A wonderful example of Edelman’s exposure approach is a scene in which Oliver is forced to help stage a robbery at his benefactor’s home. Edelman plays the night interior with a wash of cyan across variations of dark grays that play on the toe of the curve, but without any solid blacks. “This scene was in my imagination from the very beginning,” says the cinematographer. “I wanted the light to be very soft. It’s very dark, but you see all the details, and you don’t know where the light source is. We built a soft source above the set at a very low level, 31⁄2 to 4 stops under key, and added a single bright ray of light on the wall. That ray and the ambient darkness build the contrast together and make the scene believable. That is my ambition, to build those kinds of images that always have some information in the blacks, in darkness. In real life, you can see almost everything at night, so I try to create the mood of night by lighting just about everything, but at a very low level, and I try to find a good balance between foreground and background.”

Edelman typically shot at T2.8 for day interiors and T2 for night interiors. He filmed all interiors and night scenes on Kodak Vision 500T 5279, and day exteriors on Vision2 250D 5205.

The last touch in his interior scheme was the frequent addition of smoke. “Every time there was a fireplace, I tried to use some smoke.” Many of the night exteriors on the Barrandov lot were also filled with smoke, a frustrating process that sometimes meant rescheduling because of wind. Edelman’s foggy nights are worthy of Dickens, and once again manage to convey darkness and gloom with few, if any, solid blacks.

Throughout the production, the crew was able to watch 35mm film dailies, a rare luxury today. Edelman muses that screening his work on film probably enabled him to be more adventurous with underexposure. “It’s a risky business to count on your meter as you expose for the shadows that are almost black. Maybe I was braver because we had film dailies. If you see a real result every day on the screen, you start to believe in the positive, in the lab and in your meter.”

His strategy on night exteriors was to be able to react quickly to changes in weather or staging. His basic tools were Dinos on Condors for background back- or sidelight, and helium balloons for the foregrounds. “It wasn’t easy to reach all the small streets on the set with light sources on a crane, so our main sources were helium balloons, which we could move quickly into place.” Some of the more intricate night exteriors, such as when Oliver flees from his captors at Fagin’s, include flickering fires.

One of the challenges of working with child actors was the reduced time available for night shooting. Because of those limits, some night scenes had to be shot bit by bit, over many days. “We’d shoot during the day and then make one or two shots at night,” recalls Edelman. “Then we’d come back the next night to continue the night scene. This made it complicated to match [footage].“

Oliver Twist was graded at Éclair Laboratories by colorist Yvan Lucas. “I was very lucky to work with Yvan,” says Edelman. “He has a lot of experience, but he’s still very fresh, very open, and always searching for new combinations of colors. The DI process on this film was a pure pleasure.” Lucas adds, “My work was often just a matter of finding the correct value of density and color. There’s an enormous amount of detail in Pawel’s negative; he works underexposure perfectly and creates a very rich image. There are many different ambiences in the film. With so many nuances in the lighting, the set and the costumes, you get all the details of the colors, even with a fairly neutral grade.”

Some of Edelman and Lucas’ work in the DI suite enabled the cinematographer to heighten the variety of looks for night interiors. “Pawel varied the quality of the shadows with slightly colder or grayer blacks,” explains Lucas. “Sometimes we took red out of the image and rendered the backgrounds cooler. The balance of colors is perfect in the original [negative], so if we took out the warm, we’d get just the right blue.”

Other DI adjustments involved tweaking skin tones, especially for Kingsley, who had to wear a lot of makeup. “We often had to desaturate Fagin a little and balance him with other characters,” says Lucas. “We often worked on the faces separately. In general, we avoided red faces and went for pale, more neutral coloring.” Digital tools were also used to subtly adjust the colors of candlelight and firelight. Edelman recalls, “When Roman saw our first attempt, he didn’t like the orange candlelight; he wanted to go more yellow. The results look good.”

In Edelman’s opinion, the DI process still lacks some of the quality of traditional photochemistry. “I’ve used the DI process on the last four movies I’ve shot, and although I understand how great it is to have this tool in our hands, I also believe we’re losing a lot,” he says. “The quality of the image still isn’t as good as that from the original negative. We’re losing some sharpness and definition. The ideal situation would be to have the possibility of a DI with the same quality and definition as the film image. Perhaps higher resolution will make this possible.” Looking forward to his next project, he adds, “I’ve done 20 movies without a DI without any problems, and I will probably do my next movie in Poland without it.”

Looking back at a shoot that was rife with complications, such as moving light sources in cramped sets, capricious smoke and weather, matching footage shot weeks apart, and gutsy underexposure, Edelman concludes that Oliver Twist was “the most difficult movie I’ve ever worked on. Everything about lighting this film was difficult. Exterior scenes can be fast and easy, but there were few exteriors, and even those were difficult. Nothing was easy, but working with Roman and our great Czech, French, English, German and Polish crewmembers was a big pleasure. I felt lucky to be part of this bigger-than-life journey.”

TECHNICAL SPECS Super 35mm 2.35:1 Panaflex Millennium, XL; Arri 435 Primo lenses Kodak Vision2 250D 5205, Vision 500T 5279 Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383