Someone to Watch Over Me - A Story of Love & Terror
By Ron Magid

(This article originally appeared in the October 1987 issue of American Cinematographer)

Ridley Scott is among the best visual stylists working. Consequently, he demands perfection on every level from his cinematographer, and will not tolerate anything less. Scott selected the youthful Steven Poster to photograph Someone To Watch Over Me with its hard edged, high tech/art deco New York locales. Poster's first unit work for such films as The Boy Who Could Fly, Testament and Dead and Buried, and his fine second unit work on Close Encounters of The Third kind and Scott's Bladerunner, recommended his talent.

Painting with light, shadow and smoke, Scott has fashioned four of the most innovative, most imitated films of the past decade. Rarely has a filmmaker's work so rapidly set the tone and the style of entire genres as Scott's - his impact on the science fiction and fantasy film was immediate and definitive, as Alien, Bladerunner and Legend will testify. With his latest film, Someone To Watch Over Me, Scott has now brought his considerable cinematic talents to bear in recreating and redefining our contemporary world.

In many ways, Poster feels that Someone to Watch Over Me is a dramatic departure for Scott in terms of its economical production profile. "If you're looking for the normal kind of effects that Ridley is famous for," he cautions, "you're not going to see them in this movie - it's really more of a story, though Ridley is a master at telling that story with the camera. It's a departure for him a lot of ways: it's not a very large budget film compared to what you're used to seeing from Ridley Scott, and I think he really wanted to make a much simpler movie. He was determined to finish on schedule and on budget, which we just about did. We planned for a 12 week shoot, but we ended up shooting 13."

The title, Someone To Watch Over Me, refers to the film's situation: the assignment of a newly appointed detective from Long Island to guard a wealthy Manhattan socialite who is the only eyewitness in a murder trial. Though the detective, played by Tom Berenger, is married and has a child, he becomes involved in a romantic affair with his charge, played by Mimi Rogers. The murderer, Joey Venza, played by Andreas Katsulas, is aware of the affair, as is most everyone on the police force, and attempts to force Berenger to give up Rogers in exchange for the safety of the detective's family in the film's tense final confrontation.

Though the film is set entirely in New York, it was decided to film primarily exteriors and a select few interiors in the Big Apple to establish the locale, then shift to Los Angeles sound stages for the interiors of the detective and socialite's homes. Scouting for unusual locations in New York proved difficult, as Scott didn't want to go with the traditional landmarks, although he soon came to realize their value. "As much as we tried not to, we ended up having to use the cliches to say this is New York," Poster admits. "It's true anywhere - there are only a few things in any city that really establish that place's identity. It was hard to find locations that really said New York - we found a lot of great visual stuff that had texture and quite a bit of intensity, but an audience outside of New York would have trouble recognizing the location. Ridley hates using cliches, but in the end, we had to go back to those things that were true statements of the locale: the Chrysler Building, Radio City Music Hall, 5th Avenue. Those are the kind of locations that say 'New York' as opposed to just a crowded street, so we tried to incorporate sequences that took place in these areas."

Once the locations were selected, shooting in New York at the height of the Christmas season proved an additional challenge for the production. "Who chooses to shoot in the middle of winter at night in New York?" Poster asks rhetorically. "Well, we did! We started in New York around Thanksgiving and worked through mid-January. The picture could've taken place at any time of year, but we happened to be there in winter, so we were always aware of the possibility of snow, which could have been a problem. We did have some snow and some rain, but we were very lucky - none of it stayed to change anything we'd shot. New York is probably one of the toughest places to shoot on the streets, but the same things that make it tough also make it fun and exciting. Shooting on 5th Avenue just before Christmas when there are a million extra cars in Manhattan, we had to deal with all sorts of things: there were thousands of shoppers, drunks and onlookers, the inevitable police problems since we weren't allowed to restrict the flow of traffic, the inevitable parking problems and the cold and uncomfortable weather conditions."

One of the simpler locations to photograph was the detective's home in Long Island City across the river from Manhattan, an ideal exterior that beautifully sums up the dilemma of Berenger's character.

