American Cinematographer - August 1995 - 60

with

a bit of CTS. I didn't want to
lose the continuity of those yellow-

gold hues. To me, the middle of the
day is the coldest, even though
your eye perceives it as the hot,
warm
part of the day. That was
when I influence the look the least
with color and used a palette that
was close to white, with a
tiny bit
of yellow."
For nighttime scenes,
Green created a romantic moon¬

most

light look with the help of a local
well-known to cinema¬
tographers everywhere. "Fortu¬
nately enough, we were very near

Although Green kept the
lighting on the actors fairly
naturalistic throughout the pic¬
ture, he took special pains to

company

Musco's home base in Iowa,"
Green relates. "They were able to

Eastwood take a short walk out¬
side the house. "We used Musco

when the

sions."

Musco
wide swaths of

Lights provided
background light¬

through the entire background and
the house," Green states.
"Of course, we used more control
for the area they were walking
across

through. We also used Musco for a
scene

in which Kincaid drives

away from the house at night; the
field beyond the house and the rest
of the exterior was lit entirely with
Muscos."

Green notes that every

cinematographer has his own fa¬
vorite recipe for moonlight. "My
version of moonlight is not blue to
the degree that an uncorrected
HMI provides blue. That's really
blue when you see it on film, and
to me it's very unlike
moonlight
and very irritating. I like moon¬
light to have just the tiniest hint
of blue, which makes it just dif¬
ferent enough so that the audi¬
ence doesn't see it as
just another
practical light. To create moon¬
light, I correct HMI 3A back toward
tungsten - sometimes Vi. 1 never
go uncorrected, because it doesn't
look good on faces."
Faces, of course, are key in
a

love story

like Bridges, and Green

working with two of the most
renowned stars in Hollywood.
Keeping Eastwood's "no filtration"

was

caveat in

mind, Green sculpted the

actors' faces with
some

58

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make Eastwood's entrance in the

ing for several exterior scenes, in¬
cluding one in which Streep and

over and be with us on
short notice on a couple of occa¬

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marvelous face structure and
skin that you can imagine."

story memorable. "I knew that
when Meryl's character saw Clint
for the first time, he had to be re¬
markable," Green says. "When he
steps out of the truck for the first
time, we placed him in a natural
backlight that made his hair just
white hot, like a lion's mane. We

hop right

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makeup department. "Clint gener¬
ally works with no makeup, but we
toned him just a bit on this picture.
Clint is darn near bulletproof. He's
very hard to light badly; you can
put no light on him, or a little tiny
scratch of light on him, or a halflight on him, and he'll still look
good. Meryl also had incredibly
minimal makeup, but she has the

very

August 1995

lighting and
subtle help from the

shot that

scene

at the end of the

day

light

was just perfect. I
wanted the audience to know why
Francesca had to draw her breath.
I didn't want to overlight him,

though; I tried to keep the back¬
light side of his face down
enough so it didn't look lit. We
just bounced regular sunlight back
at him."

In Streep's case, Green
found that the actress was willing
to sacrifice glamour in service to
the story - a quality he applauds.

"Meryl is not as concerned with
her appearance as a lot of stars I've
worked with," he avers. "She's not
a

movie star,

she's

actress, and

an

there's a big difference. Meryl
doesn't want to look bad, but she
doesn't mind looking natural. A
movie star has to look good all the
time. You always have to give
them great light, and if you violate

that, you violate what

they

are as

movie stars. I love real actors,
cause as

long

as you
them look ugly, and as

be¬

don't make
long as your

lighting fits that natural moment in
the scene, you can't violate their
boundaries in terms of 'good-look¬
ing'

or

'bad-looking.'"
Green notes that in many

instances, he lights environments
rather than faces, which helps
speed things up on the shoot.
"Clint likes to

move
quickly," he
explains. "We'll generalize a cam-
American Cinematographer - August 1995

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