Likewise, an appropriately spooky mood pervades a night scene set near the backyard pool of one of NYPD officer Ray Donlan (Harvey Keitel), where he and a few of his brethren have gathered to drown Murray Babitch (Michael Rappaport), a younger cop embroiled in controversy. "That was a situation where we were stuck up against a wall, and sometimes you just have to punt," Edwards recounts with a chuckle. "But sometimes when you punt, you discover things. There was an existing pool in the backyard of our location, but it was very ugly." To solve the dilemma, the filmmakers joined the backyards of two adjacent homes to film the scene. The cameraman recounts, "We brought in one of those raised, above-ground pools, which would be more in context with these working-class cops. Then we blocked out the house next door, since we were trying to make the scene look as if it was set in the Keitel character's backyard. We put our 'nighttime street/moonlight,' an 18K HMI Fresnel with 1/2 CTO, in a 90-foot bucket over the [first] house. The light just crashed over the back of it through some trees, putting the [second] house into silhouette.
"We toyed with the idea of putting lights inside the pool, but decided against it because [above-ground] pools don't have lights inside them. Instead, I ended up putting a 1200-watt Par on a regular lampstand right at pool level, where we could skim it along the water. The scene then picked up these watery reflections from the Par light, which became this evil, sinister backlight on the cops."
Since Cop Land's story leapfrogs between two very distinct worlds the sprawling metropolis of New York City and the comparatively placid New Jersey suburbs Edwards decided to delineate the nocturnal look of each environment. "In Heflin's little world on the Jersey shore, we gave the night scenes a warm look," he explains. "In Edgewater [Garrison], I would utilize the available sodium-vapor lights, and color my own lamps with CTO and straws to go toward and beyond that orange look.
"For the New York scenes, we were inspired by Sweet Smell of Success,in which the city had all of these very hard surfaces; it always seemed as if it had just rained. So on Cop Land, we wet down the streets in New York to try to make the city shine and glisten. We also tried to make the scenes look steely cold by imitating the [blue-green] look of mercury-vapor lights. Of course, there are no mercury-vapor lights anymore in Manhattan every city in the U.S. has sodium-vapor lights now. But during the Seventies, when all of those fine New York films were made, there were still mercury-vapor lights, so there was a lot of blue and green in the night scenes of those pictures. In our New York scenes, I mixed my blue HMIs with mercury-vapor lights."
Edwards opted to employ Kodak's Vision 5279 stock for the night scenes, and 5293 for daytime environments. The cinematographer reports that he was pleased with the new color rendition in the Vision stocks, and confirms that the black hues are as strong and consistent as ever. "For years, Kodak had this dogmatic loyalty to technical reality," the cinematographer attests. "They were obsessed with creating a red, blue and yellow layer that faithfully recorded what the world looks like, but I hate blue light! Throughout the years, cameramen have gone to every length possible UV filters, polarizing filters to avoid what blue light does to the atmosphere. Kodak films in the past recorded blue light so strongly that you were stuck with it, even if you didn't like the way it looked.
"The Vision stocks have shifted more to the warm red and yellow side. They're far more human stocks. Kodak has finally come up with something that responds to human emotion, as opposed to something that was just a calculated re-creation of the whole color spectrum. The 79 and 93 are just incredible stocks."
The warm-toned 79 film was the perfect canvas for a chaotic night scene set on the George Washington Bridge, where an array of police cars and officers converge to investigate a shooting involving the ill-fated Babitch. "Almost the entire scene was lit with red magnesium road flares," Edwards says. "The light they give off is this strange, eerie cross between a campfire and a welding torch. I ran around with the props guys and just laid several hundred road flares everywhere. We had some elaborately choreographed Steadicam shots on the bridge, so we just placed the road flares as if we were walking along the characters' path. They're amazingly bright, and they have a flickering strobe that you just can't imitate with any kind of machinery. I also used a lot of incandescent bulbs and fixtures, mostly tungsten Par lights, in addition to the red cherry tops on the police cars and the yellow strobes from the medical vans. We mixed the tungsten light with the strong red light from the flares. The whole scene became its own aesthetic it was like lighting for Dante's Inferno!"
Asked to assess the difficulty of blending two seemingly disparate genres the Western and the "New York City cop film" Mangold points out that the classic elements of the latter will always survive, regardless of a movie's milieu. "I never focused too much on the cop-movie aspect of this film," the director says. "I figured that the locations, costumes and acting would pull the viewer naturally in that direction. If you make the typical [cop-oriented] film, you're going to end up shooting the same film that all the directors before you have shot. If there was anything new I was trying to bring to the table, it was this storybook, Western aesthetic.
"But then, I think a movie like The Verdictis a Western, Norma Raeis a Western, and The Third Man is, in many ways, a Western. Those movies [depict] very simple universes in which elaborate morality plays unfold."
