Dante Spinotti, ASC, AIC: The Insider
By Bob Fisher

The Insider is Dante Spinotti’s fourth collaboration with Chicago-born director Michael Mann. Their first film was Manhunter, an inventive "prequel" to The Silence of the Lambs. In 1995 Mann and Spinotti made Heat, and in 1997 The Last of the Mohicans won a BAFTA Award and an ASC Award nomination. A previous Oscar nomination came for L.A. Confidential, his first film with director Curtis Hanson.

Spinotti is a native of northern Italy who began his career in television at RAI, and also apprenticed in Kenya as a cinematographer for his uncle. In 1985, after a career's worth of Italian films, the producer Dino De Laurentiis offered Spinotti a chance to work in the U.S. for the first time, on Manhunter. Since then, he has photographed almost 30 films.

The Insider stars Russell Crowe as Jeffrey Wigand, a mild-mannered tobacco company executive who becomes a whistleblower. The "ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances" situation is given a sense of tension and mystery through the cinematography.

Spinotti and Mann devised an innovative approach that emphasized tightly framed shots and plenty of handheld cameras. The shooting seems spontaneous, but it was carefully planned every step of the way.

"When working with Michael Mann, movement and framing belong strictly to Michael Mann," says Spinotti. "As far as camera composition, it's more about preproduction. Michael plans all the shots way before the whole movie starts. And every single camera used has to do with the emotional stage of the character, at that emotional stage of the story.

"There were some lighting situations that required some sort of 'inner' lighting or 'inner' framing," he says. "But we really tried to be in the psyche of the character. For many of those close shots, we used the Frazier lens, which allowed us to keep foreground and background in focus in the same frame. This also gave us the technical necessity of building up light levels much higher. The [Kodak] Vision 500 film helped make shots like that match in the middle of a sequence."

In keeping with the realistic, handheld approach, Spinotti was careful to keep things from getting too flawless. "We didn't want to add an edge of perfection to the movie," he says. "We used the 500 ASA 5279 for a good part of the film, and the [Kodak Vision] 250D daylight film, which I quite like. For print film, we used the regular [Kodak] Vision. I had used the [Kodak] Vision Premier print stock for Wonder Boys because there were advantages with the Super 35 format. But for The Insider, we did some testing in the postproduction stage and Michael Mann preferred Vision. We didn’t want it to be too glossy and perfect."

Spinotti often employed multiple cameras, reasoning that a film with so much important dialog would stand or fall on the performances. "For the scene in the hotel in Louisville, when the two main characters first come together, we had two cameras on each actor. There was a tight over, a single close-up, and also a wider over. This way, when Michael has the kind of performance he's looking for, he has it covered two ways. It's tricky to light those scenes because the backlight for one camera becomes the frontlight for the other camera. But I like to do that because it plays to the performance later on. Your sequence becomes so complex and so tight and so artful, because of the quality of the performances."

Several sequences take place in the bedroom of Al Pacino's character, 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman. The bedroom has floor-to-ceiling windows along two walls and a commanding view of a lush forest. Showing the audience the full vista without losing any details in the actors' faces or the interior of the bedroom required a balancing act on Spinotti's part.

"We had a challenging time there in Al Pacino's bedroom because in the same day we were supposed to shoot day, day for night, and night sequences," Spinotti recalls. "So we had to count on the gels we put on the windows for balance and color temperature. We had the exterior trees prelit for the night scenes. All the trees were also rigged for special effects on ropes. The trees are always moving. We had a huge amount of light in the back of there, too, from HMI units. One of those shots was also made with the Frazier lens. So again higher lighting levels were necessary."

Over his past few pictures, Spinotti and his crew, including gaffer Jay Fortune, have developed a lighting system for use in location situations. It consists of strips of very tiny bulbs mounted in four, six or eight-foot lengths, or in circles, depending on the shot. They are usually mounted in the corner of a room and controlled by dimmers. If a shot "sees" the entire room, there is a method for controlling frontlight and backlight.

"We use the channel lights in a variety of situations," says Spinotti, "from close ups to masters. Once I learned how to work gels to get the effects I wanted on faces, I could write these lights across faces, and I could write them from behind to have some toplight. They were long enough to wrap nicely and to carry some sort of top and front light. They gave me a kind of lighting I can only describe as 'nonexistent.' I could have areas of intense light, while keeping them separate from the shadow areas. They are very easy to work with. It's a hard light, but it doesn't create shapes because of the many bulbs. It changes its work if you hold it horizontally or vertically, on one side or the other."

Spinotti emphasizes that all the decisions in making a film must be based on a common understanding of the film's inner workings. He calls this understanding "the language of the film."

"To me, making a movie is understanding the language of that particular film," he says. "You have to combine many elements. Every decision adds to and influences the language of the film. Michael was very concerned. He wanted to avoid a kind of HBO film approach, where the story is told very simply and classically. He wanted to reach a different level. He wanted to go into the human values revealed in this event, and visually represent that. So every minute detail for me – the shape of a pair of glasses, the color of a tie, are fundamental.

"What I have always liked about Michael is his ability to be aggressive with the material, to grab the material and make the most dynamic, cinematic film out of it, rather than laying back and covering things in the classic manner. The camera becomes a storytelling tool in a very aggressive way."