The Flower of Many Secrets
Robert Elswit adds an effervescent bloom
to Magnolia
By Andrew O. Thompson -- Photos by Peter Sorel

Set and shot in the San Fernando Valley, Magnolia unfolds over the course of 24 hours as its principal characters relate to one another in a hopscotch of tenuous and often destructive relationships. As mundane affairs amplify into personal melodrama, all the protagonists become partners to a bizarre, Biblical plague that, ironically, lends an air of calm and completion to all their emotional havoc. This critically-lauded, three-hour opus marks the third cinematic collaboration between writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson (see sidebar) and cinematographer Robert Elswit — following Boogie Nights and Hard Eight, the latter having earned the cinematographer a 1998 Independent Spirit Award nomination. The two have also teamed-up on a couple of videos for singer/songwriter Fiona Apple. Elswit’s resume also features such films as The River Wild, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, A Dangerous Woman, Desert Hearts, Bad Influence, 8 Millimeter and the Agent OO7 adventure Tomorrow Never Dies (see ICG Magazine, Dec. ’97).

Unlike their prior pictures, Anderson and Elswit set out to imbue Magnolia with a more regulated sense of artistry. The duo spent a lot of time discussing the synergy between photography and set style with production designers William Arnold and Mark Bridges. While not exactly cinema verité, both Hard Eight and Boogie Nights rely on a less polished look. The realism in terms of lighting brings greater emphasis to acting performance and stylistic camera moves.

Magnolia’s visual inspiration came from color schemes featured in Being There (shot by Guild member Caleb Deschanel, ASC) as well as The Verdict (Guild member Andrezj Bartkowiak, ASC), which, according to Elswit, has “a very dominating palette with a small number of colors, particularly one very saturated, dark red. In every single scene, the narrow palette range and lighting style is repeated — in different ways for different amounts of emphasis — to create a great sense of environment and timelessness. Being There interested me for the same reason because of the quality of light inside and out.

“I think for the first time Paul didn’t want his movie to look completely erratic, or unthought about, even though making it look like that requires a certain artfulness in thinking. In a way, he wanted Boogie Nights to look like a porno movie. But the weather and time of day [factors] in Magnolia were pushing him in the direction that the lighting environment we’re creating is complicated, and has to be as thoughtfully set up ahead of time as anything else. He had four major sequences [timewise] that he wanted to paste together, so each story had to connect with a specific time of day and weather.”

Typically, Elswit surveys each location, prior to its being dressed by the art department, and takes photographs (in slide form) of the space at various times of day. This gives him a tangible reference on the various qualities of light that he can expect within a room, and a better understanding of how the room feels as people interact within. “I took pictures at magic hour, at night, early morning and late afternoon. If you’re careful about the stops you pick when shooting slides, you can actually talk a little bit about color temperature, and quality of light and color, and have it mean something – it’s not just an abstract air discussion. If you’re lucky enough to have locations that lend themselves to this, it’s a great way of starting a meaningful dialogue with a director. Quality of light is something that Paul responds to, and he knows what he likes when he sees it.”

Since Magnolia occurs over a 24-hour period, the cinematographer had to contend with how to convey the passage of time. He had to take into account both the shift from light-to-dark, and changes in weather from clear to precipitous. Elswit also had to maintain a consistent lighting style among the various characters. Striking an appropriate balance between the interior ambiance with that seen through windows also became of major concern. He explains, “It starts out relatively warm and sunny, moves into a cooler, bluer overcast afternoon. We then have a gray, darker rainy afternoon and finally a blue phosphorescent, magenta magic hour, especially when John [Reilly as police officer Jim Kurring] loses his gun, which we shot over three magic hour nights in artificial rain. Then, we go to night, which looks a certain way in terms of a monochromatic color.”

The only section of Magnolia not to follow this progressive color scheme is the picture’s preamble, which relays three bizarre incidents of chance — urban myths, if you will, — that end in tragedy. The first episode takes place in 1911 and deals with a robbery at an apothecary. As much as possible, the pair strove for period accuracy, both in terms of camera and lighting instruments. Elswit shot the scene on black-and-white stock (Plus X for day exteriors and Double X for night exteriors) with a hand-cranked Pathé camera, which he and Anderson had used before to interesting effect with color stock on a Fiona Apple music video.

