American Cinematographer - December 2000 - 71

puppets to the camera! They become
individuals

two

hideous

working out this
destiny of the camera's

wishes. I love that."

Merhige's

previous film,
elaborate fantasy
protagonists were God and

Begotten,
whose

was an

"Son of Earth." He wrote, directed
and

photographed the mini-epic and
built his own optical printer

even

and created all of the visual effects.
For Shadow

of the Vampire,
though, he assembled a top-flight
British crew, including cinematogra¬
pher Lou Bogue, production
designer Assheton Gorton and
makeup artists from Animated
Extras. These craftspeople were asked
not just to make a film, but to create
a

universe.

"Cinema is

really about world¬
making," Merhige opines. "If you
look at the early days of cinema, it
really couldn't make up its mind
whether it

was a

science

or an

Some of the earliest comments

art.
on

the cinema

compared it to a form of
sorcery or magic, because you're in a
dark room being hypnotized. I there¬
fore wanted

to

show Murnau and his

of scientists going off
into the void, marching into the
jungle landscape of the Carpathians
and becoming savages in the way that
they exploit what's around them. I
crew as a

group

clear

everybody was that we
making an homage to
expressionism, we were making an
expressionist film using [contempo¬
rary] technology and film stocks.
The look I fought like mad to get was
my interpretation of the early
to

weren't

autochromes that

were

created

at

the

of the century, which used
potato starch to create a thin red,
turn

art books, particu¬
larly for the lighting, even [going]
back to alchemy manuscripts from

and blue coating over an 8-by10 black-and-white negative. When
they were illuminated from behind,
they had a translucent beauty and
ephemerality, almost like a Seurat
painting. I wouldn't settle for
anything until we got there!

the 15th and 16th centuries. The way
da Vinci chose certain minerals and

much

had hundreds of

flowers

to create

his colors is

some¬

thing that has always deeply inspired
me as a

choosing

director, because it's about

color palette that will
convince your subconscious mind
that this story is authentic."
Merhige was just as particular
about choosing a cinematographer
to help realize his arcane vision. "I
saw

a

that the film had

to

be made in

a

green

"It's

not a

desaturated look, it's

complicated, and one of
the things that turned me off to
many cinematographers was that
more

they kept talking about using bleachbypass. [After awhile] I thought I'd
have to shoot the film myself."
All of that changed when
Merhige met Bogue. The camera¬
man had worked as a best boy for
Stanley Kubrick and cinematogra¬
pher John Alcott, BSC on A
Clockwork Orange, and as gaffer on
Barry Lyndon and The Shining, but
his own shooting experience was
limited

to

commercials. The contrast

between

working on a Kubrick
production and Shadow of the
Vampire was immediately apparent
to Bogue. "Kubrick would ask me,
'How many different ways can you
light this set?' I'd say, 'Six different
ways,' and he'd say, 'Well, let's have a
look
ent

at

tall shadow

on

the set of F.W.

Murnau's
Nosferatu in
Shadow of the

Vampire. This
page, top:
Murnau (John

Malkovich) lines
up a shot outside
a castle under

the watchful
eyes

of actor

Gustav

von

Wangenheim
(Eddie Izzard)
and producer
Albin Grau

(Udo
Kier). Bottom:

Cinematographer
Lou

Bogue.

each one!' But that was differ¬

money

and different times. The

shortest shoot I worked
Kubrick

on

with

A Clockwork

Orange,
which took eight months; we shot
Shadow of the Vampire in six weeks!"
Shooting in the widescreen
(2.35:1) Super 35 format, Bogue
was

selected Arriflex 535
ted with Zeiss

cameras

outfit¬

Superspeed lenses

very elaborate

from Arriflex in Munich. He chose

to

lighting

style, and I didn't want
compromise that," he states. "I
interviewed many cinematogra¬
phers, and one of the things I made

Opposite: The
mysterious Max
Schreck (Willem
Dafoe) casts a

a

package

(provided by
London's Jerome Lighting) that
ranged from IK to 20K tungsten
American

Cinematographer 69
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