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For subUrbia, Daniel had a chance to use what he had learned on Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise, since the new film is the third successive Linklater effort to take place primarily at night. But the simple, natural lighting approach Daniel favors also springs from his longtime admiration for European cinematographers such as Sven Nykvist, ASC (Persona), Henri Alekan (Anna Karenina), Raoul Coutard (Breathless) and Gabriel Figueroa (The Night of the Iguana).
"I guess my philosophy is 'Don't light unless you need to,'" he explains. "Most of the time, all you need to do is take the light that's there naturally and just augment it. When Sven Nykvist was shooting What's Eating Gilbert Grape out here in Texas, I interviewed him for an article in a local paper. He used three lights on The Ox and it looks wonderful. Leave it dark where it should be dark. That's what looks more real anyway. So many night scenes in Hollywood films are overlit."
Linklater concurs. "I really hate when a 12K is pumping right off camera, lighting a whole neighborhood. Lee has a soft, European feel with lighting. We share a certain aesthetic, a sort of anti-slick realism. On subUrbia, our goal was to make the movie look like it really would to your eye at night. We also had to shoot the whole movie in 22 days, so we needed to come up with a general lighting plan that could be set up really quickly."
Most of subUrbia's action is anchored around the drab convenience store where the characters while away the night hours, a potentially stagnant scenario that tested Linklater's visual resourcefulness. "In all of my other movies, there have been a lot of locations and the characters have kept moving," he points out. "Those movies were all about movement, while this one has a static quality. You're in one place for a long time. You have to keep it varied and moving and not boring, so that it doesn't feel like one location. So it was a particular challenge to dig into that space and make it work cinematically."
Production designer Catherine Harwicke (Tape Heads, Tombstone, Tank Girl) set about reconfiguring an empty Austin mini-mall into a realistic all-night gas station/convenience store. A desktop model was constructed to help Linklater visualize his shot list before heading out to the location. "I could work out all of the shots around the store, then meet with the assistant director, the script supervisor, and Lee, and go through all of our night shooting," Linklater explains. "You could walk through a whole scene using these tiny plastic people and cars. It was almost like a James Cameron movie!"
In order to facilitate the long nights of shooting an ensemble cast outside the store, Daniel employed an imposing but soft lighting instrument that was soon tagged "the Orb" for its otherworldly appearance. "I thought an overhead source from above would let us move really fast," he says. "We were running two Moviecam Compacts for each scene, and [uniform lighting] would allow us to shoot easily from two different angles at once. The source was basically a huge China ball that we could move from the arm of a 110-foot crane over the convenience store. It consisted of 20 1K nook lights, which we could turn on and off independently. We put them inside white parachute material for diffusion. The whole thing looked like a giant yo-yo on its side! We used it as our main light on the actors for the entire three weeks of filming.
"We filled out the light from the Orb with Kino Flos. We also wanted to be able to see 360 degrees around the parking lot, so we attached three 1Ks, each on top of fake 30' telephone poles that we had placed next to the street. We would use those when we wanted a hard backlight that seemed a little more typical coming from a street."
Daniel used Optima 32 fluorescent tubes to illuminate the inside of the convenience store. An old strip center across the street from the convenience store was also refurbished to create point sources of light in the dark background and to offset the straight white light hitting the actors from the Orb.
"The whole idea of the production design was to pretend that it was 1998," Daniel explains. "We wanted things to look contemporary but timeless. We had an existing red neon 'Future Firm Fitness Center' sign and about 150 yards of over 400 Chroma 50 fluorescent fixtures in eight-foot banks across the street. They were straight Chroma 50s, so they gave off a blue cast. We just wired them up underneath the overhang of the strip center. We went for any type of electrical source we could tap into."
As a final touch at the strip center, the cinematographer placed two 1000-watt mercury-vapor lights atop each of three existing parking-lot poles nearby. "In this part of the country, strip centers are using mercury-vapor lights that have a really super-blue cast," Daniel says. "We lit the actors with straight white light pretty much all the time, so we put a blue cast on all of the buildings in the background. It was an important part of the production design that Catherine and I had discussed beforehand."
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