Adding Color to Content
Caleb Deschanel, ASC, puts his stamp on
Message in a Bottle
By Bob Fisher

Preface: Following are some facts for you to consider while reading this article about how Caleb Deschanel, ASC, filmed Message in a Bottle. He was born in Philadelphia and raised there and in Annapolis, Maryland. His parents gave him a Brownie Hawkeye camera as a birthday present when he was eleven. He used it to take pictures of his dog. The composition was interesting. Deschanel enrolled at Johns Hopkins University intending to study medicine. His interest shifted first to art history and then to film. He graduated and went on to USC film school, where Haskell Wexler, ASC, became an early mentor. Wexler loaned him a black-and-white filter, which he used to shoot an early student film. Deschanel capped his formal studies at AFI with a six-week apprenticeship with Gordon Willis, ASC. Carroll Ballard, a neighbor in Venice, California, first hired him to shoot a documentary. Deschanel subsequently directed several award-winning documentaries early in his career. Another neighbor, Ron Dexter, guided his entry into the TV spot business. His narrative credits as a cinematographer include The Black Stallion, Being There, The Right Stuff, The Natural and Fly Away Home. Deschanel also directs and shoots commercials for Dark Light Pictures, and occasionally directs narrative films.

Caleb Deschanel, ASC, describes Message in a Bottle as an almost hopelessly romantic film. There are threads of tragedy, romance and hope woven into the fabric of a story that is based on a novel written by Nicholas Sparks, who is rapidly becoming a marketable icon in fiction writing. The film was green-lighted by Warner Bros. before the first book was sold by the studio’s sister company, which published the novel.

Kevin Costner portrays a lonely sailboat builder named Garrett Blake. He writes a love letter to his wife Catherine who died at a tragically early age. Blake puts the letter in a bottle that he tosses into the ocean. Fate delivers the bottle to a barren Cape Cod beach, where a journalist named Theresa Osborne, played by Robin Wright-Penn, finds it. Theresa is touched by the words. She discovers several more letters and identifies Blake as the author. She doggedly tracks him down to a fishing village in North Carolina. All of that happens about 20 minutes deep into the film. At first, it seems like they have little in common, but it soon becomes evident that Garrett Blake has touched her soul and she might fill a void in his heart.

It was Deschanel’s first collaboration with director Luis Mandoki, whose credits include White Palace, Born Yesterday and When a Man Loves a Woman. Deschanel and Mandoki spoke candidly at their initial meeting.

“I liked the story, but was terrified that it could become a sappy romance,” Deschanel recalls. “We talked about shooting it like a fairy tale or an allegory. There were some risks, but I found that appealing, because I like working on the edge.”

Mandoki and Deschanel were standing on common ground. There was a give and take of ideas. “That’s the best way to work,” Deschanel says. “You come up with an idea and someone else makes it better. It’s like playing leapfrog.”

Costner was already cast as the sailboat builder, and Paul Newman was almost set in a supporting role as his father. Robbie Coltrane, Viveka Davis, