The devastated Hell-bound incarnation of the house was constructed on a gimbal so it could be tilted at cockeyed angles to emphasize the unbalanced emotions of Annie's existence. Needless to say, this made Serra's own situation a living hell, requiring his crew to construct inclined platforms to counteract the angle of the floor and give them level space for dolly work. "At one end, however, the platform would be very tall," Serra explains, "so we would have to boom down or up to keep the shots level depending on which way we were dollying. We also had a Steadicam, but it was very difficult to control because of the tilted stage. The operator also had a good risk of falling because there were all of these broken objects on the floor."
Due to the slanted stage surface, Serra primarily set his lights on stands off the gimbaled platform. "We had a lot of freedom in that sequence because it was not a strictly realistic situation," he says. "We used strong shafts of hard light, which we would never have used during the rest of the film. At first, I fought against using our beams of light through smoke, because they become too 'glamorous,' but [in this case] it made for a completely different universe." The jumbled, unsteady flooring kept operators Anastas Michos and Kim Marks on their toes, while the hard-light approach conspired to make properly illuminating the actors a difficult proposition. Serra and gaffer Jack English therefore relied upon easily maneuverable, lightweight Kino Flo banks or simple bounce cards to provide fill on the players' faces.
While the wrecked house is the endpoint of Chris's journey into the underworld, the highway to Hell is a land littered with the refuse of lost souls, as realized by Ward, Serra and production designer Eugenio Zanetti (Flatliners, Restoration). "I had a very specific range of images that I associated with Hell," Ward says. "We changed the screenplay so that it had these scenes which gave it the feel of heroic myth. The final sequence takes place in the upside-down cathedral surrounding the remnants of Chris and Annie's house, which was originally designed by Mike Worrall for Alien3, but never used because I didn't finish that film. [Ward departed Alien3 just prior to shooting and was replaced by David Fincher.] Our depiction of Hell is a bit in the vein of [19th-century French artist] Gustav Doré because I wanted to make it feel more like an ancient fable rather than purely a psychological journey — though that was a feeling I also wanted."
Chris's quest to find his wife begins in a dreamlike version of Venice brimming with books, and an amazing library with canals for aisles. There, he and his guide, Albert (Cuba Gooding Jr.), meet up with the mysterious Tracker (Max von Sydow), who agrees to help them find Annie in this netherworld. "The library was based on the work of the visionary 19th-century architect Boulleé," Ward recalls. "I brought Boulleé [into the discussion], and Eugenio decided to use his material. The water was an idea I had because I was very keen on keeping the sense of the quest, and also because water automatically makes a set look less like a set."
The massive library set was constructed on one side of an indoor water tank found at the decommissioned Treasure Island Naval Base in the San Francisco Bay; on the opposite bank lay Chris's cottage in the Painted World. Later, the library set was struck and replaced by a golden "stairway to heaven" setpiece. Despite their differences, each of these sets presented the same problem: as large as the Treasure Island facility was, it could not accommodate all of the imposing environments. "They were difficult sets because I wasn't able to have much space above or around them," Serra admits. "I often used many space lights for the general fill, and from behind the set I had cherry pickers and elevating platforms reaching the top of the set and the ceiling for my strong key lights."
Much of the library set's scale was fabricated via CG — particularly the entry of Chris's sailboat into the library, where the camera does a magnificent crane move up to reveal the impressive interior, then turns completely around to follow our heroes through the archive. "Two-thirds of that shot was done on the computer," Serra marvels. "We had drawings plus computer printouts that showed the actual set combined with the CG. We shot normally when the boat was against the actual set, but sometimes the reverses were shot against huge greenscreens placed in the set."
The sequence also demanded extensive wirework (later erased), which enabled Chris and Albert to practically glide to the top of the stacks, where they find the dour Tracker hovering amidst the uppermost shelves. After the characters reached their destination, the actors were placed on a small crane platform, which bobbed up and down to lend a floating feeling.
When the three adventurers take the sailboat out into the open sea, they traverse a canal formed of bookshelves rising to infinity, an effect achieved by cleverly reconfiguring the setpieces, then placing a greenscreen at the end, where the open sea was added digitally. After the trio is attacked by swarming Hellions — a scene actually shot in a swimming pool elsewhere — they land on the grim shores of Hell, which Serra illustrated with minimalistic colors. "I was always trying to avoid any blue backlight or rimlight, which again would be, for me, too glamorous for the journey to Hell. Hell was an area in a kind of a permanent twilight — not day, not night. I tried to give it consistency by always having some top light, but my key preoccupation was always to make Hell as monochromatic as possible."
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