Elmes eschews the notion of lighting by "formula," relying upon the scene at hand to suggest an artistic pathway. "There aren't any rules to this," he explains. "There was a time in my career when I felt the need to justify a light source in a scene, but now I'm much more liberal and place a light depending on the room, the scene and the architecture to create an effect. You need to take those chances, because sometimes that's what will best illustrate the drama of a specific character."
To illustrate his point, the cinematographer cites a scene in The Ice Storm in which Jim Carver returns home late one night after being out of town to find his wife Janey in the bedroom. "They have a conversation while sitting on their waterbed," Elmes describes, "The house is very, very dark, but clearly there is a very large light source outside their window lighting the bedroom. Well, I have no idea what that source is. I first thought, 'Moonlight is reaching into the room.' But it's a low, raking moonlight that is quite unbelievable. Somehow, though, it feels right for the dialogue that takes place. Going with the feeling was more important than being truthful, so we had a 10K coming through the window, making a very hard shaft of light."
The production's dailies were processed at DuArt in New York. "The staff there is very supportive," Elmes says. "The intermediate elements were processed at Technicolor, and Deluxe made the release prints in Los Angeles."
Dailies were screened on location. "It was important to me to see dailies on film," Elmes attests. "The picture was cut on an Avid, so Ang and the editor, Tim Squires, also felt that it was important to conform the workprint to the Avid cut and screen that as well. Then they would go back and make further editing changes. That approach made it even more important for me to get the dailies print as close to the intended look as possible. I didn't want them to have to imagine what the final look would be like."
Asked if Ang Lee is a technically oriented filmmaker, Elmes replies, "He's not when it comes to the camera, but he's very intuitive. When I show him a lens on the viewfinder, he has a very good sense of what it does to the space, how out of focus the background is, and what the scale of the shot is. That's not 'technical,' but it shows a lot of sensitivity. Ang always had an opinion about the composition and the size of the characters in the frame, but he left a lot of those decisions up to me."
Elmes generally subscribes to the belief that a dependence on video monitors as a reference tool can become problematic in theatrical feature filmmaking. "We did use a video tap, but relying too much on the monitor can be a real trap," he opines. "What works best for me is to make sure that the director watches a full rehearsal through the viewfinder, just as the operator would on a real take. That's the only way for them to accurately judge a shot. Ang was used to doing that, and liked it, so I continued to insist upon it.
"In terms of framing, I tried to give the characters a sense of isolation, because that helped tell the story and convey a lack of communication between people. I sometimes put performers in odd parts of the frame. Many ideas grew out of the blocking of the scenes with the actors."
This "detached" aesthetic is exemplified by a scene in which a drunken Ben has passed out in a bathroom during a neighborhood swingers party. Elena soon appears for a confrontation. "We dollied down a hall with Elena to see her open the bathroom door," Elmes details. "She goes in, sits down and has a dialogue with Ben and then comes back out into the hall just past the camera, all in one shot. In the background we still see him on the floor, but instead of leaving the focus on him which is the obvious choice we stay with Elena's hand on the door in the foreground. In the greatest little bit of 'hand acting' that I have seen in many years, Joan Allen does this little hesitation before she leaves him there. My choice was to go back to Kevin Kline, but Ang wanted to hold on the door, and he was very convincing in his argument to do that."
Lee offers, "I think any good actor or actress can perform with just their hands. Usually we just shoot their faces, which is boring. We see faces too often, so a hand, shoulder, or body position can often be much more emotional. Plus, in this specific scene, Ben, our hero, is pathetically sitting by the toilet, and I didn't want to see that too clearly! I thought we used that kind of focus play quite well in this film, but it isn't a technique I would use in a movie version of a Jane Austen novel."
Elmes employed Arriflex 535 cameras and Zeiss standard lenses to capture the film's crisp images. "Ang and I had a discussion about lenses and how any diffusion could impact the sense of cold we were trying to create," the cinematographer recalls. "We decided against using any at all."
The decision to either move the camera closer to the performers or utilize longer lenses for close-ups also became a point of discussion. Elmes notes, "Most of the film's scenes were shot in the the actual living rooms, dining rooms and kitchen areas of the key houses, so wider lenses were needed to fit in some of the rooms. We seldom used long lenses for close-ups; our usual lengths were 40mm, 50mm or sometimes 75mm. We had done lens tests before production, specifically one that I always like to do for directors I haven't worked with before."
This test consisted filming identical close-ups of each actor with lenses ranging from 20mm to 150mm. "Those shots made it very clear as to how the combination of the focal length and camera distance will affect the geography of a performer's face and the relationship to the background," Elmes says. "We then selected the focal lengths that seemed the most pleasing. Ang had never tried this kind of test before, and we both learned from it."
Because of the color scheme that the filmmakers had in mind, and the outrageous fashion choices offered by a Seventies period film, Elmes and Lee also photographed many costume tests, examining different fabrics on the actors. "We also did some different things with makeup, and went out of our way to put characters next to each others in the tests to see what they might look like together," Elmes says. "Mark Friedberg brought in big painted samples of wall colors to use as backgrounds."
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