The director briefly contemplated the Lumière camera, but rejected the idea because it could not accommodate traditional filmstocks. Denny Clairmont and Andre Martin rebuilt the Pathé camera from scratch and took apart and cleaned its two lenses — a 41mm and 50mm. “One of those lenses was actually over 100 years old, and they were uncoated, which is one of the secrets as to why those films [from the turn-of-the century] look they way they do,” the cinematographer observes. “They have pretty good resolution, and the contrast gets a little smeary because they are uncoated. They really have a wonderful quality, especially in the black-and-white interior, which is hard to get now with coated lenses.

“To light close-ups of the bad guys, inserts of signs and other parts of that sequence, we actually used magnesium flares that we got from a shipyard. It’s my understanding – not from talking to anyone, but from reading – that before they had location lighting equipment, magnesium flares would be used for big night exteriors. They just put them up high on parallels and/or parachutes and set them off; they give off an enormous amount of light for a relatively short period of time and don’t flicker too much.”

But concern for authenticity did have its limits. Anderson indulged himself with two dolly moves: one rapid shot as the pharmacist turns to peer in a mirror; and a slower one as he enters his home and kisses his wife. Besides those historical inaccuracies, Elswit indicates that shooting the segment in an existing set — Universal Pictures’ chicken ranch set as seen in Best Little Whorehouse in Texas — also hindered the period feel. The old-time incident was shot towards the production schedule’s end, so their taxed budget could not afford construction of a new set from the ground up. “Bill Arnold [production designer] said that we should have built a three-walled set for the house that the pharmacist comes home to,” states Elswit. “Back then, a lot of the soundstages were greenhouses with roll-away muslin ceilings. If we had lit it the way those films were — sunlight through a muslin ceiling — it probably would have looked more real.

“I don’t mind the night scene so much [illuminated with arc lights], where the guys beat him up in the snow and leave him to be killed. The interior of the home, however, when he comes in to kiss his wife and kids, looks far too contemporary in terms of its lighting style [as provided by 5K and 10K tungsten units.] In postproduction, they ended up degrading the film to make it look grainy, duped and washed out. By shooting in a real set, we made the actual image from the print off the negative look like outtakes from a 1930s’ Don Ameche movie.”

Magnolia’s modern-day segments begin in the apartment of confused, cocaine-addict Claudia Wilson (Melora Walters). Like the den of any habitual drug abuser, her space is somewhat devoid of bright light. Its ambiance is muted by batik bedspreads, which are draped over all the windows. Dyed in a range of colors, these sheets coat her apartment in soft shades of lavender, light blue, orange, green and yellow. “I was in that apartment on a day when the sun was hitting that blue bedspread hanging over her kitchen window,” recalls Elswit, “and it seemed like an interesting way to light. But every scene that plays in there is actually overcast and raining [all of which he captured on Eastman’s EXR 100T (5248)]. That is except for the opening sequence, when she comes home at night with the drug dealer, and when [her estranged father] Jimmy Gator comes over, which is early morning.

“Anyway, my gaffer, Jim Plannett, came up with the idea of taking pieces of these various fabrics, like the bedspread in her bedroom, and cutting them up. We put them on four-by-four frames and actually lit the inside of the rooms through the fabric. Even when we didn’t see them [in frame], I’d still push light through that weird, blue bedspread on her kitchen window. Because the fabric was made of very dense material, I’d have to pound something through it just to get any light — sometimes I used a 6K Par.”

As Officer Kurring comes to her door to check out a noise disturbance report, these kaleidoscopic shades flood out of doorways, into hallways and the openings of other rooms in her pad. Some of that cast variance is the result of Elswit’s radical mixture of color temperatures. “Except for the dining room, the whole interior is lit by these little practicals [squat-sized lamps fitted with dimmer-controlled bulbs, either 40-or 60-watts] that she has lying around, which you see from time to time. And we actually didn’t try to blue them up. Actually, we slightly warmed up the lights with one-quarter CTO, and even up to one-half at times.

“Although we were using tungsten units, we made them even warmer than 3200 degrees Kelvin. Essentially, we were shooting day interior in a real location, so we had HMIs working through the windows, mixed in with tungsten lights that were sometimes three to four hundred degrees under what they should have been for 3200. I had a huge mix of colored daylight. When John [Reilly] is out in the hallway, it’s 5600 [degrees] and they are even bluer than that for overcast daylight. In Melora’s reverses, the front of her face is lit by the same light, but the light behind her might be 26 to 2800 degrees Kelvin.”