"From the house, down the street in one direction you can see the Chrysler Building across the water, and in the other direction there's an elevated track, which really tells you what kind of neighborhood this is - the rich world of Manhattan is over there, and the real world is here. It's supposed to be a neighborhood in decline which they want to move out of, and it had the grit and texture of neighborhoods of that character. The house was a real one, and we shot in front and in back. The few nights we were shooting across the river, we got them to keep the Chrysler Building lit all night - the lights normally go off about midnight. We shot some day exteriors on the street and a lot of night work there. The night work was pretty intensive because we wanted to be able to see all the way down the street, which meant we had to light three city blocks when it came down to it, so I brought out the Musco light. We used that on one side and we had a construction crane with 12K HMIs on the other, which enabled us to be flexible enough to work in both directions."

In interior situations, like a sequence set in a subway, Scott was unwilling to settle for what was available, and had Poster create an entirely different look with lighting. "A lot of times, we simply turned off the existing light and created our own," he says. "Often, when a train goes over a switch, it sparks and there is a flicker of light, so we used those elements to devise a new look for the subway. We blocked off an entire train and lit it so you could see down two cars, but the light was very simple."

The most difficult part of the New York location shooting was undoubtedly filming interiors and exteriors of the famed Guggenheim Art Museum, an imposing structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The Guggenheim's imposing façade was one of the more difficult night exteriors Scott expected Poster to light, and once again, New York's inhospitable climate created problems for the production. "I brought out the Musco light and lit two city blocks from the park, and I also had to re-light the exterior of the museum as well, which was quite a challenge," Poster recalls. "We used some of the existing lights, but mainly I used the Musco light to draw the shape of the building. To separate that shape from the others on either side of it, I used some large units. Unfortunately, the police wouldn't allow us to wet anything down because it would turn to ice, so we couldn't use that trick of creating light values. I had to find other ways, so I used reflections off the large number of limousines parked in front of the museum and the tremendous amount of flashes from the cameras of the paparazzi to help us out. We used a lot of smoke - surprise! - but we always tried to make it come from legitimate sources. If we were shooting in Times Square, we'd use a hot dog stand; if we were on a deserted street, we'd have it coming out of a sewer. Smoke is a wonderful tool to light up an area because it takes on a light value, but we didn't want it to look too much like a fantasy, so we tried to justify our sources as much as possible."

Shooting outside the museum was trouble-free compared to the restrictive, demanding interior shoot, which required re-lighting the entire gallery - on a three day shooting schedule! "It really became almost a military operation," Poster says. "It was that difficult. When we initially walked into the museum, Ridley took one look at it and said he really didn't like the existing lighting, which meant we were going to have to re-light the entire museum because the Guggenheim is such an integrated structure - if you see any part of it, you see the whole thing. In order to change the lighting, we had to turn everything off and start from scratch. We only had three nights to do it in, and every night we had to come in and re-rig it all again since we were told we couldn't leave our equipment in there - the most we could leave were some of our cable runs. It's a problem to work in any art museum because we're dealing with fragile art work, and the museum curators are very specific about the kind of light we could use and what we could do. We were at the mercy of the museum in that sense - they wouldn't allow us to make any dolly moves in most parts of the museum, for example, because they were worried about the weight of our equipment on the marble floors."

Because of the extremely limited amount of time available to them inside the museum, Scott and Poster preplanned their lighting as much as possible. "We discussed it all quite carefully," Poster recalls, "and I came up with an idea to have a great soft light coming down from the top floor, sort of hidden, and bounced off the ceiling. There was a huge light source up there and as the light fell downwards, the ramps fell off into darkness and only their edges caught the light, which enabled us to texturize the whole floor to throw shadows underneath part of the ramps which, in a building that huge, was quite a major undertaking. That's the lighting scheme we prepared, but in that preparation I allowed a lot of flexibility, because I know Ridley."

As it turned out, Poster's built-in alternative saved the day - in fact, all three of them. "The initial concept I discussed with Ridley was not quite right," Poster says, "but I left options to turn things off and on at will, so we were flexible enough. When we walked in there, the lighting worked but it was a little bit boring. It wasn't quite the departure we wanted from the original look of the Guggenheim, so we started switching things off and turning other things on, modifying it a bit until we came up with something we liked. It was actually 180° opposite from what we originally had, but I laid it out so we could do that if we had to. In our final look, we had the soft light coming up from the floor and the hard light coming down from above. It really gave it a sharper look, and I thought it defined the building more architecturally."

