Director Tarsem and cinematographer Paul Laufer lend a surrealistic edge to The Cell, a sci-fi thriller that delves into the twisted psyche of a serial killer.
A disturbing and macabre science-fiction thriller, The Cell concerns psychologist Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), who uses a dangerous new drug therapy to enter the mind of comatose serial killer Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio) in order to learn the location of his latest victim before the girl dies. In entering Stargher’s nightmarish inner world, Catherine meets not only the monstrous adult killer he has become, but also his younger self, a frightened, sensitive, brutally abused boy who serves as her guide in the treacherous and unfamiliar surroundings.
The visual possibilities of the story are what attracted both cinematographer Paul Laufer and acclaimed commercial/music-video director Tarsem. The two men are frequent collaborators and have become something of a legend in the commercial world; in fact, New York’s Museum of Modern Art houses eight of their spots in its permanent collection. A South African native, Laufer worked briefly as a still photographer in Johannesburg before emigrating to the United States, where he attended The Art Center in Pasadena, California. He graduated just as MTV was getting off the ground and providing an entrée into the business for a generation of aspiring filmmakers. Laufer gradually worked his way up through the ranks in music videos. Around 1990, commercials were ready for a fresh look, and advertising producers began hiring people from music videos; many directors crossed over and took their cameramen with them.
The Cell marks Laufer’s second feature (after Frankie Starlight), and he envisaged two distinct looks for the film: the real world and the inner worlds of the characters, referred to as "the worlds" or "the entries." These inner worlds included not only the heightened, surreal environment of Stargher’s twisted psyche but also the feminine, nurturing landscape of Catherine’s mind and the troubled unconscious of a comatose child named Edward.
Laufer wanted the real world to look as naturalistic as possible, explaining, "The real world creates the context that makes ’the worlds’ themselves appear exceptional. In order to provide that contrast, I wanted the reality sections to look like any other detective or FBI movie you’ve ever seen." All of the film’s environments tested the cameraman’s ingenuity, as well as the resourcefulness of an exceptional rigging crew assembled under the direction of rigging gaffer Tom Nead and rigging grip Bob Leitelt. Laufer was effusive in his praise of the pair, describing them as "undaunted" in their willingness and ability to meet any challenge.
Perhaps the toughest obstacle they faced was lighting sets that, with few exceptions, had hard ceilings and were so big that they occupied nearly the entire stages on which they were built. (Every stage at the old Warner-Hollywood lot was used for the production.) The hard ceilings were suspended from the perms by aircraft cables, which were hung every six feet. Positioning lights in and around the cables was a difficult prospect, and cutting holes in the hard ceilings was generally not an option because they were too weak to support movie lights. "The cables really killed us," confirms gaffer George Ball, shaking his head. "Plus, we couldn’t get in any cranes."
A scene inside the medical institute’s conference room, where Catherine and her colleagues discuss whether to attempt the risky drug therapy, demonstrates both problems. The set consisted of a room some 12’ high by 20’ wide with a hard ceiling. The back wall of the conference room was glass and looked out onto an outdoor patio, which contained a rectangular reflecting pool. A TransLite was hung beyond the patio. The camera remained inside the conference room during the scene, with the glass wall and the patio clearly visible.
The scene was supposed to take place on a bright, sunlit day, but finding a place to put a sun source was tricky. The patio extended to within 10 feet of the north stage wall, but because four feet had to be kept clear as a fire lane, there were really only six feet of usable space. The TransLite was so close to the patio that there was no way to light it evenly, and trees had to be brought in to obscure it. "The one thing you need to create believable sunlight is distance," declares Laufer. "Being able to pick your direction is almost equally important. In both regards, we were severely limited."
Hanging lamps above the set was complicated by the aircraft cables that were holding up the conference-room ceiling. The stage floor didn’t offer any relief because the east side of the set backed right up to the fire lane, while the west side stood a mere 10 feet from another, even bigger set. This second set, which also had a hard ceiling, was the institute’s laboratory, where Catherine’s drug therapy is conducted. There was no room for a crane anywhere on the stage. In the end, the electricians decided to build three trusses above the lab set. Ball explains, "Key grip Alan Rawlins and his guys had to hang the trusses from the perms on chain motors because we couldn’t get lifts around." A couple of 20Ks were hung and directed at the patio as a sunlight source.
To brighten up the conference room, the grips cut a hole in the ceiling, which was too wide to support any kind of significant weight. A truss had to be built above the ceiling, amid the aircraft cables. Laufer recalls, "Any number of obstacles prevented us from working in an efficient manner." A silk for sky fill was suspended over the patio, with 60 space lights crowded above it and Skypans placed behind the TransLite. The space lights and the Skypans generated an enormous amount of heat, and in no time the temperature around the perms soared to 140 degrees. To alleviate the situation, an air-conditioning duct was positioned above the lights.
Three air-conditioning units were needed for the "horse room" scene, one of the most massive lighting setups in a film chock-full of elaborate lighting designs. The scene finds Catherine on one of her journeys into Stargher’s mind. She follows the younger Carl into a room where a horse is standing. Sensing danger, Carl pushes Catherine out of the way just as large panels of glass fall from the ceiling, vivisecting the horse into a dozen see-through blocks. These reveal the animal’s still-working internal organs; his heart beats and his ears twitch (courtesy of some deft CGI work done at Buf in Paris).
Laufer wanted to bombard the set with light but also keep it very even and soft to achieve what he calls "a 2001 look and feel." It was one of the few sets that did not have a hard ceiling, and the cameraman took full advantage of it. "I wanted to work at T16, so we needed a lot of light," he says. "Sixty-five Mini-Brute nine-lights almost 600 bulbs were suspended nine feet above the actors’ heads and put on dimmers to give me a richer color. I love having a big tungsten source or multiple tungsten sources dimmed down into a very warm range. A double silk was hung maybe four feet below the lights. I knew it would be like an oven in there, so we diverted the heat from the set with the air-conditioning ducts, which we slid between the two silks."
With the lighting in place, everything was set. But when the lights were finally switched on, almost 600 dimmed filaments started "singing" in unison and the lower they were dimmed, the louder they got. Rigging gaffer Nead knew that the Warner-Hollywood lot maintained a DC generating plant that dated back to the 1930s. "It was like stepping back into the past," Laufer marvels. "It looked like a set from Frankenstein’s laboratory, with huge dials and these amazing, pristine DC generators that were in perfect working order." DC current doesn’t vibrate filament, so the electrical crew repatched the whole stage through the DC plant, running cable halfway across the lot to connect the stage to the plant. They had to lose the dimmers because there were no DC dimmer boards, but in the end, it didn’t matter. "We had a walkie-talkie in the generator room, and the technician would run the gennies up and down depending upon what my meter was reading," Laufer says. "It gave me beautiful, warm light and it was perfectly silent."
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