American Cinematographer - October 2009 - 48

Hard Time Top: Refn and Hardy rehearse the scene in which a jaunty Bronson is declared sane and released from prison. Middle: While searching for a way to make cash on the outside, Bronson runs into his flamboyant prison associate, Paul Daniels (Matt King), who offers to arrange fights for him on the bareknuckleboxing circuit. “The strip club where they meet up again was actually one of my favorite locations,” says Smith. “There were no windows, and it was supposed to be nighttime inside the club. I used a bit of bar light and local light, and I hung some mirror balls from the ceiling. Believe it or not, I lit the club mostly with Dedolights bouncing off the mirror balls; I may have used the odd 1K or 2K here and there, but not much more than that. Dedos work really well in that kind of lowlight situation. I put blue gels on them to get that deep-blue color.” Bottom: During his brief stint as a free man, Bronson strikes up an awkward romance with the sultry but fickle Alison (Juliet Oldfield). When I’m shooting 35mm, I’m a great fan of the 18mm focal length, so when I’m shooting 16mm, I tend to stay around [the equivalent of] that length. There’s not much longlens stuff in this movie; I had a long lens when we were covering the fight scenes with two cameras, but we still stayed pretty wide. I’m not a fan of shooting on lenses so long that you can’t see the set.” Refn concurs: “I usually prefer wide-angle lenses because I like to see what’s behind the characters. But I don’t like it when things become distorted, so there’s a very fine balance with wide-angle lenses. I like to have a sense of depth, but within the bounds of reality.” In keeping with his preferred method, Refn shot Bronson in chronological order. “If you shoot in story order, you have a much better overview, and you can see the film progress in front of you,” he maintains. “The film was very improvisational because I was searching for its meaning as we were making it. We actually reshot 40 percent of the movie within our five-week schedule because it kept changing as we went along.” Some of that flexibility sprang from the fact that approximately 80 percent of the movie was shot at one location: a rambling, architecturally eccentric estate in Nottingham, in the heart of England’s East Midlands. Smith notes, “The real Peterson/Bronson is a hot potato in England. Nobody wants to speak about him, and none of the prisons would allow us access, but our location scouts found a bizarre mansion that’s been owned by rich aristocrats over the years. It’s fallen into disrepair, but it has corridors that are very similar to corridors you’d see in institutions. The corridors did need work, but they didn’t need a lot of distressing. They looked pretty good if we just added lines and markings on the floors and walls and some 48 October 2009

American Cinematographer - October 2009

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