Lighting even a very naturalistic-looking film can present a cinematographer and gaffer with as many challenges as can a film with a more expressionistic feel. Gaffer Michael LaViolette knew from the outset that I *Heart* Huckabees was not a dark, shadowy film and that cinematographer Peter Deming, ASC, was not interested in a self-conscious look. The unusual comedy, directed by David O. Russell (Three Kings), came with a bizarre script, which was densely packed with metaphysical language about the meaning of life, coincidence and the infinite. The summary-defying story concerns a conservationist (Jason Schwartzman); an environmentally unfriendly chain of mega-stores, Huckabees; the company’s sleazy PR rep (Jude Law); his girlfriend and Huckabees spokesmodel (Naomi Watts); an extremely disturbed fireman (Mark Wahlberg) and a husband/wife team of “existential detectives” (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin).

 

“The narrative is wrapped in theoretical dialogue about identity and the universe,” Deming recalls. The complexity, he says, called for a look that was light. “We didn’t want to make the visuals heavy-duty as well. The film takes place entirely during the day. The color schemes are light. It’s mostly a low-saturation film. There are no bold colors. We didn’t want the visuals to distract the audience.”

 

Gaffer Laviolette and Deming have worked out a kind of shorthand in the twenty-three years they’ve collaborated. “After we read the script for our next show,” LaViolette says, “we talk about looks we want to quote from great movies of the past and movies we’ve done together. That’s the starting point.” Beyond that, he adds, they lay the general groundwork for the look of the current film. “We’ve got two modes we begin with,” he adds. “One is the Lost Highway/From Hell mode and the other is the light comedy mode, more like Austin Powers, which is all very high key. This one, we thought, called for more Austin Powers and less Lost Highway.”

 

For LaViolette this immediately told him to think in terms of big, soft sources to start, and then frequent-collaborator key grip Phil Sloan would cut the light. “When we’re in this mode,” says the gaffer, “it’s all about naturalistic lighting. Forget about lighting that calls attention to itself.” It is, he says, the opposite on a David Lynch film. “With him [Lynch], it’s always about contrast. Hard light and deep shadows.” LaViolette laughs, “He’ll say things like, ‘I want this scene to be so dark that if it was any darker, it would be radio.’”

 

According to LaViolette, comedy is, as a rule, about softer light. “You need to give the actors a lot of room to play,” he says. “You don’t want to box them into a shadow play where they have to hit their mark exactly and work in a certain orientation. It’s important to give actors in a comedy a lot of room to improvise and that was true here.”

 

“We bounced light a lot,” says the gaffer. The idea was to light up big areas to within only slightly more than a two-stop range. “We used PARs, fresnels—the big guns. We’d almost never point a lamp at a person unless there was a Chimera on it. You won’t see much hard light in Huckabees at all, no blazing edges or really dark shadows.”

 

LaViolette starts out thinking in terms of the units he works with regardless of the type of look Deming is going for. “There is a quiver of instruments that you always want to have around,” he says. “You almost always want basic HMI, Kino and tungsten packages. Then in tungsten mode, I always take along a lot of China balls and China ball rings that Peter and I developed ourselves over the years. Then on this show, I used Alpha 4Ks and BlackJacks from K5600 Lighting. They came in very handy.”

 

Huckabees consists primarily of location day interiors and day exteriors. There was only a smattering of studio work. Deming went primarily with Fujifilm’s daylight balanced Reala 500D for all but the studio work.

 

Much of the action takes place at Huckabees’ corporate offices, which the production built inside a Torrance, CA office building that had been vacated by its original owners––a long-dead victim of the burst dot-com bubble. From a lighting standpoint, the interior consisted of office space, big windows, a skylight and 160 U-shaped fluorescent fixtures. The large space was divided up into some smaller offices divided by a long corridor, but the whole thing had to be lit with the big windows in mind. “That was a big set,” says LaViolette. “There was glass all over and generally you can see out the windows. Phil’s crew did a great job of bringing down the exposure from the windows with pre-cut pieces of hard ND gels that slipped in and out.”

 

Even though it was daylight, and the Reala stock has a greater tolerance for mixed light, the gaffer constantly metered color temperature and used color correction gels. “I was correcting very carefully with 8ths and quarters blue,” he recalls. “The correction on Kinos got to be very particular.”

 

Some cinematographers, he notes, worry more about color temperature than others. “In TV work, there’s a lot of latitude for color and for correcting mistakes or using mistakes or finding your color median,” he explains. “When you’re taking film all the way through print, you don’t have as much control and a DP wants it as close to perfect as possible in the neg. Peter’s done this kind of thing enough and he knows that something that might not be so bad in the early stages will start bothering him in the answer print stage. He looks at the work a lot and has a great eye for any tiny color differences. And if he sees them, it’s usually my ass!”

 

LaViolette changed out all the fluorescent units daylight-corrected Kino Flos that work in the kind of U-shaped fixture the location came with. He admits he could have tried to wrap cheaper, uncorrected tubes in correction gel, but for Deming, who is critical about color temperature, the results would not have been satisfactory. “Fluorescent tubes have discrete emissions,” the gaffer points out. “It’s not like a rainbow. So when you start to filter those kinds of lights, your color temperature meter will average out the reading as if it were seeing a full spectrum. Your meter can lie to you. It’s just come out of a lot of experience watching dailies that if you go with corrected tubes, it’s white on the set and it’s white to photograph.”

