American Cinematographer - December 1997 - 58

matic difference between the

color

present day and the past; instead,

rior

I wanted to create the

sense

that

had traveled in a time machine
and ended up right there in 1912.
Ironically, as a result of
[Caleb Deschanel, ASC departing
the production after photograph¬
ing the contemporary portion of

you

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the shoot], we have an inherent sty¬
listic difference between the film's

present-day section and the scenes
that take place in the past. I'm not
saying things were contrived to
happen that way - they weren't
but that's how it turned out,
and I think it works to the benefit
of the picture.

-

However, I also wanted

things to look beautiful when they
should. You have to do

some

inter¬

pretation there, to soften the image
and the lighting. One key thing is
that the light hardened up a bit

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when we went outside for the pe¬
riod night scenes, and a lot more
once the
passengers were in the
water. The lighting is very soft in
the interior scenes aboard the ship,

especially in the first-class spaces,
where there are never hard shad¬
ows on the faces. I
especially
wanted to achieve this on any shots
of Kate [Winslet]; we almost
wanted her to look as if she was lit
from within. But that's just a goal,
and you can't always achieve that.
For the present-day se¬

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I thought about doing
really overt stuff, like leaving
off the 85 filter and letting it go re¬
ally blue, giving it a 'high-tech'
feeling. That turned out to be too
stylistically intrusive, partly be¬

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nightmarish slow motion. So
going a bit colder in the blues
in the later scenes than we thought
we would
during production. The
beauty of this is that we have the
flexibility because our colors are far
enough apart.
One might suppose that in
a

we're

the 1912 sections we'd wash it all in
this golden yellowish mask to give
an

antique feeling, but that's not

the idea at all. Instead,

after you go

through this dreamlike transition
to 1912, you're there and it's real. So
the idea is to go almost neutral in
the color response, where the blues
blue, the reds

red, and the

quences,

are

yellows are yellow and everything

cause we

have this character Rose

[the elderly version of Kate

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the disaster unfolds in this sort of

some

Winslet's character, played by
Gloria Stuart], and I didn't want
her to be photographed as if she

smumeEHRco»

separation in the night exte¬
photography. Russell [Carpen¬
ter] would go almost full blue on
the ambient fill that lit the ship, but
then a quarter or even half CTO on
the white light, so they were pulled
apart just a bit more. In the timing
stage, we are deciding how warm
or cool we want the white
lighting
to look. Dramatically, it's turning
out like we anticipated at the point
of shooting, with the white light
always a bit warm to suggest the
sanctuary of the ship. We always
want to be historically accurate,
since electric light in those days
was not at the
voltage we use now,
and the light tended to be more like
candlelight. But that dynamic
works against the pervading sense
of cold on the deck of the ship, as

was

'high-tech.' The compromise

was

to

is vibrant to the best extent that the

Kodak negative can render it. We
didn't want to stylize it and inter¬

pose a barrier between the film and
the audience; we just tried to do

really beautiful, elegant lighting on
a
shot-by-shot basis. Do you want
backlight and shafts of sunlight
coming through the windows?
Great,

we

did that, but then

we

day, but also to emphasize hightech source lighting that they

backed off just one step so we
didn't end up with something that
looked like an extended dream se¬

would not have had in 1912, such
as fluorescents. In scenes
featuring

tion -

old Rose in this

tiful

use a

cooler look in present

are

high-tech envi¬

ronment, we let everybody else
in the scenes fall into this cyan-

blue while

keeping her in white

light, which left her

as the most
human of the group.
We shot all of the period
scenes so

that there

December 1997

was

quite

a

Everything was in propor¬
richly textured, and a beau¬
interpretation of reality.
That style later evolves as

quence.

we

get deeper into the disaster and

the

scenes

below deck: the

camera

become less elegant and
more nervous. There's a lot more
handheld work and Steadicam,
and it's rough, which creates a
moves
American Cinematographer - December 1997

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