Stapleton’s solution was a simple but effective illusory technique known in England as "dingle" lighting. "In England, when you set up a branch in front of a source and you get the shadow of a tree, we call it ’dingle,’" he describes. "In both of the forest worlds, dingle was one of the psychological tricks I used to make the scenes feel like night without going too dark. That way, I could use directional light that would feel like moonlight, rather than just having soft light blasting all around the place. Through the whole movie, I could be seen carting around dingle number 1, dingle number 2 and so on, like a kit of gels. I had branches of certain leaves and certain shapes that I would use in different situations, depending on whose face was in the scene and what kind of effect I wanted. I don’t think I made a single shot throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream without some sort of branch in my hand!
"We then had to figure out how to get a sense of movement in the frame. Fans make too much noise, particularly the ones they make in Rome! Instead, we had dozens of Italian crew members holding pieces of wire strung between all of the leaves and trees, and they would shake them to make the woodland move. They did this for weeks on end, which was quite tedious! But I had to make sure that was always happening, because if there was no movement in the trees, the scenes immediately felt quite dead and stagey."
Lights were also physically moved to add to the illusion of activity in the woods. Crew members in lighting grids panned an array of tungsten lights (ranging from 2Ks to 24Ks), and moved large gobos (with branches draped over them) across the light during various shots. "Night in the movie is moving nearly all the time," Stapleton says. "I wanted the woods to always seem alive, as if some person, creature or troupe of fairies might appear at any time. We were working in an incredibly artificial environment, but when we combined the costumes, the set design, the light and the movement in a certain way, it all sprang to life."
Stapleton added further dimension to the woods by using powerful Jumbo lighting units provided by the Rome-based company Iride, which is run by Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC’s longtime gaffer, Pippo Cafolla. The cinematographer explains, "They’re basically aircraft landing lights—giant, 36-kilowatt lights which are very strong because they have 36 bulbs in them and they’re very spotty. They cut through atmosphere, smoke, branches, leaves and trees, and gave me highlights of leaves that are completely unique to that type of light. These lights were so strong and directional that they made 20K or 24K tungstens look like babys in comparison. Since they’re very hard lights, I used them to make the moonlight beams and the backlight. They also solved the problem of making the backlight cooler, since they were near 3400° Kelvin."
The cinematographer also quickly realized that such a concentrated beam could be cleverly used to lend Michelle Pfeiffer’s Titania an otherworldly aura. "Michelle was definitely the leader of the ’magical people’ in the film," Stapleton says. "As a—major figure in the film business, she also is referred to as the ’Queen of Hollywood,’ I believe! I felt strongly that she should have a fairly unreal, magical, over-the-top feeling about her. Generally speaking, I don’t use much diffusion, but I decided to diffuse her close-ups in a way that was almost noticeable, so that the audience would definitely have the feeling of being introduced to someone special. This wasn’t your average fairy, if you like! I used a combination of the 1/4 ProMist and a 1/2 Tiffen FX, which would vary a bit depending on the shot. To top it off, she was given a very strong-edged backlight from one of those 36-kilowatt Jumbo lights."
Hoffman enthusiastically encouraged Stapleton to push his lighting to fantastic extremes since, as its title suggests, A Midsummer Night’s Dream isn’t bound to any sense of objective reality. "Right from the first dailies, we steered the movie towards the look of Thirties Hollywood movies," Hoffman says. "It had to do with how Oliver deals with backlight, and how he uses lights in exteriors in really clever ways. I said to him, ’I don’t know exactly what you’re doing, but it’s feeling to me like The Wizard of Oz.’ I just really loved it. And he said to me, ’I don’t know exactly what I’m doing either, but I think we should keep experimenting with it.’ That led to this very glamorous, old-fashioned look for Titania."
While the lively, magical feel of Titania’s world provided plenty of motivation for Stapleton to paint scenes with light and movement, the moodier, more sparsely decorated Oberon set called for some compensation. "Oberon’s world had very few trees, so there was much less excuse for light and shade," he explains. "There were also a lot of plain, hilly Polystyrene surfaces on the set that had to look good. I wound up putting the gobos up in the air out of shot, using the motion of passing clouds as an excuse for moving the light. I didn’t have much excuse for using dingles, but I did it anyway—I just cheated a bit! There were a few trees there, but they weren’t the kind of trees we’d seen in the other set. The movement of the light in Oberon’s world is more farfetched, but without it, it would look very static and stagey. If we’d had more money, I would have loved to have put in a proper ’moving clouds’ system."
In addition to the weeks of work inside Cinecitta Studios, the production was granted permission to use several beautiful Italian locations, such as the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, where the interiors of Theseus’s palace were filmed. Scene painters added a fresco portraying Cupid’s exploits to the magical frescoes of forests and rivers that already adorned the site. "The main challenge in the Villa d’Este was getting the right degree of softness between the characters and the background," Stapleton recalls. "If you’re photographing actors in front of paintings or painted walls where there are a lot of faces, you’ve got to work out the degree of sharpness you want. Obviously, you don’t want to throw the frescoes so out of focus that you can’t see them, because that’s why you’ve paid all that money to go there in the first place! But you also don’t want the faces of the paintings competing for attention with your actors. In that particular location, the paintings on the wall were quite soft and muted, in terms of their style and colors. It was therefore possible to photograph them much more sharply than I could have if we were in the newly restored Sistene Chapel, or someplace that had very bright colors and sharp edges.
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