Lachman lit Valentine's modernist mansion in the Hollywood Hills primarily with augmented sunlight, using 18K HMIs coming through the windows: "I mixed the temperatures in there, using straight tungstens on practicals inside so they'd be warmer than the exterior windows. However, because the windows were so burned out, we almost completely lost their color."
During a daytime party sequence staged there, Wilson and Ed loiter outside on a narrow platform jutting over the edge of the hillside, waiting for a chance to confront Valentine. In one panoramic shot, the pair look out over smog-choked Los Angeles, incredulous that anyone would pay for such a view. "That's Steven's favorite shot," Lachman says. "Here's someone who has built a multimillion-dollar house to see just whiteness. You know L.A. is out there somewhere, but there's nothing to see.
"One problem with filming up in the hills is logistical: how do you get the crew and equipment up there and parked? While shooting in the house, there was no place to put the equipment, because we were filming so much of the area. Of course, you also have to deal with the neighborhood. I find it ironic that Hollywood is one of the worst places in the world to shoot a movie on location—nobody wants to be next door to a production, because I guess that's what they do at work all day.
"That said, our location house had all of these great windows that were terrific sources for light, allowing us to basically work off what was there. The interior was also primarily white, so that helped us as well."
At Valentine's mansion in Big Sur, Soderbergh wanted to stage a climactic chase scene between Wilson and Valentine on the shore below some steep cliffs, an area that was basically inaccessible for standard filmmaking gear. "The solution was to build a cable system in order to fly some HMI lighting balloons over the area, so we could view the sea, the cliffs and this house," Lachman details, noting that he'd never used such floating fixtures before. "It was a real process. The major problem was getting these cement stanchions out into the sea, and then rigging the cables to hold the balloons in place. We didn't know how viable our plan would be because the winds were unpredictable, but we were lucky over the two nights we shot down there.
"Another problem was the tide changes, because we just had this very narrow rocky shoreline, which almost completely disappeared at high tide. After a few takes in any given position, we'd have to move everything because the waterline was changing. The balloons helped us in this regard, because they carried such a broad area that we never had to move them around.
"After this experience, I'm a big fan of using balloons, but there's still something to be said about using Condors. If you want a general light over open space, balloons are great, but [the light] has no direction to it."
Working with production designer Gary Frutkoff, Lachman regularly tried to incorporate lighting into their settings. "At the Big Sur house, we used Malibu lights around the grounds leading into the darkness, and practicals on the house itself," the cameraman offers. "Steven wanted a very stark, cold nighttime world outside, which was provided by our HMI balloons. The house interior is very warm, in part because you see so much wood—beautiful teak and cedar—and it was predominately lit by a fireplace for most scenes." The fireplace was already rigged for gas, and the illumination was boosted with the used of small lamps on flicker generators.
Considering the artfully down-and-dirty style he used to shoot The Limey, Lachman offers, "It's interesting to watch the trends in cinematography, and it seems that the pendulum has been swinging away from the direction of creating cosmetically 'perfect' images. Film stocks are so grainless and wonderful, and lenses are so pristine and sharp, that I feel we need to go back a bit in the direction of feeling that something is 'real,' so that we're not manufacturing some homogenized abstraction of reality.
"Steven understood that if we were going to approach the storytelling, these were the kinds of images we'd find. It excited him to explore different ways of telling the story of The Limey photographically. If you're going to investigate this low-rent, underbelly world, why not use a low-rent means to tell the story? I think audiences want stories about real human emotion and conflict, and moving away from sterile technical perfection can help on those kinds of films."
