American Cinematographer - November 1992 - 44

Dracula's

ominous,

crumbling
castle

was

constructed
within the

spacious
interior of

Sony's Stage 30.

complicated to do. We had a pro¬
jector behind [Gary Oldman], and
dancer created his shadow and
doubled his movements in sync
with him. We had to rehearse it
over and over again to make sure
that he was absolutely in sync, but
it worked out quite well.
"The scene in which
Dracula and Harker walk along the
a

hallway was lit by big oil lamps and
torches. For some scenes that light
gave us a good reading, but we
filled in with softer units on a flicker
box or in chicken coops so the ac¬
tors go

through light areas and dark

areas.

Darkness is

an

important

part of this movie."
The
soon came

cinematographer
Coppola's fas¬

to share

cination with

early cinemato¬
graphic techniques. "They did
some pretty amazing effects in the
old days," he said. "You look at a
movie like Nosferatu and they have
things in there that are quite thrill¬
ing. They didn't have ILM to do
their tricks for them, so they had to
do it in the camera."
For Ballhaus and Coppola,

speed changes

that Dracula
swiftly in an un¬

so

sometimes moves

real way from one room to another;
it seems as though he's flying

through the room rather than walk¬
ing. Lef s say he's 15 feet away from
Harker and suddenly he's right
next to him. It happens in a second
because we changed the speed
from 24 fps down to 8 fps. Gary

the in-camera, classic

Oldman would race into the frame,
and then we would go back to 24.
We also had Dracula on a little

the Arriflex 535

dolly and moved him fast toward
Harker. I've never done anything

approach to
special effects was facilitated by a
sophisticated, high-technology tool
-

camera.

"Using the

new Arriflex
535 camera, we tried to do a lot of

things using the old way, such as
double exposure when somebody
appears and disappears," the cin¬
ematographer says. "We did all the

like that before! The camera takes
care of the
exposure with the vari¬
able shutter. It was a tricky thing to
do back in the old days, but now it's

nothing! You tell the computer in
what time period you want to
change, then you push the button
and it does it all by itself. And if you
go from five fps to 50 fps exposure
it is absolutely 100 percent correct.
"This

new camera can

do

many things," Ballhaus enthused.
"We did a lot of action backward.
We were rolling the cameras back¬
ward and the actors were playing
backward - for instance, when

Lucy becomes a vampire she comes
down to a crypt carrying a child in

^

A

**

Tgj

her arms which she's about to bite
to suck the blood, but [Van Helsing
and his men] are waiting for her.
We had her walk up the stairs back¬
ward and the cameras went on
when she entered the crypt. It looks
almost real, but there's a strange¬
ness about it that makes it
magical.
And the moment when she slips
into her coffin was also done in
backward action. It looks great be¬
cause the fabric moves
differently;

can't tell what's wrong, but
something is weird and it makes all

you

the difference. These are subtle little

things that we didn't do in the
usual way of simply giving it to one
of the wonderful postproduction
companies. We tried to do it in the
camera on

the set, and that made it

exciting because

we were part

of

the process when it was happening.
It wasn't taken out of our hands."

Ballhaus noted that in

Nosferatu some scenes were
cranked erratically to give them a
jerky, stop-motion look. "We did

42

American

Cinematographer

November 1992
American Cinematographer - November 1992

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