"The approach to lighting the Chicago house was extremely soft," explains Kovacs. "We always designated a sun side and a soft side. For the sun side, we would play a 10K or a 5K through the windows, but for everything else we made good use of bouncing 20Ks off of 20' by 20' muslins, letting them come through the windows."
"We played with all of the tricks," Goldblatt confirms with a smile. "For wide shots — or shots with a lot of movement, where we were seeing all over the place — we'd hide Kino Flo tubes behind a raincoat or a bookshelf, just to get a little base fill. We put some light grid on those or painted the walls down where we couldn't cut them — little tricks like that. Once we'd set a wide shot, I liked to take out a wall and place a 20K through two muslins 30' or so away and get this very soft, white light into the room that we would cut closer in to the action to keep it off the walls. That all worked very well. It was a very beautiful, soft source that looked as if it wasn't there at all."
Outside the set walls, production designer Dan Davis hung desaturated photographic backings to simulate the world outdoors. "The monochromatic backings were all quite effective," Goldblatt says. "We kept them a little high-key or overexposed them by just a stop or a half a stop, and they looked quite realistic. In preproduction, we carefully worked out our sightlines so that when we were upstairs, you wouldn't see off the backings. But I learned that you can cheat a lot. You can move the backings around, and no one notices. The backings should never be at the same dead exposure as the interior anyway, so you can get away with a lot of cheating."
The boy at the Cappadoras' front door does turn out to be their long-lost son, Ben (Ryan Merriman). We soon learn that a classmate of Beth's had kidnapped the boy from the hotel lobby in Chicago and kept him for her own. She later married, and her new husband, completely unaware of any wrongdoing, adopted Ben. When the woman committed suicide a few years later, Ben (renamed Sam) was raised by his adopted father. After giving up hope of ever finding Ben, Beth and her husband, Pat (Treat Williams) moved from their Wisconsin home, where Ben had been born, to a new home in Chicago; there, they took up residence just two short blocks from where their missing son was living a completely different life. On a sunny fall day nine years after his disappearance, Ben/Sam knocks on the Cappadoras' door. Once his true identity is discovered, a struggle begins to determine where the boy really belongs.
The strong bond between Ben and his brother, Vincent, manifests itself in their mutual love of basketball. During the course of the film, two pivotal games are played between the siblings that reveal, layer upon layer, a complicated relationship. Both sequences were shot on location outside a house that doubled for the set built at Universal. Says Goldblatt, "I was very interested in the basketball games, which are a big thing in the relationship between the two brothers, and I wanted to shoot them in a fluid way. I was concerned that a Steadicam couldn't make snap moves from one boy to the other as they exchanged dialogue. Both games were staged with an awful lot of dialogue which was absolutely essential to the story. We ended up using a lightweight Moviecam to cut down on the inertia and move the camera that much faster between the boys, the game and the basket."
The second scene on the basketball court takes place late at night, as the two boys play by the light of a streetlamp. Goldblatt continues, "When the location was being scouted and the design phase of the production was underway, I asked for a light source near the driveway, where the basket would be. To facilitate that, we pulled out a modern lamppost and put in an old-fashioned one that lent itself to the design of the neighborhood."
"My first thought on how to attack that sequence," adds Kovacs, "was to accentuate the streetlight by rigging speedrail up into a tree at the end of the driveway and backlighting from there. But once we got there and Ulu started laying out what he'd envisioned, it became apparent that we could get away with sticking an 80' Condor out on the street and arming it in to get our backlight. We put in a 20K real high and soft to emulate the streetlight, and then aimed another 20K into a 20' by 20' muslin bounce in the foreground for fill."
[ continued on page 4 ] © 1999 ASC