"The balance between the dialogue and visuals is very crucial, especially in Shakespeare, so you can afford to be more oblique visually if you’ve got a lot of talking going on. Because the audience is listening hard, you don’t want the pictures to overwhelm the speech. That’s why I will always grade a film with sound. Some cinematographers like to time a film silently, and I’m not sure why. When I’ve timed a movie with no sound, I’ve tended to make the scenes brighter. You’re seeking information from the pictures, and you’re bound to feel differently about a scene if there’s no sound."
The wedding feast of Duke Theseus (David Straithairn) and Hippolyta (Sophie Marceau) was filmed at the Palazzo Fornazzi in the town of Caparolla. Stapleton had to figure out how to handle the sun’s progression for a scene in which several characters converse around a large table as an entire day passes. "To prevent the bad things the sun could do all day, we put up a big silk awning that was incorporated into the production design," he explains. "I’d remembered a similar situation on a previous film I’d photographed called She-Devil, and mentioned the idea of the awning to Lucianna. I ended up using very little light on the actors, because the actual sun hit this awning and was diffused beautifully.
"I knew that at about five in the evening, the hallway where the table was would go dark. [Gaffer] Alex Scott and I arranged to bring in 6K, 12K and 18K HMIs to shine through the silk and replace the real sun. We planned the day so that we could do all the shots that showed the real landscape behind the characters first, and then concentrate on the shots toward the table when it got darker. The only problem left was creating the reflection of the sky in the windows. We ended up putting up big silks and shining lights through them [to represent the sky], and it worked just fine."
Romantic comedies are rarely shot in the lush anamorphic format, but after looking at tests, Hoffman and Stapleton both agreed that the 2.35:1 aspect ratio was the right aesthetic choice for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. "One of the things Oliver and I agree on is to leave certain decisions up in the air until we see [footage] on a screen," Hoffman explains. "For Restoration, we’d been sure that we were going to shoot in ’Scope—we’d even already ordered the lenses. But when we studied the tests, we noticed that the close-ups in 1.85:1 format brought us closer to the world of 1700s portraiture that we’d studied in preproduction. At the last minute, we abandoned ’Scope and shot the movie in 1.85. It was just as obvious in the tests for this film that ’Scope was the answer. We’re so used to seeing landscape movies in ’Scope that it helps fool the audience into thinking they’re outside when they’re really looking at a very artificial set. I thought that was fascinating—I didn’t expect this illusion of being in nature."
Just prior to shooting A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Stapleton had photographed Stephen Frears’s western drama The Hi-Lo Country with English equipment designer Joe Dunton’s anamorphic 2.35:1 Research lenses, and he simply carried the same set over to Italy.—"I’d fallen in love with the 2.35 format again on The Hi-Lo Country," he says. "I suggested to Michael that since we were dealing with a Shakespeare play, maybe 2.35 would really separate it from the theatrical experience and make it a ’movie movie.’ He was very supportive of that idea. Joe’s lenses are based on the old Cookes, and the nice thing about them is that they’re so small and light that you can put them on a Steadicam without changing lenses. They also close-focus to about three feet, which is great. One of the problems of anamorphic is that a lot of the lenses don’t close-focus, which obviously is a big problem on a Shakespeare film."
Given the filmmakers’ decision to shoot in ’Scope, Stapleton didn’t worry too much about using a higher ASA stock, and the resulting grain. "The great thing about anamorphic is that since you’re only using the big part of the negative, grain really isn’t an issue," he points out. "The interiors were all shot on 500-speed Kodak [Vision 500T 5279] stock. I originally toyed with idea of shooting them on the 320 [Vision 320T 5277] stock, but then I discovered that to get the kind of image I wanted, I would have to shoot it at 200 ASA. And then I was winding up at too shallow a stop, a T2.8, when I wanted to shoot near a T4. In the end, I decided on the 500. The day exteriors were shot on Vision 320, rated at 200. It’s a softer stock, and it gave us a nicer feel."
Stapleton used a pair of his own Moviecam Compact cameras on the production, in addition to an Arri 35-III for second-unit work. "The Moviecam is a very versatile camera," he comments. "It’s just as easy to shoot handheld as it is to put it on a tripod or a Steadicam. In addition, it’s really quiet. We used the two Moviecams simultaneously quite a bit. Since it was Shakespeare and there was a lot of dialogue, we were able to do wider and tighter shots together, although once I’m indoors I find that using two cameras is usually a problem."
In the hands of undisciplined filmmakers, the crazy-quilt of dense plotlines and fantastic settings in A Midsummer Night’s Dream could easily tip over like an overfrosted wedding cake. Stapleton felt a refreshing sense of creative freedom working on a text that spurned rationality in a carefree way, but he acknowledges that the situation also called for a firm sense of self-restraint. "At the beginning of the film, Michael and I looked at each other and said, ’Well, this has nothing to do with realism!’" the cinematographer recalls. "I’ve made a lot of hard-edged, documentary-style films such as The Grifters and My Beautiful Laundrette, in which you try to make the cinematography look as if you just pitched up your equipment and started shooting. This movie was completely the opposite. The only problem with an ’Anything goes’ [aesthetic], of course, is that everyone can go tremendously over the top. You just have to make hard decisions about the world within the film. For A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we didn’t say ’Anything goes,’ but rather, ’This is non-naturalism.’ We put a cross through the concept of blue moonlight, and just decides that the woods didn’t need to feel like a real place in this particular film. It was very liberating."
