Constantine explores two boundaries: the line between reality and fantasy and the line between heaven and hell. The story is set in Los Angeles, where an irreverent detective named John Constantine (Keanu Reeves) teams up with policewoman Angela Dodson (Rachel Weisz) in a quest to resolve the mysterious apparent suicide of her twin sister Isabel (also played by Weisz).

Constantine is a renegade misfit who investigates supernatural mysteries around the world. He has been to hell and back, literally. Dodson is skeptical until she and Constantine enter the world of angels and demons. She discovers that hell is not a state of mind, but a physical place that exists beneath the surface of Los Angeles.

Constantine has been a smoker all of his life and is paying the price because he now has lung cancer. That subtext adds another layer of complexity to his character and the story.

The film is based on the DC/Vertigo comic book Hellblazer. The comic book was created by Kevin Brodbin, Mark Bomback and Frank Capello, who collaborated on the screenplay with Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis.

There is a large supporting cast playing angels, demons and human beings. Los Angeles, which is seen in many backgrounds, is kind of an inanimate character.

“When my agent called to tell me about this film, he described it as a story with angels and demons,” cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, ASC, AFC recalls. “He also told me that the director, Francis Lawrence, was a music video director and that this was his first movie. My first reaction was to say ‘Forget it.’ I had no interest in comic book culture or in shooting that type of movie, but my agent kept insisting that I meet with Francis.”

It was good advice. Lawrence’s long list of music video credits includes Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me a River, which won the Music Video Producers Association Best Pop Video Award in 2003. Shooting award winning music videos turned out to be just one aspect of his native ability.

“Francis was the complete opposite of what I expected,” Rousselot says. “He was intelligent and poised. I immediately liked him. I read the script and found it very interesting. There are angels and demons, action and some intriguing intellectual twists. Sometimes you find that your most interesting work happens on surprising projects.”

Like most filmmakers, Rousselot brings a unique background to his endeavors. He was born and raised in France. When Rousselot was 11 years old, his parents sent him to a two-week summer camp where films were shown and discussed every night. That was the spark that ignited his passion for film. He subsequently studied at the Vaugirard national film school in France, and served an apprenticeship with Nestor Almendros, ASC as an assistant cameraman during the late 1960s. Almendros was riding the crest of the new wave that was sweeping through the film industry in Europe. Rousselot worked with Almendros on My Night at Maud’s, Claire’s Knee and Chloe in the Afternoon.

Rousselot earned his first cinematography credit at the age of 26. He won the first of his three Cesar Awards (France’s equivalent of an Oscar) for Diva in 1982, in addition to Therese and Queen Margot. Rousselot has compiled some fifty narrative film credits. He won an Oscar in 1993 for A River Runs Through It and earned other nominations in 1988 for Hope and Glory and in 1991 for Henry & June. His eclectic credit list also includes Dangerous Liaisons, Sommersby, The Emerald Forest, Interview With the Vampire, Antwone Fisher and Big Fish.

Rousselot had about eight weeks of preproduction planning for Constantine during the summer of 2003. Lawrence showed him books with photographs from Cuba as visual references for the atmosphere he envisioned. Rousselot recalls that the images included a mix of fluorescent greens and warmer colors. The director also said he wanted graphically symmetrical composition. Rousselot explains that Lawrence wanted to avoid skewed angles. He envisioned parallel lines and no distortions.

“We didn’t do a lot of research,” he says. “I visited locations, looked at the sets they were building, spoke with the production and set designers and shot some tests with the costume and hair people. I was working with good people who know their jobs. They asked me some questions, and then I figured out how I was going to light. My gaffer was Jack English, a long time friend and collaborator. He knows exactly what I like, and he organized a terrific electrical crew, including a fantastic rigging gaffer named D.J. Lootens. I walked on the set every morning knowing we were ready to shoot.”

Warner Bros. approved a digital intermediate finish up-front, so Rousselot knew he could alter colors and contrast, if necessary, while timing the film. He had done a DI finish on Big Fish at EFILM, so it was a familiar concept. He didn’t have to convince Lawrence, who has put finishing touches on music videos in telecine suites throughout his career. Rousselot says that the director had a very clear mental picture of an aesthetic that bordered on surreal. He previsualized graphic composition, a specific color palette and somewhat gritty and grainy images, especially in the underworld.

“It’s a darkish and very colorful movie,” Rousselot says. “There aren’t any ugly images. We wanted to find the beauty even in hell. The colors on sets are never unreal. It’s more like a slightly enhanced reality, which we created with colors and costumes and with gels, usually to make the light a little greener or more cyan. I knew I could push the colors in digital intermediate in shots where we used cool white tube light that I couldn’t gel. Colors were always motivated by something in the environment, but sometimes I felt something should be a little redder, yellower or desaturated.”

Rousselot says there is no easy way to quantify those nuances in words. It came down to trusting his instincts about when and how much to emphasize or de-emphasize colors to give a scene either a realistic or slightly surrealistic tone. His lighting tools included Kino Flos, tube lights and sodium vapor lamps, and sometimes color gels.

