A much-publicized aspect of Cop Landwas action icon Stallone's willingness to gain a substantial amount of weight to play Heflin, a middle-aged man past his prime. Despite the potentially intimidating presence of Stallone and the other luminaries in the cast (including Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Ray Liotta), Mangold was determined to avoid tarting up the film's look with any reverential Hollywood touches. "Everyone in the cast kind of 'got it,'" the director attests. "My [visual] mantra on the film was 'simple, clean, don't shoot too fancy.' There's not much glamour treatment for anyone in this picture. I actually kind of wanted to flatter Sly, but he had to be filled out. He's an incredible physical specimen very handsome, very cut, lean and muscular. My point in encouraging Sly to gain weight was not to try to make him into a kind of spectacle. In Raging Bull,for example, there's a sort of spectacle in the cross-cutting between the young, lean De Niro and what he became, and it suits the story. But with this film, I just wanted to transform a man who has become an icon into simply a man. I told Sly, 'All I want you to do is have my body' a regular man's body!"
The actor went along with the idea, but Edwards still found it a bit uncomfortable to photograph a more human Stallone. "Stallone said to us, 'I've become aware in the last four films I've done that I can look different depending on which side I'm photographed from,'" Edwards recalls. "And it's true no face is symmetrical. I kept dwelling on it a lot myself. It's not a 'better side versus worse side' issue, but there's a tonal difference. Fortunately, Jim said to me, 'Don't get stuck on that. We can't shoot a picture from one side of his face!'
"Along the way, however, I discovered some things about Stallone's face that I really liked. When I gave him a light from the back, it would bring out this amazing cheekbone structure he has, which made him look like an old cartoon drawing of Dick Tracy. With the extra weight added, his face became a far more complex landscape there were volumes in his face that don't exist when he's thin. I found the shape of his ear interesting, as well as his filled-out cheeks. In general, I would use hard light from the side or back on Stallone, because I wanted to see the textures in his face. There's a lot of 'afternoon' lighting on him, because his character is in the afternoon of his life.
"Of course, from a photography standpoint, we're still talking about a dangerous situation," the cinematographer adds. "You're dealing with a powerful industry star, and you're messing with his face, which is the feature he's built his whole career around. I took some chances in letting side backlight come off his face, because that technique brought out textures that another cameraman might have avoided."
In Cop Land, the big-city police officers Heflin lives among are his idols, but he is excluded from their "brotherhood." Mangold and Edwards were conscious of setting Stallone apart from the other actors compositionally to highlight his character's alienation. In one scene, Stallone is seen as a mere foreground reflection in the window of a deli as a group of NYPD officers huddle together inside. "We had to flag out the camera so its reflection wouldn't appear in the window," Edwards explains, "but we still had to get light back through to Stallone, so outside I bounced some Arri 6K Pars off Griffolyns. We had to hold the actors in the background as well, so the focus was at a really deep stop, either f8 or 11. The result is almost like a split-diopter shot! We had 12K Fresnels coming through the windows to pound the actors inside with light, and we also had 6K Pars bounced off the suspended ceiling tiles of the store. I used 1/4 CTO on the lights inside the deli, since I always try to shift color [within a scene] when I can. I usually work with very fine shades; I never carry full orange on the truck. I carry 1/8, 1/4 and 1/2 CTO, and I just double them up if I need the effect of a full gel."
Recalling the scene in question, Mangold says, "One of the things I warned Sly about before we started the movie was that he was sometimes going to find himself in the background of scenes. Part of the point we're trying to make is that Freddy is back there, pushed away from the white-hotness of the action. There's drama going on, but he's on the fringe. I told Sly, 'You're going to have to be patient, because there's going to be some intense conflict going on that you are somehow separated from.'"
As he had done on Heavy, Mangold wanted to present as much of the story as possible in static, painterly frames. He and Edwards generally avoided placing zoom lenses on their Panavision cameras, opting instead for wide-to-normal Primo primes. "My love of primes is twofold," the director states. "First, they're very sharp, and they're faster. But beyond that, a zoom lens has a very strange way of making you indecisive. If you want to change the frame a little, all you have to do is turn a ring, and to me there's something cheap about that. With primes, if you want to be closer, you have to physically move closer. I don't want to sound too Zen about this, but there's something about the physical act of moving around a room to get the shot; it lets you feelthe way your camera is dancing through the scene."
Mangold and Edwards avoided excessive camera movement, however, except when the natural flow of the story dictated a sense of motion. At one point, Steadicam operator Rick Raphael tracked Stallone through an entire shot in which the actor exits a New York subway car, makes his way through the darkened station and climbs up a flight of steps, emerging before the looming edifice of New York's City Hall. The smoothly executed sequence evokes the unmistakable Western-tinged idea of a decent man walking toward his destiny. "It's the 'showdown' shot!" Edwards exclaims. "You see the world over Stallone's shoulder, and at the end of the shot there's this monolithic building spread out in front of him. That was one of the physical things we did to reinforce the story. Through camera placement, you can make a character appear weak or vulnerable in a large, oppressive world."
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