A hilarious and intentionally camp lighting effect accompanies the introduction of Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise) as he starts a seminar for “Seduce and Destroy,” an encounter group for wishy-washy men looking for lessons in the fine art of crass machismo. The moment opens on a darkened stage with Mackey being lit from behind. As Mackey spreads out his arms and flexes his muscles, the opening strains of  “Aldo Sprach Zarathustra” (the bombastic piece of classical music immortalized as the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme) rumble throughout the room. As Mackey brings his hands down, and straightens his posture, a banner unfurls behind him to reveal his motto: Seduce and Destroy.

“That’s really based on something that Tom did,” reveals Elswit. “He made a video of himself, which he thought would be a great opening for his character, where he lit himself from behind. I don’t know exactly what space he was in – probably the projection room in his house – but he played the music, stood there and did all those little hand gestures. Paul and I looked at it and thought ‘Oh my God, why don’t we do something that looks like this.’ Only, we didn’t have enough money to do it right. It’s dopey enough so that it would look professional if you’re a member of his audience.

“It’s sort of vainglorious in that I don’t want it to look like I, as the cameraman did it. It should look believable, but in the sense that the knuckleheads who work for Tom Cruise’s character did it. In playing with that, I sort of regretted that, at some point, I didn’t put more light on the curtain that hung behind him or did better effects lighting on him. But why make it look like a fabulous, million dollar lighting effect that supposedly this guy couldn’t afford or wouldn’t be interested in.”

To effect this sensational spotlight, Elswit placed ParCans on the floor and lit actor Cruise with 2Ks, both for an edge light and backlit effect. To heighten its pompous “star” quality, he aimed a 4K Xenon spotlight at Cruise, following him around stage as he rants-and-rages on the piteous plight of the heterosexual male. “Most of the scene with him on stage is obviously lit by that [4K Xenon], which is slightly blue. We added a bit of blue so that it would contrast with the tungsten light that the rest of the scenes are lit with. So Tom appears in this theatrical blue light that’s a little less saturated than what’s in the game show. But again, it’s in keeping with our being able to say that the one saturated color in the movie is blue.”

In illuminating the quiz show What Do Kids Know?, Elswit received some pointers from James and Scott Moody, lighting designers for the game shows Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. He paid a visit to their sets to survey the setups because, at the time, the plan was to shoot What Do Kids Know? entirely on video – just as real game shows are done – with genre appropriate camera coverage. For game show videography, the proper approach is to brighten specific areas of a set – the host’s station, the contestant boxes, and those areas on stage where the host and a contestant may convene for a showdown. But the lamps have to be set high enough so as not to appear in the show’s opening and closing wideshots. Source Fours hung above the program contestants, who are situated in a rotating booth, while multiple 5Ks render fill light, both key and side. All lamps are dimmer-controlled for the fades in studio lighting which bookend commercial breaks.

Such a system, however, can produce multiple shadow areas all over set, which would look glaring in film photography. So after shooting the video version of What Kids Know, Elswit had to reconfigure the lighting plot for film-image friendliness. After switching the Source Fours with Leikos, differences in frame composition most impacted alteration of fixtures. “We didn’t want the multiple shadows look needed on tape just to get an exposure,” indicates Elswit. “Since we weren’t making the same kind of shots as for the game show [as seen when broadcast], I hung the lights a little lower into the shot, and made whatever fill we had a little softer. It’s essentially the same lighting, but with more of a one-source look. I didn’t have to fill in the shadows as much as I did for the video. On those shows, depth of field is an issue. Although they can get away with a lot of low light, they can’t shoot at zero foot-candles.”

While walking from the backstage area onto the set, the contestants have to pass through a corridor bathed in a deep blue aura. Besides lining the back of the stage with a blue cyclorama, the ambiance was augmented with gelled fixtures. “We used regular tungsten lights [Skypans set from above] but for the most part it’s strip lights [multiple banks of 2K nooklights, set five inches off the floor] with steel blue gels. That was our one big saturated color, which seemed fine for the game show because we could play with it a little bit. It didn’t seem to Paul to be so outrageous because we are dealing with a theatrical set, and it ended up being emotionally interesting for what was going on [in terms of the frustration that quiet, quiz show wunderkind Stanley (Jeremy Blackman) feels at being treated like a sideshow freak.].”

Meanwhile, half way across town, Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), a now-impoverished quiz show champion of the Sixties,’ has just lost his job as an electronics store mascot. Down-on-his-luck, Donnie decides to drown his self-deprecating sorrows at The Foxy Lady. This anonymous bar is furbished in rich wood-paneling and red vinyl upholstery. The serving area’s aura is warmed by neon signage and is garnished with strings of multi-colored Christmas lights. “That was art directed and lit to be very warm and almost romantic — in an impersonal, Valley kind of way — with no smoke.” The spot lamps (200-watt PhotoFloods) set into the ceiling, which cast a downward shaft onto its patrons “were exaggerated slightly, but Paul and I did not want the standard bar interior where you use smoke to see shafts because that lowers the contrast. At the same time, it should feel dark and moody. Every time you go back there, it looks different in small ways that have to do with what’s going on with his character.

