Originally published in the  ICG Magazine in January 2001.

Anyone familiar with the lyricism of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote or Pat Conroy knows the American South to be a haunted place — a region so ripe for the supernatural that every gnarled tree and backwater swamp seems filled with an unknown mystery. No southern town has better preserved this sense of the macabre than Savannah, Georgia. Spared by GeneralSherman during his inglorious march to the sea, “Slov-vannah” — as it is known for its snail-like indifference to change — is as much a character in Sam Raimi’s new independent thriller, The Gift, as are the assortment of depraved oddballs populating the picture.

Annie Wilson (Elizabeth’s Cate Blanchett) is a recently widowed mother of three boys who bears “the gift” of psychic vision. For financial support, she gives readings to a variety of emotionally disturbed friends and neighbors. Coaxed out for an evening by gal-pal Linda (Kim Dickens), Annie meets Wayne Collins (Greg Kinnear), her eldest son’s school principal, along with his fiancée — the sexy, teasing debutante Jessica King (Katie Holmes). Soon after that meeting, King turns up missing. Her shackled and desecratedbody starts haunting Annie in psychic visions. Unable to suppress the horrific images of a possible rape and murder, Annie is compelled to assist the local police in solving Jessica’s disappearance. The trail wends and winds through virtually all of the characters who have called upon Annie’s “gift.”

Despite good intentions, the fear and small-mindedness in the small Southern town (Savannah is actually a stand-in for Brixton, Georgia), gradually turn on Annie — her psychic gifts are thought to be the handiwork of Satan and the cause of many of the town’s problems. At the trial of Jessica’s accused murderer — hot-tempered wife-beater Donnie Barksdale (Keanu Reeves), whose property held the pond where Jessica’s body was uncovered — Annie is called to testify about her supernatural powers. Though prosecutors make mockery of her “gift,” Donnie is convicted just the same and sent to prison. Even after Donnie is locked away, images of Jessica’s gruesome death continue to torment Annie. Realizing that the wrong man was convicted, Annie must utilize her “gift” to find the true killer and save her own life and family.

According to cinematographer James “Jamie” Anderson, the single biggest challenge on The Gift was its compressed, 43-day production schedule. Yet, despite the hurried timeframe for the low-budget picture — the crew surpassed 45 daily set-ups during some of the courtroom scenes — Anderson managed to find a languid, studied look. He called upon some great artistry of the South’s past to help articulate The Gift’s measured visual themes. The honest images of photographerWalker Evans (1903 – 1975), in particular, proved a frequent inspiration in terms of composition, lighting, and focal lengths. “Sam Raimi wanted a very straightforward, simple quality to this woman’s life,” explains Anderson, whose credits include Unlawful Entry, What’s Love Got to Do With It, The Juror, Grosse Point Blank and Small Soldiers. “We agreed that normal to a slightly longish focal length would best suit that feeling, so I looked at a lot of Walker Evans’ photography. Much of Evans’ work was done with classic and simple medium-length compositions, yet the frames are also very poetic and ethereal. Since The Gift is about this unspoken mystery which exists beyond the surface of a quiet Southern town, I felt Evans’ photography — so much of his work is set in small Southern towns — really captures that duality. A simple reality set off by a strange mystery. His work was a great reference point throughout the shoot.”

“We shot virtually the entire film [approximately 350,000 feet] on a 200 ASA stock — Kodak Vision [200T] 5274,” notes Anderson. “It’s a smooth, versatile film with a tremendous latitude well-suited to the simple, straight-forward look we wanted for this small Southern town. I did use the faster [Vision 500T] 5279 stock occasionally. But, I really prefer pushing the 5274 one stop in lower-light situations because the grain looks better.”

A few years ago, Anderson switched over to a Panavision camera package (from Arriflex and Moviecam) and Panavision’s zoom lenses served him well on The Gift. “I did have prime lenses on this film, but, I hardly ever used them,” he continues. “The quality of the 4-to-1 zoom lens that Panavision makes was essential to our tight shooting schedule. In the last 10 years, the difference in image quality between the 17-to-75 [millimeter] Panavision zoom lens I used and any prime lens has virtually disappeared. It’s not like we did much zooming on The Gift, anyway. We just used the Panavision zoom as a variable prime lens for speed and ease of setup.”

