American Cinematographer - April 2008 - 78

Sundance 2008: Mining for Movies collaborated on several other features, including The Craft (AC May ’96), Dick and Nancy Drew (AC July ’07). “Andy and I know each other so well that a lot of our work is intuitive,” says Gryszynski. “That helped a lot on this movie because we literally had no time! “I had one day, a Saturday, to design the lighting for the big show, and it was very important that it be as exciting as possible,” he continues. “The stylistic rule we established was that Dana’s day-to-day life would be bland and static, and that would be juxtaposed with the stage production, which would be dynamic and colorful. Of course, [the show] doesn’t have the ambition of a Broadway show; it’s a student production done within the confines of what’s available to them. Naturally, however, we took some license. For students, they use some pretty sophisticated equipment.” Except for an epilogue shot in New York City, Hamlet 2 was filmed on location in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the site chosen for the students’ production was a giant warehouse that was designed to facilitate the repair of locomotives several decades ago. “It was one of the biggest industrial spaces I’d ever seen, really raw,” recalls Gruszynski. “We shot there for eight days, and that included the play as well as scenes showing all the commotion outside.” The stage was a platform that measured about 20' wide and 12' deep, and production designer Tony Fanning incorporated industrial work lights across the front of it to suggest makeshift footlights. “That’s really the only element of the stage lighting that suggests something found in someone’s garage,” notes Gruszynski with a laugh. “As I said, we took some license.” The cinematographer and gaffer Dan Delgado collaborated with a local concert-lighting designer to program the stage lighting, which had to facilitate two major Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan, wearing white shirt) and his students bring down the house with an original production in Hamlet 2. Hamlet 2 Cinematographer: Alexander Gruszynski, ASC Director: Andrew Fleming Stuck in Tucson, Arizona, struggling actor Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) contends with an unpronounceable surname (“Marsh-zzz”) it hasn’t occurred to him to change, lives with a wife (Catherine Keener) who can barely stand him, and directs lackluster stage adaptations of popular Hollywood movies at the local high school, playing to a mostly empty house. After earning another pan from the school newspaper’s merciless critic for his latest production, Erin Brockovich, Marschz decides to try his hand at an original work. Beset by some daunting Daddy issues, and convinced he’s not the only theater buff who finds Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy a little too “down,” he writes a sequel to Hamlet, crafting an ambitious musical that incorporates a time machine, elements of the New Testament and Flashdance, and a karate move or two. When word gets out about some of the show’s musical numbers, notably “Raped in the Face” and “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus,” Marschz and his students are booted off campus, and their show becomes the hottest ticket in town. Hamlet 2 was the rare comedy script that was “hilarious on the page,” says cinematographer Alexander Gruszynski, ASC. “With so many comedies, whether something is funny depends on the execution, but that wasn’t the case here.” That isn’t to say the execution didn’t pose some difficulties. Most of these lay in the third act, which depicts the performance of Marschz’s controversial play. “In the initial script, the play was in an embryonic state, and you didn’t see much of it,” recalls Gruszynski. “But when we started shooting, the third act started growing, and the play ended up being a whole beast in itself. At the same time, we started to lose shooting days; the schedule was originally 38 days but we ended up with 30. It’s kind of miraculous we pulled it off.” One thing that helped significantly was Gruszynski’s seasoned working relationship with the film’s director and co-writer, Andrew Fleming. They first teamed 20 years ago on Bad Dreams and have since 78 April 2008 Hamlet 2 photos by Cathy Kanavy, courtesy of L+E Productions.

American Cinematographer - April 2008

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