This early photographic research contributed to the monochromatic, desaturated look that Scorsese and Richardson eventually adopted. "Most of the photographs I looked at were in black-and-white, so that is how I began perceiving the look of the film, even though it was to be in color," Ferretti says.
Scorsese confirms, "I wanted the film to be less colorful, and Bob suggested skip-bleaching." This process involves an either partial or total elimination of the bleach step in printing, which results in the retention of more silver in the image, creating desaturated colors and deeper blacks (see "Soup du Jour," AC Nov. ’98). "Bob showed me his upcoming film, Snow Falling on Cedars, in which the skip-bleach process was used effectively, and I said, ’Let’s do it!’" Scorsese enthuses. "My ideal of desaturated color is the control they got with the Technicolor [prints] of Moby Dick, a look that was designed by director John Huston and cinematographer Oswald Morris [BSC] in 1956. However, the skip-bleaching gave Bringing Out the Dead another flavor and tone that I also like."
This tone is especially apparent in some of the film’s driving scenes. While light motivated from road signs was occasionally played on the actors, Richardson tried to de-emphasize the signs’ warm effect in shots of the streets. "Part of the point of the bleach-bypass was to overwhelm the red and yellow tones, which tend to predominate from signs in Manhattan at night," the cinematographer says. "We were trying to move the whole film to a cooler black-and-white feel."
Bringing Out the Dead was shot in the anamorphic (2.35:1)format with Panavision’s older C- and E-series anamorphic lenses (although Richardson did utilize Panavision’s Super High-Speed T1.4 35mm anamorphic lens for many of the film’s ambulance-mounted shots). Richardson debunks the idea that a widescreen film shot on the street at night might be better accomplished in spherical Super 35. "Unless a zoom lens is critical to the film," he avows, "there isn’t that great a difference between the speeds of spherical and anamorphic prime lenses, and I happen to like the look of an anamorphic lens wide open at T2; some people may not. My first assistant, Gregor Tavenner, is extraordinarily capable at maintaining focus at such apertures. As it was, we used no zooms, except for one shot where Marty wanted a snap pullout from the front of the ambulance."
The older lenses were tapped because they helped avoid an excess of contrast, and because the cinematographer is comfortable with them. "I’m accustomed to the C and E lenses," he says. "I felt it was especially important to stick with those older lenses on this film. There’s a high level of contrast with the Primos, and given the deep blacks of the bleach-bypass printing, and the fact that the new Kodak print stocks are higher in contrast, we would have picked up enough contrast to bury the dead!"
To scale back some of the extra contrast created by the bleach-bypass process, Richardson used a 1/8 to 1/4 black ProMist filter throughout the production.
One of the crew’s biggest challenges on the show was preparing practical locations. In addition to following Pierce and his partners as they delivered people to the emergency room, Scorsese wanted to be able to show the medics racing into apartments from the street. Scenes set in the Burke apartment were therefore filmed in a real, occupied tenement apartment which the crew took over for a month. Six walls were actually removed in this apartment so the filmmakers would have more room. "It was a mess," Ferretti laments. "We had to put everything back because people lived there and were coming back after spending a month in a hotel."
Richardson details, "The camera was always coming in through a door, entering, exiting and moving up stairs and down and out to the street. However, when it came to the scenes between Patricia and Nic, Martin kept things more static. Throughout the rest of the film, which moves very rapidly, we were constantly following people speeding through the city, so it made a certain amount of sense to stop moving when we weren’t in the ambulance."
The composition and movement of virtually every shot was predetermined by Scorsese. "Marty tends to pre-design more than 90 percent of his shots," Richardson explains. "Of course, there is some flexibility in those pre-designed shots, depending on what the location can or cannot provide. He may alter his preconception if he feels it is just not worth the time to stick to the storyboard. However, once he believes that something needs to be done a certain way, it will be done that way no matter what it takes."
Richardson adds that there are always a small number of shots that have not been storyboarded, but he maintains, "It’s not like I come along and say, ’Let’s do this or that.’ The shots that are not down on paper are defined by Marty once he arrives on set. There’s not a great deal of interaction with the cinematographer on what a shot may or may not do; there may be some small adjustments, but I emphasize the word ’small.’"
Scorsese notes, however, that he left the actual job of photographing the streets from ambulance-mounted cameras to Richardson. "I would ask Bob to compose shots so that the ambulance’s roof lights were framed a certain way," Scorsese notes. "He found streets that had the most light and took a lot of footage, much of which was undercranked, and some of which was overcranked. He improvised, getting extra images from setups similar to the ones I specified. Those extra shots proved to be handy in three or four scenes."
When not approximating the EMTs’ hallucinatory point of view, Scorsese turned the cameras from the streets and onto the drivers, showing their various responses blank, caustic, bewildered and angry to the bizarre night city flying past them. To film these driving scenes, Richardson mounted up to a half-dozen lights around the ambulance on a process trailer. In almost all instances, the cinematographer avoided the use of constant illumination inside the ambulance cab, preferring to create an avalanche of lighting effects that were ostensibly emanating from the streets. "We turned the lights on and off and swished them to simulate the effect of driving by various light sources," Richardson explains. "We’d go from front light to side light, simulate passing street lamps, and occasionally approximate the look of the actors being hit with car headlights. We sometimes matched our lights to road signs, which is all you read in Manhattan at night."
As the story progresses and Pierce becomes more unraveled, the film’s visual landscape becomes progressively more chaotic. "There is a more aggressive visual quality as we move through the three different partners Nic has in the film," Richardson notes. "As Nic’s character proceeds through his story, our lighting and camera angles become much more extreme."
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