Observed shooting Carlo's Wake last October at Santa Monica Studios, Klein and his crew, which included first assistant Emily Mackley, second assistant Paul Maletich, gaffer Bill Scalzitti and key grip Anthony Vietro, were certainly wasting none of their 18-day schedule. The primary sets built there were the funeral home's foyer, featuring stained-glass windows, and the garishly decorated "Coliseum" room, which holds Carlo's casket and serves as his mourners' main gathering site.
Suspended from the pipe grid above the Coliseum room was a 6' x 6' softbox supplying an ambient glow. Hung around the uppermost perimeter of the set, a series of 2K zip lights offered more directional illumination, while warm-gelled nook lights aimed up from behind a dozen Roman-style columns set along the room's walls added a distinctly practical feel to the overall lighting. At the far end of the room, a Chimera with a 2K blonde hung above a raised stage, while several more warm, up-light practicals filled in the back wall.
However, this naturalistic softlight approach was not the rule throughout Carlo's Wake; in fact, the photographic treatment for one scene was specifically inspired by Robert Richardson, ASC's arresting work in Natural Born Killers — specifically, the sequence in which that film's serial-killer lovers stumble into a vast, emerald-hued drugstore. "There's a scene in our film that takes place in the funeral parlor's embalming room, where two morticians are working on a body," Valerio says. "We were looking for a very 'Frankenstein's laboratory' feel, and thought that a greenish look would suit the scene really well."
Klein adds, "We lit that scene entirely with Kino Flos, but the standard green fluorescent tubes weren't enough to give us the extreme green we were after, so I added several layers of plus-green to them. We'll also add quite a bit more green in the timing."
Klein's main camera on the show was a Moviecam Compact, although he occasionally employed an Arriflex 535 to take advantage of its programmable speed-ramping capability. The cinematographer framed Carlo's Wake entirely with Zeiss primes, using a 25mm as his workhorse and seldom going above 100mm. The camera package was obtained from Otto Nemenz in Hollywood. "We made a few concessions in terms of lenses to save ourselves some money," the cameraman says, "which allowed us to afford some special things when we needed them, like a few extra days with the Steadicam or the Arri 535. We got a fantastic deal from Alex Wengert at Otto Nemenz, but we wouldn't have used longer lenses — our sets were too small — or a zoom; I don't care for them, and Mike wanted to move the camera rather than zooming."
To keep a consistent look, Klein shot almost the entire film at T2.8 with Kodak's Vision 200T 5274.
Speed-ramping was used to highlight the emotional content of certain scenes, exemplified by an early sequence in which the eldest Torello daughter, Rosalie, arrives at the funeral home and sees her father for the first time since his death. "The specific shot begins as she enters the Coliseum room, walks to the casket and pulls out her rosary beads," Klein says. "During that walk, we wanted to go to 48 fps and then come back to 24 fps when [actress] Rosie Taravella had her first line. We did that with the 535 plugged into my Mac PowerBook, and it worked quite nicely. We could have used other tools to control the ramping, but I already had the Arri laptop camera control software and wanted to try using the PowerBook; the scene in question was a perfect opportunity. I just programmed the ramp and then had my second assistant, Paul Maletich, hit the control to speed up the frame rate as soon as Rosie pulled out her rosary beads, using that movement to accentuate the slow motion."
Asked what inspired this use of slow motion, Valerio confesses, "I ripped it off from Martin Scorsese, Michael Chapman [ASC] and Raging Bull. They used it when Jake LaMotta was in the ring during a match, and after seeing that 18 years ago, I never forgot it. In our scene, we used slow motion to highlight a sad, emotional feeling, which ends as Rosie reaches her father's casket and slaps it, bringing us back to 24 fps and ending the shot with a joke. For the audience, this also sets up the rest of the film, which often goes from sad to funny without a moment's notice."
[ continued on page 4 ] © 1999 ASC