Two considerable location tasks involved a jail hallway and a large church. When Vincent's delinquent behavior gets him arrested for drunk driving, Beth and Pat make their way to the county lock-up to bail him out. There, they discuss their options with detective Candy Bliss (Whoopi Goldberg), the officer who was assigned to Ben's case for the nine-year duration. During the walk to the visiting room, the trio trek down a long, narrow hallway lined with windows. "My best boy, Benny McNulty, who's been with me for 15 years, also doubled as the rigging gaffer on this show," explains Kovacs. "Our biggest task was the walk-and-talk in the jail, where we used 16 18Ks coming through the windows. There were about 25 windows in all, but we only went through about three-quarters of them because we wanted the location to have some areas of shadow and contrast. The only additional lighting we did was on a couple of takes where I handheld an LTM 200W HMI with a Chimera and a 30-degree honeycomb, in order to pick out Whoopi and give her a bit of fill. Both Stephen and I like to use the Chimeras, especially with the honeycombs, because they make such a greatly controlled soft source. I could pick out Whoopi with the 200W HMI and not hit Michelle at all.
"The church sequence was kind of tough as well," Kovacs concedes. "After Ben returns, the family attends church one Sunday. We shot in an old Catholic chapel with lots of stained-glass windows. Trying to punch through those and make it look good in wide shots from the altar was a bit of a challenge. Stephen also wanted to be able to go from looking in one direction to the other at the flick of a switch, so we rigged two sets of lighting at one time, with a number of 10Ks and Chimeras for backlights. The church was another location where we got great use out of the balloons. Even though we were punching 14 12K HMIs through the stained-glass windows, we still went with a tungsten balance inside, and it looked fantastic."
"I love to be able to pre-rig, and be as prepared as I can be," says Goldblatt, "but I'm always ready to throw it all away. I'm a very intuitive worker, and I like to think fast on my feet; I really want the rehearsal to drive what we're doing. My guys have gotten used to me calling for something that I've said I'd never need, but I'm never in a panic. I like a really good, comfortable atmosphere. I don't think people can work well, or happily, under some kind of gun — whether it be psychological or physical. I don't like to be under the gun, and I don't like to do it to other people. In a comfortable atmosphere, people are happy. They get up in the morning and they're happy to go to work. That's what this film was like, but unfortunately, it's not something that happens all the time. It could be, however; it just requires desire and people who are really there to work and not just throw their weight around. If everything is driven by the project, everyone can get together in a collaboration. That's what Ulu does — he collaborates. And when he's happy with something, he doesn't tease it to death; it's 'Goodnight, thank you very much!' I'm not saying it was all a big love-fest, of course; we all worked very hard, and we had our differences. It's going to get rough sometimes, given the nature of the work, but it's extraordinary what human beings can do when they work together, and how much fun it can be. On this picture, we truly had a fantastic, comfortable atmosphere that was wonderful to work in.
"This is a dark film," Goldblatt continues. "It could have been very melodramatic, but we chose to step away from that. We didn't execute the material in a dark way; we just kept it as true as we could. I think being driven by the narrative is enough. I wanted to work with more classical sources of lights — to be as truthful in the lighting as we were in the storytelling. This is a film for adults. No one is going to respond to this who has not suffered in some way — in their relationship, in their marriage, or with their kids. I wouldnot say that it's a pessimistic film — it ends hopefully — but it's mature. There's no golden rainbow.
"I have been so conditioned [by my previous films] to be show-offy, and to use the camera as another character in the film, that I had to concentrate on not doing that this time," he concludes. "Self-restraint was the most difficult part of this project. I obviously wanted things to look good, but I didn't want them to look pretty. I feel that I will have succeeded in what I was asked to do — and what I wanted to do personally — if people don't think about the camera. The film is the concern, and the camera is as invisible as possible. That's always a cliché, but it's quite difficult to do well."