From previous experience working with Scott, Poster realized that the key to working with the director was the ability to give him just about any look he wanted as quickly as possible. "Ridley has a specific vision," Poster explains, "and to put this vision on film takes a certain amount of collaboration and an ability to be as flexible as possible, which is both a blessing and a curse. I find it a very exciting process of discovery with Ridley, a very creative process where we're sharing ideas back and forth. He's very demanding about what he wants to see, but he'll take my ideas and mold them and throw them back at me, and I'd do the same to him. He's very improvisatory - we could be looking in one direction and wind up shooting 180° away. Nothing's really set. I'd have to be on my toes and ready to change everything all of the time, which is not traditional and very much goes against the grain of the people working with us, so I'd always make sure to prepare them for this. Once they knew what to expect up front, they were able to work with us very well. In the past, people have felt that this approach is negative, but I feel it's very exciting."

Still, Scott's unorthodox working methods placed a strain on Poster and his crew that only increased when production shifted to sound stages and other locations in the Los Angeles area. "There was a lot of pressure all the way through," Poster admits. "It was a very intensive experience. We worked very quickly. It's a bit of a myth that Ridley tends to be slow because he takes so much time with everything. He's very careful to do things the way he wants to, which means we really had to work twice as fast to keep things on time and on budget. We would try to get as much coverage in as possible every day so we'd have plenty of alternatives in cutting. It was a little bit like an athletic event - it was exhausting but it was great to get through every day. It was a press from the day we started shooting until the day we finished."

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the production once it moved to California was the use of an indoor swimming pool aboard the Queen Mary, which was converted into a stylish New York disco for the film's violent opening. "It has nothing to do with being on a ship," Poster explains, "but we couldn't find anything we liked in New York that would facilitate our doing this major scene there: on the opening night of the disco/restaurant/art gallery, the killer confronts his ex-partner and murders him as Mimi Rogers watches, so it's the whole set-up for the movie. We looked all over for the proper setting, something unusual enough to adapt to our purposes that would have that deco and high tech look at the same time. It had to have a spectacular look to it. We needed a large anteroom and entranceway, a teeming disco, as well as this restaurant and gallery area that hasn't opened yet, where the murder takes place. All of it had to have a style that would suggest this was the highest society and the hottest thing going in New York, so naturally we did it in California! The Queen Mary allowed us enough variety and enough style in its architecture to accomplish what we wanted to do. The poolroom was two levels of wonderful architecture. There's beautiful hallways with stainless steel elevator doors which are part of the existing ship, and stairways with stainless steel wraparound railings, all of which we were able to use for reflections."

To enhance the exotic quality of their unusual location, Scott and Poster chose a highly unusual type of lighting: xenon. "We wanted to create an atypical lighting scheme for the disco interior, so we used xenon lights as huge sources that would filter down through the smoke and light everything up," Poster reveals. We built huge fans out of cardboard and plywood to flicker in front of these lights. We mounted the fans on gripstands, and we'd have two of them going in opposite directions to create a flickering light. Sometimes you can see them when you see the light source, and sometimes you just see the effect of the light. We also had a large xenon light reflecting into water flicker pans - tubs of water filled with pieces of broken glass - which created a water ripple effect. It's an old trick. Over the pool itself we placed a grid floor and we had our lights in the pool coming up from the bottom. We built a huge scaffolding to support them, which was a bit of an architectural problem since we couldn't put that much weight on the pool - we didn't want to break the floor."

When the production moved onto the sound stages, Poster's ingenuity was once again challenged by production designer Jim Bissell's remarkable settings. Bissell had been production designer on Poster's last feature, The Boy Who Could Fly, and Poster was delighted to find himself on his sets once more. "We finished in New York on a Thursday and we were shooting on stage in California the following Monday," Poster says. "Even though we had a crew working for two weeks pre-rigging the sets, it was a bit awesome walking onto them for the first time and seeing how large they really were - one was Berenger's two story Long Island home, and the other was Mimi Roger's elegant apartment. As soon as we got there, we were dealing with establishing backings, windows, the direction of light and all of the practical lights. We had to make our changes, put in our major units and go!"