From The Gift’s opening frames, Anderson and director Raimi were intent on evoking a sinister visual poetry, evident in abundance all over Savannah. A series of long tracking shots over water — framed at eye level as if from a slow-moving boat — provides the film’s first images. The weathered skins of the cypress trees — like an old woman’s tattered veils which, only reluctantly, offer up the region’s secrets — impressed Anderson and Raimi so much, that they serve as transitions throughout. “There were these spectacularly dramatic oak and cypress trees all over that area and Sam Raimi immediately fell in love with them. The trees in Savannah have this wonderful combination of being full of life and feeling haunted and dead at the same time. There was a huge oak in the back of Annie’s house where we shot. Even for Savannah it was a pretty amazing tree in its texture and size.”

The cinematographer actually captured the striking shots opening The Gift during a break in shooting. As the Sun was setting, Anderson ventured upriver from the cypress-filled swamp location on Donnie Barksdake’s property (the spot where Jessica King’s body is ultimately found). Utilizing the swampboat as a substitute dolly, Anderson tracked back and forth along the shore’s edge, shooting over 2,000 feet of film in a matter of minutes before the light disappeared. He used a zoomto give flexibility and work at the wide end of the range, shooting at 30 frames-per-second to lend a gliding quality to the image. “If you look closely, you can see these faces in the bark of some of the trees,” marvels Anderson. “I had no idea how much of the footage Sam would use. But I knew the light was perfect, so I seized the opportunity. Ultimately, the cypress footage was used as the film’s main transition device. It was a spontaneous act, shooting these trees. Yet, they actually became integral to the spirit and visual plan of the film.”

Love and Human Remains

Spontaneity, in the guise of visionary hallucinations, plays a significant role in The Gift’s supernatural storyline. While Annie’s impressions are somewhat controlled during her porch-side readings for clients, her unscheduled journeys into the dark side of Jessica’s murder are pure visual chaos. The most stylized of these sequences kicks off from a long dissolve of an extreme close-up of Annie’s eyes. “The way it was written was that Annie found herself wandering down an unknown road and drawn to this mysterious pond,” details Anderson. “Sam wanted it to be magical and dissolving from one section of the road to another until she reaches the pond. We decided to shoot Cate Blanchett backward during that scene. She walked away from us and we shot it in reverse to give it that odd quality of motion Sam wanted.”

He had intended to shoot the dissolve sequence at night, but realized the company did not have the means to pull that off. And the shooting schedule did not permit enough manipulated daytime hours to control the light the way Anderson felt a day-for-night shoot required. “I basically decided to underexpose the ambient daylight around Cate’s character and light her very strongly regardless of what time of day we actually shot,” Anderson relates. “The effect we wanted was somewhere in-between day and night — a kind of a netherworld that only could exist in her dreams. It’s not a gimmick — it was just a matter of overpowering the background ambience to suggest this feeling not defined by day or night. My gaffer, David Morton, pressed all of our big HMIs into service to light this. I believe we had three 18Ks, 6K Pars and 4K Pars mostly through light grid frames.”

As the dissolve sequence ends, Annie Wilson arrives at the swamp to see Jessica’s body for the first time. She encounters yet another strange image — a warped-looking fiddler playing in the middle of the water. The camera pans with Annie into the foreground of frame as she arrives at the swamp, then moves off toward the fiddler, before returning in a 200-degree circular move to find Annie once again. “Sam was after a dream-like shot that brought Annie forward, so her movement began our pan right. She leaves the frame as we continue a slow pan of the trees of the swamp, and the dolly is turned as well. Meanwhile, Cate has scurried around to her endmark where we rediscover her at the end of our pan. It took several takes to get it just right and Cate’s wordless performance of being pulled by both the mystery and fear in this dream is amazing to watch on her face.”

