For a courtyard-set dance sequence, Klein utilized another in-camera technique to suggest an emotional connection between feisty teenager Gwen (Tamara Mello) and the somewhat-sleazy Derek (Charles Rocket) — who actually attend Carlo's service as the guest of another woman. After sharing a joint, the pair conspire to make love in an empty casket. "Mike really wanted them to be in a different state of mind, their own world," Klein describes, "but he didn't want to use psychedelic lighting or other obvious effects, so I suggested shooting the sequence with a 45-degree shutter angle. We were shooting on stage — interior for exterior — which gives the scene a certain feel, but the sharpening of the image due to the shutter effect heightens the sense that these characters are isolated." The cameraman adds that the motion of the dancers accentuated the technique's tendency to strobe, "but, in this case, we felt 'the more the better.'"
The notion of using unusual camera angles came into play while shooting a dialogue scene that originally had the characters simply seated in the Coliseum room. "Just before shooting it, we decided that the scene would look really boring if they were just sitting there doing their lines," Valerio says, "so we came up with the idea that one of them has lost a contact lens. That allowed us to have the actors crawling around on their hands and knees, looking for the lens while delivering their lines. It also gave us a better opportunity for extreme low angles. Dave just put the camera on a sandbag on the floor and pulled it along, covering the scene in one setup.
For flashback sequences in which the Torello siblings respectively recall personal memories of their father, Valerio wanted a "home-movie look that could represent four distinct visions," Klein says. "Originally, we thought about shooting them in Super 8, but we didn't have the budget to do the blow-up from Super 8 to 35mm, so we just shot in 16mm, shooting two visions with 7239 reversal film and two with 7298, which I pushed to increase the grain and emulate that home-movie feel."
Valerio adds, "The psychological justification for that technique was the idea that while children share the same parents, they have different individual relationships with them and see them differently in their mind's eye. The use of different stocks helps to suggest that notion, but we also filmed the sequences four different ways, using slightly different line readings, costuming, lighting, and emotional tone, because everybody remembers things in their own way."
Klein notes that these sequences also feature more expressive lighting with contrast and blown-out highlights, which adds flavor to the film's overall look.
Having recently seeing a rough cut of Carlo's Wake, Klein reports, "Mike really wanted a frenetic camera that moved around all the time, and while I knew at the time that we were moving around a lot, things really move on the screen. I'm amazed that were able to pull off this film in such a short period of time. I wish we could have had a few more days, but that beast of shooting a movie in three weeks finally buried its fangs into us."
Concludes Valerio, "I've shown this cut to a few people now, and it moves like a rocket. You don't get bored with the spaces at all, so I'm pretty happy with that."