A quick decision was made to produce Constantine in Super 35 format in 2.40:1 aspect ratio. Rousselot explains that he wanted the flexibility of using wide-angle spherical lenses. The knowledge that they were going to time the film in a DI suite reinforced the decision to produce the film in Super 35 format.

Rousselot explains that with a traditional Super 35 process, the edited negative is optically converted into a squeezed 2.40:1 aspect ratio while it is being optically copied onto color intermediate film. With a DI, after the movie is edited, the conformed original negative is converted to digital format. After shots are timed for continuity, the digital files are recorded onto color intermediate film in squeezed 2.40:1 aspect ratio. This process results in a color intermediate that is one generation closer to the image quality on the original negative.

Rousselot also established a collaborative relationship with visual effects supervisor Mike Fink. He says they were in constant communications during production to assure that visual effects shots blended seamlessly with live-action footage.

The visual effect shots consisted of CG and greenscreen images composited with live-action film. They are designed to be transparent to the audience.

“This isn’t a film that you can take very seriously like something that happens in real life,” Rousselot observes. “John Constantine and Angela Dodson are coping with characters that come from hell and heaven. I think of it as kind of a cold war between heaven and hell. There is a lot of interesting dialog with an extremely good cast, including strong supporting performances. It’s an entertaining rather than philosophical movie with interesting visual metaphors, which gave us a lot of room for interpretation.”

Interior scenes were filmed on stages at Warner Bros., in Burbank, and also at Center City Studios in downtown Los Angeles. The stage sets included apartments where the two main characters live, rooms and corridors at a hospital, a bowling alley, and a big stage for the underworld sets, a.k.a. hell. Most greenscreen shots were also filmed on stages, where background screens could be quickly set up and lit.

“The set for Constantine’s apartment had a long stretch of windows with metal shutters and a mechanical control that opened and shut them in just a few moments,” he says. “We were able to make much quicker lighting changes on the stage than we could have on location. That’s a good example of how we saved time by lighting on stages.”

The exterior locations included streets in downtown Los Angeles, St. Mary’s Hospital in Long Beach and a park in nearby Compton.

Rousselot assembled a veteran crew, including second unit director of photography Neal Norton, camera operator Mark La Bonge, first assistants Pam Rittelmeyer and Xiomara Comrie, second assistant Mike Blauvelt and film loader Oliver Ponce. “They are mostly people with whom I have worked on many pictures,” he says. “They know how I think and what I like, which is a big advantage on any film.”

His modest camera package was provided by Panavision. It included several Platinum bodies and an array of Primo prime and zoom lenses. Rousselot says that he mainly relied on 14, 17 and 27mm prime lenses with only occasional use of zooms.

“There are a lot of very sharp wide angle shots with objects and people close to the lens,” he says. “Anamorphic lenses are wonderful, but they don’t offer the same depth of field from an elongated perspective. Francis wanted a very specific symmetry, like an architectural design, with the camera on a horizontal axis and no distortions. We used the word ‘nodal’ during filming. It’s actually a misuse of the literal meaning of the word. For us, it meant putting the camera in exactly the right spots for the design Francis wanted. We even designed and wore nodal T-shirts as a constant reminder.”

Rousselot estimates that they covered the action with a single camera between 75 and 80 percent of the time. The main exceptions were scenes where Lawrence anticipated that something unpredictable might happen. In these situations, Rousselot had a second and sometimes third camera covering the action with different focal length lenses and perspectives. The goal was to reduce the number of takes and capture the unrepeatable.

The camera usually tracked on a dolly, though Rousselot used a Steadicam when that was the best way to pull the audience into a scene. He also used a Technocrane and various other cranes when Lawrence wanted coverage from a different perspective or angle. There are also a few underwater shots with a HydroFlex housing.

“Francis was extremely clever in making his breakdown of scenes,” Rousselot observes. “He amazed me with the knowledge he had for a first time movie director. He watched scenes from the video village, but was with us at the camera when we blocked shots. We put the lens on a viewfinder for him, so he could see what we were covering. He knew exactly what he wanted, and was also very good with the actors on the set.”

Rousselot chose to work with a modest film palette. He mainly used the Kodak Vision2 500T 5218 negative and some Eastman EXR 100T 5248 film for covering daylight exteriors. He slightly over-exposed the 5218 stock by rating it for an exposure index of 400 to get a somewhat richer negative, but cautions that this is not a recipe for all situations.

“It’s what I felt was right for this film,” he says. “The most important thing is to be consistent with your exposure point. I knew that, if necessary, I could isolate anything in any frame in DI and alter contrast and colors. Once you have some experience with a DI you know exactly what you can modify in postproduction. It becomes instinctual. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to do your job. You still want to record the best possible images on the negative, but now you have another option.”

Front-end lab work was done by Technicolor in Los Angeles. Rousselot mainly watched dailies in HD format along with Lawrence and usually some of the producers during lunch breaks in a trailer at the location or near the stage where they were shooting.

“You don’t see the same details, including focus, that you get with film dailies,” he says, “but it was a very relaxed environment, which was important on this film.”

A second monitor was set up for the crew, so they could see how their work was progressing.

Rousselot is timing the film for continuity and putting the finishing touches on nuances in the look at EFILM and Studio 3 as we go to press.