 

The gaffer then supplemented the minimal amount of illumination he got from these tubes with additional banks of Kino Flos as well as big HMIs—from 6K in cramped conditions up to 18K for wider areas—bounced into 8 x 8 or 12 x 12 muslins. This light in turn was supplemented by the skylight, which he diffused to control the sunlight, and a Condor outside holding multiple Dinos with Par 64 globes and diffusion. “That way we had a big, soft rush of light that we were able to handle coming through the window for different scenes.”

 

LaViolette was also able to light some scenes in the Huckabees corporate headquarters by creating artificial fluorescent units in the ceiling by pounding corrected Nook lights through egg crates mounted with diffusion paper. He also lit long hallways by bouncing big HMIs into muslins inside offices along the hallway and leaving the office doors open.

 

The glass walls and windows added the greatest lighting challenges. “There was a lot of glass everywhere,” he says. “And that means a lot of reflections. The camera was always moving and there were so many places we had to make sure to avoid double and triple reflections. “A lot of our lighting units had to be really skinny to fit right into the blind spot—the missing wedge of a reflection. That’s where the Alpha 4K came in so handy. It put out so much light to such a wide area that we could have the instrument extremely close to the diffuser and the whole thing had a really thin profile. That was really handy. So we had a lot of 8 x 8 muslins really close to the Alpha 4Ks. We only had two of them at the time. I wish we’d had more, but I think that’s all Paskal had at the time.”

 

Several sets were created in a pseudo-stage/warehouse in Playa Vista, CA. “Luckily, I have a lot of experience turning warehouses into studios,” the gaffer notes. “It always involves pushing limits. You’re hanging things from ceilings that aren’t even rated for snow. You’re generating a lot of heat and you really don’t want to activate the sprinklers. And since I’m generating all the heat, I want to make sure I have enough exhaust fans.”

 

Among other warehouse lessons he’s learned over the years: Keep lamps lower than you might normally and keep them as far away from sprinklers as possible. “Those sprinklers can be a big problem,” he says. “I always plant my own electronic temperature gauge on the ceiling ahead of time to keep an eye on what’s going in up there. It’s very important to be aware of even subtle changes. Especially near the sprinklers.”

 

The private detective offices inhabited by Hoffman and Tomlin’s character was the primary set shot at the warehouse. Others included an apartment, an elevator and a record store. Lighting on the stage was all tungsten. Deming switched to Kodak’s 500T 5279 and LaViolette used a lot of tungsten 2K space lights. “These units are kind of new,” he notes. “They weren’t around when I started doing warehouse work. They’re really handy units. In these warehouse situations, you’re generally working with lower ceiling height and lower load capacity than in a real studio. Getting the cable weight out of a rig helps you get the lighting you want without the problems of bigger units.”

 

The film has a few effects sequences that crop up primarily when Schwartzman’s character begins having visions about recent events in his life mostly of people in his life. These snippets of scenes were also shot at the pseudo stages. Deming went with a harder, more saturated tungsten stock—Kodak’s 250D 5246—and requested more contrasty lighting to give these bits a different look from everything else.

 

“We wanted the people in these visions to look like cutouts,” says Deming. “We generally used longer lenses to sort of flatten out the image. Except for a part with a floating head that we wanted to have a little more shape. We shot those on wider lenses and they have this odd presence because there’s no background reference. They’re just floating in space.”

 

For these elements, the actors were placed in front of a greenscreen and LaViolette used a single Alpha 4K straight on to light the greenscreen itself. “It comes with a choice of three lenses,” he notes, “but we used it without a lens. I prefer to light greenscreen simply. When you use multiple units you’ve got to marry all the seams. I try to get away with as few as possible and it can work just as well. Kinos are great too, but very expensive. The single Alpha 4K gave us a light level that we needed for a 30 x 40 foot greenscreen.”

 

All the exterior work, which was also shot on the daylight Reala stock, was based on silking off very large areas and then using a few HMIs to highlight certain areas. “We didn’t care to shoot in the hard sun,” says Deming. “It didn’t go with the low contrast look of the movie. We’d pick locations where we could put silk overhead. When we shot at the house Jude Law’s character lives in, we silked off the entire front yard with 70 x 20 foot silks. You see the house and you see Dustin and Lily sneaking around and following the couple as they walk in the yard. It was a very wide area to cover.”

 

“Peter’s style developed over the years,” LaViolette says, “and as long as we’ve got the time and the budget, he wants something overhead all the time. He wants big silks or sometimes many silks all stitched together to control that sunlight. Then we’ll use a Chimera or diffusion with HMIs—18Ks, 6Ks or even 4Ks for close work—to highlight certain areas and add soft edges. We use a lot of bounce keying. I wouldn’t call it filling because we don’t pick a side. I just call it bounce keying.”

 

He credits Sloan for ingenuity and creativity when it comes to creating that soft light environment that provides him and Deming with a starting point to place lights. “He did an amazing job of stitching in pieces of rag all around the trees and eves of the house. He created quite a large area for us to work in, which then let us maintain a consistent look at the location throughout the day. I just pushed around some HMI bounce and fill to augment the sunlight because that light was already so controlled.

 

“ California sun is a beautiful thing when you move out here,” LaViolette observes, “but when you’re lighting and shooting, you really want light that’s a little less hard.”