The glamorous apartment of the wealthy Manhattan socialite proved a difficult set to light. "When I walked onto this wonderfully designed set which contained a long marble hallway lined with pillars I said, 'Where the hell am I going to light from?'" Poster recalls. "The socialite is supposed to be a patron of the arts, so at one end of the hallway was a huge Rothko-type painting, and the art light on that painting became our major light source for the hallway. We had enough light back there so we could establish a direction of light and let it continue through the hallway, falling off as it comes towards the entranceway. The doors leading to the rooms on either side of the hallway were open or closed depending on the time of day, so we could create some light sources coming from there. Once we established that one end of the hall was lit, we made layers of light all the way down and carried the reflections from those light sources off the marble. Throughout the apartment, we used a very thin layer of atmospheric smoke to create depth. It was an even layer, so it didn't look smoky - that was a look we were trying to avoid. At night, when the huge living room would be lit with two floor lamps, they looked like they were being lit from underneath."

A tense confrontation occurs in a mirrored bathroom as Berenger confronts a hired hitman on the trail of the socialite. The detective enters the bathroom from the bedroom, while the hitman enters from the hall and becomes confused by the multiple images of the detective and himself. "When the detective confronts him, he doesn't know which is the mirror image and which is real, so the detective gets the drop on him because he knows the geography of the room," Poster explains. "This was a wonderful piece of set work by Jim Bissell where most of the mirrors were gimbaled in such a way that we could create light sources using reflections and not see ourselves. There was a wall of glass bricks over the bathtub which we were able to use to create a light source that would throw that quality throughout the bathroom. This added believably to the assassin's confusion because we see that light source reflected in a lot of different mirrors. There was a bit of geometry going on there because the scene takes place at night with the lights off. It was kind of like doing The Lady From Shanghai without lights, by using lights from other sources. It became a matter of using my imagination to find a way to crack a door to allow a little light in from the hallway. This would create a backlight to separate them, and then I could use the reflection of other lights to create light on their faces and to add texture to the scene so it looks believably dark and yet allows you to look into it and see what's going on. Ridley and I are great believers in being able to see into an image as opposed to just making it so black that you can't see anything. I would rather get the exposure on an area and then print it down to the point where you almost can't see into it - then you know that the texture is there. Using this concept, we were really able to allow the audience the privilege of seeing everything. Ridley started doing that in Alien and I began doing it in Dead And Buried - I wanted the audience to have to strain to see so that when the action happens, it throws them back in their seats!"

Poster and Scott took this idea to its logical extreme in the film's climactic sequence: a confrontation between the detective and the killer that occurs in the detective's own home, where the killer holds his wife and child hostage. "All of this action had to be shot with almost no light," Poster recalls. "We had to deal with what Ridley calls 'Movie Night', where we created sources to throw a highlight here or there to act as a balancing source so the darkness isn't so pervasive the audience can't see anything. They have to see everything that happens, but it has to have the feeling of night. There's a level of style that we had to establish and maintain in order to find ways to create that look though this style. It's a very delicate balance because it's really easy to blow it. That's where Ridley's a master, but it was both a source of confrontation and collaboration."

Because Poster wanted full ceilings to his sets, he had to create a genuine ambient light coming in though the windows from outside in order to achieve "Movie Night". "I believe that by creating the atmosphere of a real room, not by lighting from a scaffold and pulling the ceiling out, you make it look more like a real room on film," Poster feels. "It's a help artistically when you don't cheat, and it's also a challenge to light these big sets without resorting to the normal tricks you can do in a studio. We had to deal with larger lights coming in through the windows. In an overall balance, we had to have that light wrap around and be the source as opposed to cheating. We were dealing with no light in that house, so how do you do that? We had a street light coming in through the windows, and maybe a light source from a doorway down the hall, which created the look for a whole room, so there's ambient light. We were always looking for highlights that could be a light source. For example, an open refrigerator door can seem to be a source for a moment - the problem is that the audience has to be able to see everything prior to that moment and afterwards, so we had to create an ambience and a texture that looked real. With Scott, we were always dealing with strong directions of light and really painting with it. It has to have the feeling that the light is coming from that source, and anything that opposes that is thrown out."