American Cinematographer - September 1997 - 74

This feels right to me'
had to start thinking
technically. I found myself saying,
'Well, that's a T5.6 and brighter
than hell, but I know it's going to
be underexposed a stop.'"
eye

and

was

say
gone. I

Schneider elected to shoot
the film entirely on Kodak's 500
ASA 5298 stock, because he felt
that the anamorphic lenses needed
the stop. He also didn't want to risk

cutting to a finer-grained stock.
"Picture quality is relative within a
movie," he

explains. "If you don't
show the viewer a deeper black or
a finer
grain, they will accept what
they

see as the standard." To ac¬
commodate his use of the 98 on

bright day exteriors, Schneider uti¬
lized ND filters.
"In

forest, you have am¬

bient

both Primo and E-series lenses. I

generally wound

between T3.4 and T4 with them."

Helping Schneider with
tricky anamorphic work were
camera assistants
Terry Phrang
and Brian Armstrong. The latter
pulled focus for cinematographer
the

Jan DeBont, ASC

Die Hard,

challenging anamorphic film
known to have been shot at very
shallow stops.
For

close-ups, Fleder gen¬
erally wanted to shoot with the
camera
tight in on the actors and
fitted with wide lenses. "I think

that

doing a close-up with a 40mm

75mm [with spherical lenses]
creates a real sense of intimacy," he
or

says.
focus

Anamorphic lenses do not
as
closely as flat lenses do,

of trees that is not

however, so Schneider used a di¬
opter whenever Fleder wanted an

lens. Phil Radin at Panavision pro¬
vided us with wonderful sets of

extremely close shot. "Anamorphic
makes you focus on a single person
or
object in the frame, because the
depth of field is so shallow," Fleder
adds. "I really like that. I think that
the shallow depth of field really
helped on this film, because to a
great extent it is about what you

light underneath the canopy
as
bright as
you'd think it would be," he notes.
"So even though I was shooting 98,
if I was exposing for the shadows
in the forest I might be at T5.6 or 8.
I wasn't going to stop down any
further than that on an anamorphic

I '

33x

ing

POV shot," Schneider says
laugh. Fleder wanted the
story to shift back and forth be¬
tween subjective and objective
a
with

views in order to draw viewers

deeper into Freeman and Judd's
characters. He was equally ada¬
mant about avoiding the cliche of
the "killer's perspective" so
prevalent in suspense and horror
films. Consequently, shots from
Casanova's POV were kept to a
minimum.

middle of

POV)

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As she exits the tunnel (seen in a
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from her cell and runs out
into the daylit forest. Since she is
encountering sunlight for the first
time after four days of captivity in
the dark, she is partially blinded.

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American Cinematographer - September 1997

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