Stephen Lighthill Talks About Convergence of Reality and Drama
This article originally appeared in On Production in 1995

One of the unbendable rules about shooting episodic TV is that there is no tomorrow. You could almost see that thought running through Stephen Lighthill's mind. The cinematographer was shooting several scenes for Earth 2, a TV series produced by Amblin Entertainment in a wooded area near Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was biting cold at the 8,000 foot altitude. Threatening black clouds filling a corner of the sky were moving in his direction.

Earth 2 is a sci fi story about people from a future time who are forced to crash land their space ship on an unknown planet. The survivors discover that they aren't alone. They decide to explore the planet. Their journey is comparable to the pioneers exploring the old West. They travel across the landscape in small vehicles, living in tents.

Lighthill had just completed shooting several sequences. In one, a shadowy figure in the foreground aims a weapon at several Earthlings. There's an explosion and some fiery pyrotechnics. The camera comes in tight on an actor who is sent flying through the air by the blast. Lighthill adds a slight red light to the shot. He explains that the simulated reflection of the fire amplifies the sense of imminent danger.

The next sequence shows four actors stealthily approaching a ramshackle hut. Maybe that's where their assailant lives. They are running directly at the building. Lighthill is covering the scene with two cameras. One is tracking vigorously in the opposite direction of the running men.. It passes the actors and comes around behind them.

The camera moving against the action energizes the scene, and it also reveals the front of the building. The only apparent entrance is a hole in the wall which serves as a front door. That sets the stage for the next sequence when some of the actors will storm into the dark hut. There are no windows or lamps. Lighthill had intended to light the interior with a couple of 4Ks shooting light through two openings in the hut walls. That would have taken time, and the company still had a move to make to a nearby arroyo.

Lighthill glanced at the approaching clouds, calculated how much time he had, and asked the operator of a Night Light truck how quickly he could move into position next to the hut. He was improvising. The Night Light was there for another purpose.

Lighthill noticed that the roof of the hut was made of an opaque plastic material. He asked a crew member to clear debris from the roof. Then, he told the director he was ready to shoot the scene inside the hut using the Night Light instead of the 4Ks. The light filtering through the plastic roof was perfect and it took just a couple of moments to set up. He was shooting with the then new 200-speed Eastman EXR 5287 film.

"I shot tests before switching to this film mainly because it is less contrasty with less saturated colors, and that was an ideal match for the look we wanted," he says. "It gave me the latitude to manipulate film speed and contrast. I didn't have to reload."

Lighthill shot the scene quickly, and moved the crew to the arroyo. It was all in a day's work. Earth 2, which aired last year, was the first episodic series filmed by Lighthill, who started his career some 30 years ago shooting newsfilm and TV documentaries in San Francisco. He has shot film for 60 Minutes and went on the road with Charles Kuralt. In 1970, Lighthill worked with David and Albert Maysles during the filming of Gimmie Shelter. Two of his long form documentaries, Seeing Red and Berkeley In The Sixties earned Oscar nominations in 1983 and 1990, respectively. Another documentary, Coming Out Under Fire, filmed in black and white, won a special jury award at the Sundance Film Festival and top honors at the Berlin film Festival in 1994.

What's a venerable non-fiction shooter doing filming an episodic TV program?

"I've always had parallel careers in narrative and non-fiction filmmaking," he says. "Documentaries give you a tremendous foundation. You learn the craft because you are dealing with everything. You are lighting, putting up reflectors and adjusting lamps by yourself. When the camera is rolling, you're watching people's behavior, listening to their stories, and learning about human nature. I learned the differences between using wide angle and long lenses while shooting close-ups during interview shots for documentaries. There are a lot of ways you can help make a scene work beyond lighting and shooting it."

Simultaneous with his early documentary work, Lighthill was a camera assistant on an early George Lucas feature, THX 1138. He worked on a second unit crew when Bill Fraker, ASC, shot Bullet in San Francisco, and was a camera operator on Brad Six's crew when he filmed the Midnight Caller episodic series in San Francisco.

Lighthill shot his first feature in 1975. It was an experimental film called Over, Under, Sideways, Down. "We shot with the new 16 mm version of the Kodak 5247 film using a CP 16 camera," he says. "We thought it was a miracle. We were used to shooting with color reversal film, and then making a CRI (color reversal intermediate).. That limited us to a three-stop dynamic range. It was so liberating to shoot with a negative."

