with that approach and pushed it.
"For example, we would take an establishing shot of the police station, whip around to the other side of the street to find Chow Yun-Fat, and then whip around again to find another actor. That's the type of thing that most people stop doing once they leave film school — just letting the camera go where it wants to go, instead of where it's supposed to go. Using that approach on a feature film was exhilarating."
Foley's general strategy on any film is to try not to let planning get in the way of spontaneity. He says, "When I'm asked during preproduction what the film will look like, I'll often say, 'I have no idea. I'll let you know when we've done it.' Much of the influence on the visual style ends up coming from the interaction of the locations and the production design. To work that way, you need to have already made a couple of films, so the editorial chessboard is ingrained in your head. It also helps to work with someone like Juan Anchía, who happens to play that chessboard very well and makes it easy to improvise."
The director, cinematographer and production designer David Brisbin came to one initial agreement about their approach to The Corruptor's genre material. Foley relates, "We decided early on that colors and light should be active instead of passive elements on this film. So we used paint and light, or pure light with the source in the frame, to help the images pop off the screen." As an example, the director cites a scene set in a police office, where there is a bright-blue fluorescent light running horizontally on the wall behind the desk of a police official. "There is absolutely no logic to that light being there," Foley admits. "However, it lifted the scene visually and intensified the image. If you're making a feature, you might as well include something you won't see on television." The filmmaker adds that he is gratified that many viewers have said that they did not even notice the oddly placed fixture. "That's good, because the scene is not about a blue fluorescent light," he adds.
Despite the extreme camera movements and unexpected use of zooms in The Corruptor, which seem to echo the approach of some Asian filmmakers, Foley and Anchía say they were not influenced by the energetic and colorful cinematography of Hong Kong crime films, such as director John Woo's A Better Tomorrow and The Killer, both of which also starred Chow Yun-Fat. The filmmakers maintain that The Corruptor's unusual visual style resulted instead from their script's story and the desire to shake up their usual working methods. "Don't tell Yun-Fat, but I've seen precious little in the way of Hong Kong films," Foley admits. "I suppose it's natural to think that those films influenced us, given Yun-Fat and the material, but it's not the case."
In one sequence, the unusual use of two subsequent quick-zoom shots on the face of a prostrate, badly injured lead character resulted from Foley's wish to use every moving-camera tool available. "Many cinematographers won't even order a zoom lens, or they'll only use it at fixed lengths," says the director. "When I was in film school, if you used a zoom shot you were stigmatized as a 'TV director.' I told Juan that I wanted to use zooms on this film, thinking he would hate the idea, but he said 'Great!' It was amazing how much that changed things. The possibilities of camera movement are intensified many times when you can do things like combining quick pans and zooms. For the scene in question, where one of the leads is shot down, the use of two zoom shots in a row just felt right emotionally."
Once this frenetic style was set, Foley never worried that he and Anchía would takes things too far. "We wanted the images in The Corruptor to be radical," he insists. "We started out by asking ourselves, 'What if we push this further than we're supposed to?' That philosophy became automatic after a while. Once we got going, we never worried about going too far."
With Foley and Anchía bent on going wild, production designer David Brisbin served as a calming influence. "The visual end of making a film is always at least a three-way street," Foley notes, referring to the director/cinematographer/production designer triumvirate. "David has a very naturalistic approach to production design. It took a great deal of convincing for him to be enthusiastic about this idea. I sometimes felt that he must have taken his only solace in thinking, 'Well, Foley may be crazy, but I know that Juan Anchía is not.'"
[ continued on page 3 ] © 1999 ASC