Brisbin may have had good reason to harbor suspicious thoughts about his collaborators' sanity; in many shots, Foley and Anchía repeatedly broke a basic rule of cinematography by boldly mixing light that was several stops over and several stops under a hypothetical "correct exposure." This method is used most notably in a close-up on the face of an FBI agent toward the end of the film. Taking traditional, half-shadowed facial lighting to its extreme, Anchía placed half the man's face in almost impenetrable shadow, while illuminating the other half with blown-out window light that is many stops overexposed. The look is unsettling and striking in its boldness, yet effectively communicates the suddenly unavoidable differences between the two lead characters, as well as the idea that the FBI agent, like virtually all of the characters, may be either a good guy or a very bad guy.
Anchía took delight in devising such an unconventional close-up. "I learned from a well-known actor that the face is like a landscape; there are mountains, valleys and curves," he relates. "One face's response to light is always different from another's. The approach to lighting a face can vary infinitely, and one's choice depends on the nature of the film, the scene and the actor. In this scene, the two characters' very different worlds are confronting each other, and it required a very unusual, highly dramatic approach to lighting."
The use of deep shadows contrasting with strongly overexposed light also emphasizes the tension in a key scene between Wallace and his drunken, dissolute father, a former cop with a long criminal history of his own. The two men face off in Wallace's apartment, where his father has shown up unannounced. Their confrontation comes to a boil in a shot taken from over Wallace's shoulder; the son stands in deep shadow, while the father's face is bathed in strongly overexposed window light. "Again, this lighting is about the two men being in such separate worlds," Anchía explains. "It's an extreme effect, like cutting from an extreme wide shot to a tight close-up." The scene was simply lit with a 20K tungsten light outside the window of the studio set, with fill provided by reflectors.
Shadow patterns ostensibly cast by venetian blinds make frequent appearances in The Corruptor, yet the filmmakers managed to breathe new life into this clichéd technique by taking it to new extremes. Anchía often used 200W Leko HMIs to project patterns of blinds onto faces and backgrounds. "These projected effects were yet another a way for us to escape the correctness of normal cinematography," the cameraman says. "The projections also met our desire to escape from beautiful light and to obscure faces, but we mostly used the various patterns to keep the tension going in scenes where the story had less inherent tension."
Those backgrounds in The Corruptor that were not enhanced with projected patterns received a different kind of special attention. As he had on Glengarry Glen Ross, Anchía occasionally enlivened unspectacular settings by deploying frosted translucent panels bathed with colored light. "David Brisbin, James and I tried to push certain key colors for dramatic effect throughout the film — yellow, red, green, blue and black — which we agreed were the colors one sees most often in New York's Chinatown," says Anchía. "Those colors became key elements of our overall look. I worked closely with David to include those colors in our locations. However, when you're working in certain places, such as an office, there is often nothing very visually interesting, and not much you can do to help. If you shoot one scene without much visual style and then another and another, it accumulates and weakens your visual schematic. I feel that you have to stay consistent with your approach, so we occasionally brought in translucent plastic panels, surrounded the actors with them and lit them with one or more of our theme colors. We were pushing the reality [of the Chinatown look] to the maximum."
This technique, most notable in a scene that occurs within businessman/crime lord Henry Lee's office, makes for lively, almost expressionistic interior landscapes. Lee, a sweet-talking bad guy who finally reveals his true colors, sits at his desk, surrounded by translucent panels bathed in rich yellow and red hues that suggest his seductive yet dangerous nature.
One of Anchía's most daring and unusual images appears when Wallace uses a pay phone to warn an informer that he is in great danger. Wallace's face is bathed in blue and white light, the background is deep red, and there is a completely unexplained, slanting stripe of green light playing across the lower half of his face. "The location, a fast-food joint, gave us the excuse for this multi-colored lighting," says Anchía, who adds that the scene is more about the fact that Wallace's situation has begun to unravel. To reflect the detective's downward spiral, the cinematographer wanted the moment to have a distinctly confused feeling.
[ continued on page 4 ] © 1999 ASC