American Cinematographer - May 1994 - 52

daughter enters, Jack is still so far
away in his mind that he points
the gun at the little girl. "To me,
this was a person who had to be
portrayed in many different
lighting conditions," explains the
cinematographer. "He's going
through a stage in his life where
he's experiencing many different
moods and feelings. His charac¬
ter is in a state of development."
Sakharov helped reveal that de¬
velopment by using "a very Ger¬
man, expressionistic look," and at
other times "getting a totally
warm

look."

Jack tells his newspaper

publisher that he's envious of the
way Daryl, the killer, has pro¬
tected himself. Sakharov realized
that was "a very dark moment,"

epitomizing Jack's character's
emotional descent as his identity
begins to disintegrate. Accord¬
ingly, the cinematographer tried
to create
Above: Source

lighting lends
mood to

a

confrontation.

Right: Jack and
his wife (Claire

Wren) find their

relationship
heading into

a

dark limbo

evoked

by

Sakharov's
spare

lighting.

a sense

of limbo. "I shot

black silhouettes, striding in
what seems like slow musicas

a sea of pictur¬
smoke. The smoke was the
cinematographer's choice, not
only as an aesthetic consider¬
ation, but as a way to hide a bar¬
ren
landscape and production

video motion into

esque

trucks that no one had time to
move off camera.
Sakharov had to get the
shot in 30 seconds, so he asked
his gaffer to put 1200 Pars on pi¬

geon

boxes for backlight into the

gate area to hide the barrenness.
"We also needed smoke so that
the men could disappear into it,"
he notes. That also worked with
the storyline, as Jack's identity
becomes so confused he actually
hallucinates a reenactment of the
murder in which he, not Daryl,
kills the farm family - a halluci¬
nation that helps convince him

Daryl is innocent.
In

scenes

where

Jack is

shown with his wife (Claire Wren)
and young daughter (Nancy
Moore

Atchison), Sakharov used

"more realism, because they're
normal people, not murderers
or

hallucinations, and they de¬

serve

52

to be shot in normal

American

Cinematographer

light,

whereas

Jack was a person of
different feelings."
To help create Jack's
deeply disturbed state of mind in
a scene in which he is
brooding in
his darkroom, a gun in his hand,
Sakharov placed the light slightly
behind him, casting deep, heavy
shadows and barely revealing his
eye sockets. "There was just a
glimmer of something in his

against black with one Inky as a
sidelight, with a little amber gel.

eyes," he

Sakharov knew before he
started out on Midnight Edition

many

says. Then, suddenly,
the door opens and a sidelight
washes over his face. As his

May 1994

And that

was

all there

was

to it.

One

Inky for Jack, and one for his
publisher. When they look at
each other," says the cinematog¬
rapher, "there's a very Storaroish moment. Remember the way
he treated Colonel Kurtz in

Apocalypse Now? Sometimes sim¬
plicity adds so much."
that

low-budget films don't need
American Cinematographer - May 1994

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