Lighthill continues, "Today, we have a huge palette of stocks that give us total control and absolute freedom. We can do anything. I'm a minimalist. I try not to alter naturally-lit environments because that's part of the truth. I believe in augmenting available light. Sometimes I'll add a little eyelight to help the audience see the truth behind the character's eyes. Other times I subtract light to conceal something. There are films where it's better to start from black because the available light isn't appropriate."

Lighthill has a feature film opening this winter. Open Season was written, directed and produced by Robert Wuhl, who also plays the leading role. The executive producer is Ron Shelton. It was filmed in Toronto, with about a week of some establishing scenes in New York, the capital of the TV business world. It will be released by New Line Cinema.

Open Season satirizes the ratings game that drives the TV industry. It couldn't be more timely with the industry being targeted by politicians and would-be censors. Wuhl portrays a softball fanatic, who gets miscast in the role of brilliant TV executive. Top management thinks he is offering sage insights when he's actually talking about plans for making the company softball team more competitive.

Lighthill and Wuhl visited every location, and discussed the strategy for visualizing each scene. They also watched many Woody Allen films together. One of the things they were diagnosing was the effectiveness of handheld camerawork in different situations.

"There's a lot of physical humor in Open Season," he says. "We rented an Aaton 35 camera. It was second nature for me to put it on my shoulder and shoot documentary style. It's a marvelous camera. It's like part of your body when it's on your shoulder. You can run with it, and it's compact enough to allow you to work into the tightest corners and let actors squeeze by you."

Lighthill says that the decision to shoot many handheld scenes was dictated by the action in the script. It's never forced. There is another scene where Lighthill had the camera on his shoulder while sitting on an apple box on a doorway dolly.

"You can't tell it's handheld," he says. "It's just a very quick and flexible way to shoot on location. It's easy to make little adjustments in framing that are much more complex when you're anchored on a fluid head or a gear head."

His eye for reality paid dividends in some surprising ways.

"It was a struggle finding extras who looked and acted liked New Yorkers," Lighthill says. "There are differences in the variety of races and ethnic faces, the way people dress and even in body language. There are also behavioral differences. If there's a plastic coffee cup or other trash in the street, pedestrians in New York kick it out of the way. In Toronto, they stop to pick it up. We had to instruct them."

Some scenes were filmed with the camera on the business end of a small jib arm. Lighthill used this combination to make moving shots that have a big picture feel at a fraction of the price of renting a crane. A dolly grip was the only extra cost.

"We did some interesting little move-ins to people without having to lay track," he says. "It adds a lot to the feeling of the picture. Sometimes I substituted a jib arm move for a dolly shot. I told the grip to park it, and just swung the arm in. It helps with visual pacing and adds some dramatic emphasis when you want to be high and wide. It makes a nice statement that draws attention to something a character is about to do.

"We were filming a scene in the boardroom of a local company," he says. "I put a jib arm on the dolly and made a nice move across a huge mahogany table. It required a little more time for lighting and some investment in equipment, but it makes a difference."

The art and wardrobe departments used rich colors, and he played off that theme by keeping skin tones on the coral side. Lighthill carried a set of coral filters and used them to correct the ambient color temperature and keep it consistent.

"We want the audience to feel connected to the main characters, who are portrayed as warm and likable people trapped by institutions that are out of control," he explains.

The audience is cast in the role of participant. Lighthill borrows a tactic from his non-fiction filmmaking by forcing intimate eye to eye contact. He comes in ultra- tight on close-ups with the eyeline close to the axis of the lens and key light falling away from the subject so he can model with shadows on one side of the face.

"We are trying to make people feel like they are living the lives the actors are living," he says. "In a documentary, your resources are more limited, so you try to compensate by anticipating what the person will do. You really can't intrude and alter reality. You can't restage a shot if you miss it. The documentary gets its sense of authenticity by just being there and building drama out of small human moments. There is tremendous power in truth. That's the essence of what we are trying to create when we produce a fiction film. We want that sense of drama and truth."

Does he have a preference for either the narrative or non-fiction formats.

"I think of myself as a filmmaker," he says. "It's a struggle maintaining your identity and being true to yourself, but I don't want to get typecast."