“We start with a very strong contrast when Donnie walks in on that long Steadicam shot, and sits down [in a booth] to order a drink. There are a couple close-ups of him while he’s looking over at the bartender with the braces. He’s sitting all by himself in the darkest, dreariest corner of the bar — all he has is an eyelight and a little bit of toplight. Other than being fired, it’s the unhappiest moment in the movie for him. He’s as dark as you would ever want anyone to be in a close-up [with its anamorphic F-stop hovering between 3.2 and 3.5].”

Lacking any shame, Donnie blurts out his problems to the entire clientele. Sauntering over to the bar, Donnie bounces his pathetic, self-analysis off of the flamboyant, and quite flippant, Thurston Howell (Henry Gibson) who is lit from above (with a 250-watt PhotoFlood) in maniacal, stage-like style that reflects the character’s rather theatrical nature. “As he sits near Henry Gibson, Bill Macy ends up getting a little bit brighter and more even. Ultimately, he comes to an understanding [of himself] – a little bit anyway. The bar itself doesn’t end up looking much different, but the quality of light on him changes from scene to scene. Then as Donnie comes to his hopeless confession and walks out, he sort of recedes back into darkness again.”

The counterpoint between interior and exterior light is most pronounced in scenes with Linda Partridge (Julianne Moore) as she slowly spirals into a state of manic depression. Racked with guilt, Linda makes a vain and misguided attempt to nullify her sham marriage to elderly TV producer Earl Partridge (Jason Robards). She visits her lawyer (Michael Murphy) and confesses to years of adulterous behavior. The attorney’s office is made up of dark, wood-paneled walls. Standing halogen torchieres spaced around the room offer slight luminance. As Linda sits across from him, a small desk lamp (containing a dimmer-controlled 60-watt bulb) with a cream-colored shade bathes both their faces in a yellow haze. “When it turns overcast outside, all of the interior tungsten lights are sort of a blue or bluish-gray tone,” states Elswit. “We did exaggerate the warmth of the interior lighting [1Ks with a light or full grid], and that’s a remnant of what we saw in some of those movies, most particularly Being There. We purposely lowered the color temperature, so it was warmer than the normal tungsten – it wasn’t at all neutral. Again that was part of the contrast between what was still daylight outside — either late afternoon or rain — and the warm glow. It’s the case of Julianne Moore and Jason Robards more than anyone else, with the exception of Melora Walters.

“If there’s one unifying aspect [of the interiors featuring Julianne Moore’s character], it’s that all those sets are very warm and use practicals. A lot of it is just the location itself, the way it’s dressed and where the windows are when we staged the scenes. Quite honestly, I might have gone a little overboard with Julianne Moore, especially in the lawyers’ office. But in retrospect, I don’t know what I would do differently. It was a concern of having the interior practicals seem somewhat consistent – feeling like the same movie at the same time – knowing that we are cutting back and forth [between scenes].”

Since Julianne Moore and Jason Robards were among those actors who had to finish production first, and because their two characters are so closely related, Elswit ended up blending their light somewhat. At Earl’s bedside, for instance, sits a table lamp with cream-colored shade. When activated, it produces a yellow glow similar to that seen on actress Moore in her lawyer’s office. Since Earl remains bed-ridden for all of Magnolia, the cinematographer had to get creative with the sickly old man. Complicating matters, Anderson wanted to be able to shoot freely around both sides of the bed. Earl’s ambiance develops from cool to warm to light yellow. During day scenes, Elswit lit him from above through an overhead skylight with 2500-watt Par HMIs. Stray sunlight seeping into the living room adds to the atmosphere. At night, he aimed tungsten 2ks through the skylight and also suspended several Chinese paper lanterns over various parts of the bed. His close-ups are lit with 1Ks bounced into foamcore. If one takes death as a metaphor for “walking into the light,” it’s apropos that Earl is lit the warmest during his last moments of life.

