American Cinematographer - March 2007 - 35

the darkness

trate

and

-

simple

electrical fixtures. "We built

some

that the dirt and rock down there

wasn't

really kicking anything back.

practical based on authentic
Japanese work lights, just to try to be

We wanted to control the

authentic," recalls Stern. "But they

we

had

to

be fabricated

metal and

were

out

of sheet

expensive, so we only

made 18 of them. We strung them up
wherever we thought they seemed

appropriate. We also exploited the
notion that the Japanese would just
run their electrical and telephone
lines along the tunnel floor; we did
the same with our cabling, so there
was no need to really hide it."
"The art department created
lantern units for us to use, working
on

the idea that

as

the battle went on,

the

electricity would fail and the
Japanese would resort to lanterns,"

Dunkerley. "We rigged those up
with our bulbs and power, but none
of that put out enough illumination
to actually light anything. We didn't
even try very hard to sell the idea that
our light was coming from them. It
was just coming from somewhere."
Stern and Dunkerley agreed
that the best way to sell darkness was
"to not only use a lot of black, but
also have some really bright brights,
with little in between," says the gaffer.
"If you're walking down the street at
night and a car shines its headlights
on something, there's nothing but
black and that very bright light. You
can clearly see the thing that's illumi¬
nated, but the range between the
darkness and light is so extreme that
says

it reads

as

dark. We used

some

pretty

lighting ratios on this
picture to achieve that same effect."
These extreme bright highlights were
extreme

generally sold as daylight stabbing
inwards through an opening in the
ground, and the filmmakers could
sometimes rely on the real thing, "but
for the most part, we were using 5Ks
or

lOKs hidden around

a

corner,"

Dunkerley. "Any time we had an
opportunity to throw in something
really bright, we did, to help sell the
darkness. One thing that really
helped us in this regard was the fact
says

that

was

made easier

blacks, and

by the fact that

could add those very hot sources
and not have the light bounce all over

the

place."
Stern

frequently employed
the jagged rock
walls, which not only enhanced the

washes of light across
texture

created

ing

of the location but also
a

perfect backdrop for play¬
with the characters in

scenes

silhouette. "It

was

similar to

an

sometimes used in
Baby" he says. "For
most scenes, there's always the ques¬
tion of whether to light characters or
light the background and play them

approach we
Million Dollar

in silhouette, but I

choice

on

didn't have a lot of

Letters. The decision

was

just made shot to shot, in part
because Clint doesn't like to

over-

prep.

"About 100 feet down in those

mines, the trick was to treat each shot

individually because, well, there was
nowhere to go," he continues. "Forget
about pulling a wall. But it was a great
source of discipline. I think it's great
to always see ceilings, and, in this
case,

we

had

a

lot of them."

Dunkerley adds, "One of the great
pleasure of this film was trying to
make the caves look the way they
really look. So often in this business,
we go into an ordinary location and
try to make it look like the most visu¬
ally arresting location on the planet.
But here, we were going into these
insanely spectacular mines and just
trying to get that on the screen. Not
only were they not four-walled
spaces, but they also had a vertical
element that you just don't see in
designed sets. They presented us with
an
incredible
opportunity to
explore."
The sloping nature of the
underground spaces lent itself to
unusual compositions that were
reminiscent

of

employed

Mystic River. "In that

film,

we

on

methods

Stern

often tried to work with

vertical space and the notion of one
character being higher in the frame
or

on

a

different

plane than the

other," he notes. "Clint often took

advantage of staging things on the
steps in front of the row houses we
found on location, positioning char¬
acters higher or lower on the steps
and then composing to suggest the
dynamic between them. It was very
simple and effective, and we thought
that approach could be useful in
Letters, as the military is all about
hierarchy. For example, after several
soldiers commit suicide by blowing
themselves up with grenades, Saigo
tries to flee up out of a cave toward
daylight and is chased by another

A

despondent
(Ryo
Kase)
contemplates
Shimizu

desertion. Stern

observes, "On

Flags of Our
Fathers, any shot
that featured

an

800-ship naval
armada

was a

'wide' shot, but
in Letters, a
'wide' shot could
be

something
just a few
soldiers jammed
with
in

a cave.

So for

our

close-ups,

we

have much

tighter shots
than

we

normally might,
often just faces."

soldier, who threatens to shoot him
for desertion. We found

a

tunnel

that had the incline we wanted
positioned the actors accord¬
ingly, which added a three-dimenspace

and

American

Cinematographer 33
American Cinematographer - March 2007

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