Edelman expresses considerable admiration for Polanski’s staging: “He has the great, very rare talent of seeing what is really important in the scene. He always knows where to put the camera and the actors to achieve the most natural and organic effect. He would rather simplify a scene than complicate it, and he does this by choosing the essential elements.”

When the filmmakers began planning Oliver Twist, they discussed shooting in anamorphic 2.40:1, according to Edelman. Despite his own love for the format, however, the cinematographer felt that Super 35mm was a better choice. “There are so many scenes with low light levels, usually with candlelight as the only source, so my intuition was to go with Super 35mm,” says Edelman. “I think we made the right choice.” Choosing spherical lenses also increased the depth of field, heightening the filmmakers’ dynamic framing. For Edelman, the chief disadvantage of Super 35mm was the increased grain; he notes that the 2K resolution that is standard in digital intermediates (DIs) is a little small for anamorphic release. “It would be great to have 4K,” he says.

In designing a lighting approach for an era lit by candles, fireplaces and gaslights, Edelman started with his penchant for realism. “Maybe it’s a question of taste, or maybe it’s my old-fashioned feeling about photography, but I feel that you should try to render what your eyes see in real life,” he remarks. His desire to motivate the light from fireplaces and candles ruled out lighting from above the set. “There was no way to hang lights because there was no reason for light to come from above.”

Much of Oliver Twist takes place at night or in dimly lit day interiors. “In my imagination, London means fog, smoke, clouds and wet rain, and that combination naturally leads to soft, dark lighting,” says Edelman. “I think two-thirds of the picture is night scenes or gloomy scenes.” The filmmakers strove to pepper the film with sunlight when the script allowed it — for example, during Oliver’s first morning at Fagin’s place. “You can count the sunlit scenes in this movie on the fingers of one hand,” says Edelman. “There are two or three sunlight exteriors, and maybe two sunlit interiors!” He adds that the latter scenes were “the easiest part of the movie — we’d just put 20K sources at the same height through each window, and it was done!” Fill was provided by a Kino Flo Wall-O-Light.

Edelman credits Polanski for recognizing the importance of choosing the right time to shoot certain exteriors, such as when Oliver, dressed as a little gentleman, walks down a busy London street that is lit by sunshine on one side. Other exteriors were shot at magic hour, late in the day. “There’s no way of cheating that light,” notes Edelman. “It’s such a magical time. We were lucky that Roman was willing to wait for the right moment, and that we could afford to come back the next day to continue the same scene if we had to.” The film features a few exteriors that were shot in the countryside around Prague. “I don’t remember any big difficulties there, just the immense relief of being able to shoot outside the studio after four long months!” Edelman says wryly.

On night interiors, Polanski’s choice of wide-angle lenses left little room for lighting in tight spaces, dictating small instruments. “Using wide lenses on small sets, we didn’t have enough space for large sources,” says Edelman. “Sometimes we could lose one wall, but not always. When you have a lot of small units, you have to choreograph them with the actors and the camera moves, so our lights had to be compact, and we had to be able to move them quickly. It was a kind of ballet of lanterns and boxes.

“There were three or four tools that we used all the time to create a candlelight effect,” Edelman continues. “We had three sizes of Chinese lanterns that could be moved to follow the candles. For the fireplaces, my wonderful gaffer, Ronnie Schwarz, built boxes of soft light with flicker circuits. Each box had nine bulbs on different circuits, so we could dim them and make them flicker independently. We had these boxes in two sizes; the bigger one was 11⁄2 meters square. The trick was to place a bunch of these sources on the set and hide them with set elements or place them just at the edge of the frame. Because all of the light sources were low, we had to hide the units on the floor or at camera level.” Edelman often placed several small lights very close together when shooting close-ups “to wrap around the face and keep the feeling of a single source.

“Candlelight,” he adds, “is actually not very soft, but it doesn’t look good to my eye if it’s hard. My feeling is that candlelight should be soft and flickering, and that it shouldn’t be just one color. I tried to use different colors for the sidelight and for the fill in candlelit situations, and I made the fill warmer than the key.”

Edelman sought to vary the looks of the film’s many night interiors. “We shot in Fagin’s place for three or four weeks, and I tried to make each scene a little different. I was constantly trying to build a combination of different sources that were flickering in different modes with different color temperatures. My basic strategy was to light the foreground with a warm, soft source and fill the background with slightly cooler light. As I recall, I wasn’t using gels. The foreground was warm because [those lights] were dimmed down, while the background was left white.

“On the screen, those night interiors look simple, but they were quite complicated,” he continues. “Many scenes in the script are described as having ‘one candle standing on the table.’ There are also many scenes in which characters are walking with a candlelight source. So you have to somehow fit electricians with Chinese lanterns on the set alongside the actors. Of course, that’s not just one person, but three or four people carrying sources that you have to keep out of the shot.”

Oliver Twist is distinguished by the range of gray values that Edelman packs into the dimness of a London street, a foggy square or a dingy interior. The cinematographer’s mastery of these underexposed nuances gives the images a unique richness. He explains, “At all times, I was trying to keep a little bit of exposure everywhere, sometimes three or four stops under key in the corners and backgrounds, just to keep them on the negative. This gets tricky because you can very quickly lose the background, or sometimes the foreground is brighter than you thought, maybe because the lanterns are closer to the actors than you thought they would be. I was just trying to balance foreground and background in a such a way as to have both on the negative.”