The initial dilemma for Ward and Serra was how to film the shores of Hell, a vast landscape dotted with the twisted, battered hulks of old vessels. "I did a rough drawing of the ship graveyard, some of which I knew would be constructed as models, but what could I do when we got close to them?" Ward recalls. "If we built a set, it could only be so large. Fortunately, Eugenio found an abandoned aircraft carrier that was going to be chopped up for scrap metal, and came up with the really fantastic idea of redressing it so that we had this enormous real-life location." To illuminate the enormous carrier — a nighttime setup in a San Francisco shipyard — Serra deployed five 15' helium balloons fitted with four 4K HMI lamps. The cinematographer expounds, "The balloons were controllable, very easy to use, and very useful for creating a relatively soft top light in a big area. I also used fire and flares as practical sources, though not close enough to the actors to make it dangerous. Still, shooting there was dangerous because the ship was in such poor condition. For safety reasons, the areas we could use were quite limited."
After Chris, Albert and the Tracker rise up in an elevator alongside the derelict ship, they push past hordes of damned souls and reach the Sea of Faces, a desolate plain strewn with living human heads gazing upwards at a bleak sky. "The problem was how to create that image in a way that would allow an actor to walk across the faces without stepping on someone's head," Ward says. "Eugenio was incredibly ingenious. He designed an elevated set so we could fit people under the stage. Three out of every four heads were to be made of rubber. We cut a hole where the fourth head would be and put an actual person's face in there. Then, by using their hands, each person would manipulate the two malleable rubber masks on either side of them, so three out of the four faces would be moving. Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding and Max von Sydow could just walk over the rubber faces [as if they were stepping stones]. That allowed them to easily cross the set, which I thought was quite brilliant."
The tremendous economy and imagination of the Sea of Faces' Gustave Doré-inspired production design was well-matched by Serra's stark, impressionistic lighting. "However, it was quite difficult because the set was a little too small, and I felt we needed it to go on forever," Serra declares. "I used a giant drop silk — a reflective material — and I was bouncing [light] on it so that I would have a very huge gray sky above them — very soft and slightly backlit, with no fill light."
Quite paradoxically, Serra's exploitation of soft sources in Dreams lent a very hard, shadowy look. "I've been working on that for 20 years," he says. "I do want modeling and contrast in the image, so my main goal is always to reconcile these two things that people might think are contradictory: softlight and contrast. That's my obsession."