“At the end of the movie, the light is almost yellow on Tom Cruise [as his alienated son Frank T.J. Mackey] and Jason. And when he dies, it’s the warmest sequence in terms of color temperature — somewhere around 2200 degrees [Kelvin.] Of course, a lot of this depends on printing. You can print some of this out, but at the end of the movie it’s night and there’s no blue light left from the other rooms coming in and out. A lot of the light is the mix of the two — it’s an overcast or rainy day outside and the room inside is lit by practicals — and sometimes one overpowers the other. As Phil Hoffman [playing Earl’s nurse Phil Parma] is in the kitchen, for example, there may be practicals on, but he’s actually lit by a skylight and blue light coming through the windows and the kitchen.”

After dark, all the characters’ intertwining dramas come to a head. Having swallowed a cocktail of anti-depressants, Linda is being hauled off to the hospital by ambulance. Rose Gator (Melinda Dillon) has taken to the streets in her car, fleeing from home and her husband, quiz show host Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), after the mortifying realization that he once molested their daughter Claudia. Shots of the deserted Valley streets appear blown-out and seem almost “black-and-white in color.” Elswit overexposed the white areas some 30 stops over middle grade, which he tends to do anyway when using Vision 500T (5279), his night exterior stock. In his opinion, it makes for a better interpositive image.

“Because it’s been raining all day [according to the narrative], I could get away with wetting the streets for the night work without it feeling completely phony. If you use a very strong backlight, you end up getting a white sheen on the ground. What you’re literally seeing is a reflection of the unit, and it’s white — unless it’s a colored light. But we were always using 20Ks, or sometimes 18K HMIs, so you essentially end up with white on the ground. You don’t read the colors because there aren’t any. It feels like you are looking at a completely monochromatic image, but it’s really a result of the wet ground picking up all the highlights and looking completely white. I did overdo this – it’s not at all realistic. I mean, it’s really overexposed. There are some incredibly bright highlights on the ground that you’d never encounter in any sort of real world. It’s a part of the film that you could end up saying is some unreal, fantastical place right before the rain of frogs.”

In Magnolia’s outlandish conclusion, the Valley is subject to a torrential rain of falling frogs, which consists mostly of computer-generated animals developed by Industrial Light and Magic. Elswit’s real reason for overexposing places that would normally fall into blackness was to give ILM’s artisans a broad, 360-degree canvas for its composites of digital frogs. Those toads seen on the ground — during the following morning as Officer Kurring sends Donnie Smith off from the gas station — are actually fashioned from rubber. To accentuate this strange downpour’s realism, F/X Concepts created interactive, in-camera effects. Special effects supervisor artist Lou Carlucci oversaw a team that utilized air guns firing explosive plastic pellets that spread “frog guts” over designated targets. These contraptions were set up on rigs, Condors and scissor lifts around the shooting area and fired at the actors, cars and other objects within frame. Around Earl Partridge’s swimming pool, monofilament was run along all the trees, and connected to pneumatic devices which would make the branches move and sway during the storm. These tubes were also situated beneath the pool’s surface to pump water upwards for a splashing effect.

“When the frogs are falling, all you see are strobed, out of focus blurs. It’s only when they hit and stop moving that you see them as actual frogs. All these frogs are layed in over the actual onset of effects, the exploding frog bodies. What you see on the windows of the cars as John Reilly is driving are all digital frogs. So while doing these night exteriors, I always had to keep in mind that there’s going to be frogs falling here and there. To enhance the frog effects later, I ended up building up the light values [by hiding smaller units — 2Ks, 5Ks and aircraft landing lamps — around the area] and put more in the way of reflections and shiny surfaces in the cars, on the streets and other places. I also had to give them a pretty big negative to work with, which they needed in order to digitize all the information.”

Director of photography Robert Elswit will be the first to acknowledge that the imagery in Magnolia hardly ranks as slick or refined — even in spite of its well-thought out formula. But as far as his collaborations with director Paul Thomas Anderson go, this movie definitely ranks as the most stylized, even if it’s a somewhat subdued and subconscious style. “When you’re not just creating an environment that sets up a mood, the light becomes a metaphor for what’s going on traumatically. Paul does responds to that a little, but it can’t happen quite as dramatically in a theatrical sense as with other directors because Paul just doesn’t buy it. But if light in Magnolia is the gaining of wisdom, understanding and knowledge, then that’s the metaphor for the difference between luminance and darkness.

“The characters go through remarkably dramatic changes, where they come to some greater understanding about their situation and what they should or could be doing. Every one of them starts out with a certain amount of confusion, loss, sense of alienation and unhappiness, and then takes a journey somewhere else. Figuring out how to do that with a certain amount of restraint — so that it doesn’t feel completely over-the-top, self-conscious or banal — is the hardest part.”