Director Raimi’s previous features — The Evil Dead, Army of Darkness, Darkman and The Quick and the Dead — have all been laced with complicated and riveting special effects. While The Gift required a more subtle, story-driven touch, its supernatural elements did offer some chances for visual pyrotechnics. The massive oak tree in Annie Wilson’s backyard, for example, became the anchor for the film’s most striking and disturbing sequence. “The script called for Annie to walk out to the backyard and see Jessica’s body floating up in this huge tree,” recalls Anderson. “We agreed that it would have looked ridiculous to actually hang someone up in a tree via filament wires or something. Since I already knew that Jessica’s body would be found in a pond, it seemed natural to me to have her floating in water. The suspended, weightless quality was the right tone to composite with the leaves and Spanish moss of the big oak tree.”

Originally, the cinematographer planned to shoot Jessica King’s floating body from underneath — a la the lifeless form of Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Boulevard. But instead, the actress was shot straight-ahead via a greenscreen because “the pool where we wanted to do the shot wasn’t deep enough to look up at a full figure,” relates Anderson. “Peter Donen, the visual effects supervisor, rightly thought it would be easier to shoot straight and vertical.” The tree itself was shot at 60 frames-per-second to emphasize the rippling of the Spanish moss in the night, as if the big oak’s limbs and leaves were also submerged in water like the dead girl. Two large wind machines were required to get the Spanish moss to “float” because, as Anderson laughs, “oak trees just don’t move. Any scene requiring wind through trees was a real pain because of the weight and bearing of those huge branches. They hardly budge no matter how much wind you pump through them.”

To finish the sequence, Anderson photographed Annie Wilson underneath the tree just prior to her seeing Jessica’s corpse floating above. Annie is lit with the soft warm light of a 5K Croney cone with some highlight diffusion in the kitchen window. Working entirely without filtration throughout the movie, the colorless, cold light of the big oak tree above Annie contrasts the light from her home. Anderson achieved a conversation of sorts between the real world of Annie’s simple life, and the terrifying mystery her “gift” creates in the evocative oak tree above her head.

Fire Walk with Me

Unlike past efforts, director Raimi opted for a “quiet” camera, observing Annie “reading” for her friends and neighbors. He also eschewed any use of Steadicam. In fact, the camera moves in a quick or aggressive manner only once — during a startling violent handheld scene set in Act III. The sequence opens with Buddy Cole (Giovanni Ribisi), the tortured car mechanic who is Annie’s most loyal client, going off the deep end in his hatred for his sexually abusive father. As Annie rushes to the family’s house, she sees that Buddy has tied his father up to a chair in the yard, and has a can of gasoline and a lighter ready. Having beaten his father bloody, Buddy is preparing to set him on fire in a final act of filial revenge. “Sam storyboarded virtually the entire movie,” notes Anderson. “He has a regular group of artists who board for him on every film. Sam is precise, with an incredible sense of visual storytelling. But, for this scene, we worked entirely handheld and only did one take with the fire — it was just too emotionally taxing on everyone involved to push it too far.”

Anderson worked in conjunction with stunt coordinator Mark Stefanich on this tricky sequence, which cuts from Buddy’s beaten father stripped to his waist and tied to a chair to a burning figure. Stunt player Erik Cord wore several layers of protection: including nomex, a protective gel substance; long underwear; a rain mask to retain the gel and keep the outfit dry; a pair of Levi jeans and a pair of pajamas. As a final precaution, the actor’s wardrobe also had fire retardant.  Thanks to Anderson’s deceptive camera positioning and a skewed angle of the stunt actor’s chair, the fire appears to actually engulf the surface of the skin. Utilizing two camera angles for the burn shot, Anderson could convey a sense of the fire racing up the actor’s lower extremities. He also kept the scene dark, mimicking ambient street light as the scene’s main source. Like the entire movie, he executed the scene without any color filtration. “I wanted the fire to really pop out and overwhelm us,” Anderson relates. “It’s a shocking, violent scene and the lighting needed to be muted so as to showcase the fire when it came. Sam was so worried about the safety of the stunt actor that he actually cut the fire a bit earlier than I would have. But, that’s why he’s the director!” (Raimi wanted the stunt actor to “burn” for a mere 10 to15 seconds.)

If Anderson critiques The Gift’s director with a hint of a smile, it is only because the pairing was, in the cinematographer’s own words, one of the most pleasurable of his entire career. “You really feel that your creative input is valued and respected with Sam,” adds Anderson. “For example, I stopped using viewfinders a few years ago, and will usually line up the shots and show them to the director. Even though we had video assist on this film without playback, Sam invariably proved to be the most generous of collaborators with regards to my compositions and lighting. We’d have a conversation, and I’d go and light the scene. It was really that easy and fluid.”

