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Despite the great pains taken to create a sense of depth around the convenience store, Daniel still faced more than a few lengthy scenes in which Jeff and his buddies traded dialogue against a stark brick wall on one side of the convenience store. "I knew those scenes would be a challenge photographically," he says. "There wasn't anything visually interest in that area besides some old graffiti. I thought, 'The audience is going to drop dead if you just lock off the camera and let three or four people talk for seven or eight pages of dialogue.'"
To solve the problem, Daniel came up with the idea of introducing movement in the frame through the illusion of car activity. "We set up a system of 'headlight gags,'" he reveals. "In the natural world, you see car reflections all the time. The funny thing was, we started to develop a whole new nomenclature as we went along. The gags became such a habit every night that the gaffer, electricians and I had fun coming up with a new terminology to describe each specific one. Most of them were named after food items.
"For instance, if you took a double header with two 1Ks on it and just panned it across the scene to simulate headlights, that would be a 'pound cake.' When you brought the effect into the scene and then turned and went out the same way you had come in, it was termed a 'tuna sandwich.' And if you brought your 'pound cake' through the scene and then dimmed it down as if the car was fading off in the distance, that would be a 'bag of chips.' You could have a 'tuna sandwich' with a 'bag of chips.' We had at least half a dozen different gags."
Daniel pushed the 200 ASA 5287 film one stop to 400 for most of the filming. "The big difference between subUrbia and Before Sunrise was that we had an ensemble cast for this film," Daniel explains. "We needed more depth of field so that as many of the actors as possible would be in focus. I pumped up the light level so that I could work at about an f2.8 stop. Pushing the film also bumped up the saturation and contrast, which is what we were looking for anyway. subUrbia is a street picture, so we wanted that contrasty, gritty feel. The Zeiss Superspeed lenses we used also tend to be inherently pretty contrasty, so they're nice for getting really good blacks."
Daniel found that he had to switch to 500 ASA 5298 film for darker scenes set away from the convenience store. For an extended Steadicam shot tracking the characters as they wandered aimlessly down an Austin street, the cinematographer reverted to a simple but resourceful fill method he had first used on Before Sunrise.
"We had one 6K up on a Condor lighting the actors, and a 12K on another Condor for the backlight," he recalls. "But we also handheld a 2' by 4' Kino Flo over the Steadicam to fill in the actors' eyes, similar to what we had done on Before Sunrise. In that movie, the couple walked through many different pools of light in the streets of Vienna. There were halogens, fluorescents, mercury-vapors, sodium-vapors, and standard incandescents. It was of the utmost importance to keep Julie and Ethan's skin tones consistent, so we used a very lightweight lightbox of mini Kino Flos around the mattebox to put a little frontal light on them."
Complicating matters further in subUrbia were the vastly different skin tones of lead actor Giovanni Ribisi and Amie Carey, who plays the part of Jeff's girlfriend. "Giovanni is really pale, while Amie is part Native American," Daniel explains. "She has naturally dark skin, so for scenes involving both of them, I would often have to put a single and a double net over his light, not hers, so that the light would even out."
As with nearly every location shoot, the filmmakers were sometimes at the mercy of the elements during their speedy 22-day shooting schedule. In a crucial scene filmed over two nights in a deserted alley where Jeff bonds with the troubled Bee Bee (Dina Spyvey), Daniel used a 12K gelled CTO through some trees to make an eerie shadow of branches against the wall behind the actors. "Unfortunately, one night was really windy and the other just wasn't," he explains. "During that scene, sometimes you see the shadows of the leaves against the wall, and sometimes you don't. I liked the effect, but I wish it could have been more consistent."
Linklater and Daniel initially considered shooting the entire film with a handheld camera, but eventually decided that judicious camera movement to highlight important moments in the story would be more effective. For one scene, in which Jeff peers curiously at a deserted van that he believes to be the site of a murder, Linklater jogged his encyclopedic movie memory to come up with an eerie visual hook.
"We used a handheld camera on a dolly that was moving very slowly," he discloses. "I call it the old Friday the 13th shot, a P.O.V. inching in on the van from Jeff's eyes. I liked the creepy quality of that shot. I'm always telling the dolly operator, 'That speed you just went there? Half as much.' If you go too fast, it works as a sort of psychological exclamation point, which Martin Scorsese does really effectively. But with the pace of this film and the type of characters we were dealing with, a faster move wouldn't have been appropriate. The characters were coming to gradual realizations in this film, so the camera movements had to be slower. I don't like camera movement that draws attention to itself. I think it would feel intrusive and out of whack in my films."
Similarly, the director prefers focal lengths that approximate what the human eye naturally sees. "That's the sort of thing Lee and I always argue about," he laughs. "He naturally wants to be on longer lenses, but I consider a 50mm to be a long lens! I really like wide lenses. I think they're closer to the way I view the world, and I like seeing how characters inhabit the space around them. This film also has a lot of characters in the frame at once, so we shot most of the movie with two lenses, the 25mm and the 35mm."
subUrbia begins on a note of wicked irony, as the camera pans over acres of souless suburban architecture to the bathetic strains of Gene Pitney's "Town Without Pity." "We didn't have to spend too much time looking for really ugly locations and tract houses," Daniel notes wryly. "Austin is in the midst of a major boom, with all kinds of construction going on and something like 100 people a day moving here. The second unit went and shot a lot of those areas, and then Rick and I found some ourselves."