A favorite holiday fable springs to vivid life in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, directed by Ron Howard and photographed by Don Peterman, ASC.
At the risk of sounding like a true holiday humbug, Don Peterman, ASC admits that he’d never read How The Grinch Stole Christmas before he accepted the job of shooting director Ron Howard’s feature-film version. "It’s really funny," Peterman remembers. "I read the movie script before I ever read the book! It was the same kind of thing with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. When I first was offered that job, I didn’t know any of those characters other than Spock! I’d never seen the television show, so I wasn’t sure I should do it. But my agent said, ’Look, don’t turn this down, this is going to be good!’ And oddly enough, I got an Oscar nomination for it."
Nevertheless, Peterman feels that The Grinch was his most unusual assignment yet. "There were so many peculiar things on this picture, things that just don’t come up often," he says. "There was the wild makeup and the [limited] hours we could work each day [because of the time required to apply Jim Carrey’s makeup], not to mention the gigantic sets on 10 soundstages at Universal. I’ve done 26 pictures, and these were the biggest sets I’ve ever worked on. At the start, it looked like the lights were going to be prohibitively expensive. We were able to scale that down, and with the help of producer David Womark, we were able to get what we needed. Even scaled down, though, this was the biggest lighting package I’ve ever used."
The sets required massive air-conditioning units, not only because of the heat buildup from the lights, but also because the actors wore winter clothes and the heavy makeup. "In prep, we realized we needed extra generators for the air-conditioning, but they really worked," Peterman recalls. "In the morning the stages were about 45 degrees [Fahrenheit], and by the end of the day they’d be around 60. That made Carrey’s makeup and furry costume a bit easier to wear. It helped the other performers, too, since they had to be all bundled up."
A small army of makeup people and hairstylists prepared the cast for each day’s shoot, working under the supervision of five-time Academy Award winner Rick Baker. "Rick did a great job," Peterman says. "Even the extras in the background all look different from one another. There’s a stage at Cinovation, his company in Glendale [California], so instead of dragging the makeup people over to the studio, we were able to do makeup and costume tests there. I tried all kinds of green light on The Grinch. His fur is an olive-green hue, but it leans toward brown and photographs black if you don’t watch out. At the same time, I didn’t want him to be too green, too much like a cartoon. However, I did let him go pretty green when we showed him as a child during a flashback."
Peterman originally wanted to do the flashback scenes in black-and-white, with The Grinch a bright green exception. This idea was shelved because it was deemed too expensive for a film already facing an array of logistical challenges. One of the biggest worries was the time it took to transform Carrey into The Grinch a consideration that affected the cinematographer’s lighting design. "Every morning, they worked on Jim for four hours," Peterman reveals. "His makeup and contacts were hard to wear for long periods, and even the most skilled experts can’t change the fact that it takes a long time to do that kind of thing. We’d get Jim at 11 a.m., and we usually worked with him until about 6 p.m. Because we had to work fast when we had him, I didn’t have time to move lights around the studio floor or bring in a Condor to light a building or any of the usual things you do on a stage. We had to figure out how to provide most of the lighting we’d need on the huge sets simply by throwing switches. It all had to be pre-rigged before anybody walked onto a stage."
The need to shoot quickly also meant that most of the lights had to be hung from the soundstage ceiling. Because the sets towered high above the studio floor, the lights had to be hung above the perms; otherwise, they’d appear in the shots. In addition, huge 360-degree bluescreens were used on some sets, and these also required their own pre-rigged lights.
Peterman gives much of the credit for the first-unit prep work to second-unit director of photography Keith Peterman and chief lighting technician Gary Palmer. "Gary is actually a director of photography himself," Peterman explains. "He’s done commercials and visual effects work, and he’s also worked with me on quite a few films as chief lighting technician. [Lighting console operator] Scott Barnes created lighting schematics based on the master lighting blueprints I worked out with Gary. We got a lot of prep time, which is something I believe in, because any wasted time always comes off the hours you’ve allotted for the lighting and actual production. Once we were in production, I’d prepare by going over the upcoming week’s work with Ron [Howard]."
Some of Peterman’s prep time was spent with production designer Michael Corenblith, who helped him devise Seussian patterns to throw on the walls of the Whoville interiors. For a scene set in the Whoville post office, Peterman asked Corenblith about projecting a pattern straight down at a beige floor with Leko lights. "I always asked before I did anything like that so my ideas wouldn’t work against his set designs," Peterman says. "Michael came up with a pattern that worked great; you’ll see it on the post office floor and also on the people as they walk through the halls. Sometimes we’d project window patterns onto walls. There’s a scene in Cindy-Lou Who’s house when the family comes down Christmas morning to find all their presents gone. The scene takes place at dawn, so we projected weird window patterns on the wall to suggest that the sun was just peeking up. We’d also project very hard HMI shadow lights through lace onto walls, just to make things even more ’Whoey.’"
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