No stranger to creative collaborations himself, Jamie Anderson studied at Syracuse University and New York University’s Film School, before moving to California in 1972 to work for Roger Corman. Although Anderson shot several features at the “Roger Corman University,” he elected to enter the Guild in 1975 as an assistant, rather than a director of photography. Concerned that a slim cinematography résumé might result in a paucity of work, Anderson opted to apprentice with some of the industry’s best image-makers before once again shooting his own features. While rising up the Guild’s ranks, Anderson became a camera operator and worked for Conrad Hall, ASC on Tequila Sunrise, Allen Daviau, ASC on Harry and the Hendersons, John Alcott on Baby and Vittorio Storaro, ASC on Tucker and Dick Tracy. (Anderson moved up to second-unit cinematographer on Dick Tracy.)

Although this path might have taken longer, Anderson has few regrets about his years as an operator and assistant. “Every time I walk on a set, I feel like I have these people over my shoulder and I need to honor them by putting as much as I can of myself into every single film,” he reasons. “It’s amazing what great teachers they all were. For example, Storaro taught me how to change the lighting during a shot. That’s a handy practical technique to get out of a jam, and I still use it to this day.” One cinematographer whose lessons live on forever in Anderson’s work is Tak Fujimoto, ASC. “I realized from watching Tak light a scene, that he would often stand on the actor’s mark and look around. He was trying to get a sense of where he thought the light should come from. I find myself doing that all the time. Every time I wander out to an actor’s mark and start gazing off to place a light, I’m reminded of Tak.”

Simplicity — in both design and execution — is what made Anderson a smooth fit for The Gift. When Savannah’s placid skies turn unruly, unleashing a brutal rainstorm on Annie Wilson as she races to the district attorney’s home to beg for the murder case’s reopening, the cinematographer kept matters minimal and hands-on, literally. Settling on Savannah’s ancient trees, the shot pans down from their gnarled branches as Annie approaches the DA’s house, Raimi wanted the trees to be “blowing wildly in the night” to anticipate the oncoming outburst. The wind Raimi wanted was “extremely difficult to achieve” because of the old oak tree’s solidity. Anderson’s crew was forced to rig cables to the branches to simulate gusts because two wind machines could not adequately pull off the job. For the rainstorm that engulfed the district attorney’s house, special effects coordinator Vern Hyde utilized three separate wind machines in a fairly tight space. Placing them on either side of the house, and in front of the home, Hyde aimed the contraptions at one another to produce the massive maelstrom.

This vicious tempest also generates consistent lighting strikes. Once Annie Wilson enters the DA’s warmly-lit, masculine-toned study, Anderson wanted the bolts to rain down the windows outside.He used Lightning Strikes devices — as developed by David Pringle, which are fired via remote control to vary speed, pulsation and intensity — and hand-triggered them himself. “You can pre-program the strikes or you can just do it on the-fly, which was my approach,” Anderson expounds. “Lightning strikes can look so tacky if they’re done improperly. We had two machines for that scene — each one outside a different window so it did not look like it was happening all at once. I was inside the room with the two controllers, and the script. I tried to trigger them during action, which felt natural to me. You could feel the lightning on the actors’ faces but not enough to affect our interior setups. Once I got into a sort of rhythm, I could just keep matching it with all the coverage.”

Although The Gift very much ranks as an “actor’s film,” driven forward by the quirky and explosive performances of young performers like Blanchett, Ribisi, and Katie Holmes, its visual anchor ultimately threads back to the town of Savannah and those miraculous live oaks, cypress-lined rivers, and watery Spanish moss. Founded by colonist James Oglethrope in 1732, Savannah’s landscape is steeped in Gothic mystery, like many of Raimi’s films, or, as cinematographer Jamie Anderson concludes in a direct echo of the director’s visual blueprint, “The trees became a thread throughout the film — a presence throughout. They proved to be a perfect symbol of the acceptance of death and the reaffirmation of life, a theme which Sam saw running through this wonderful story.” •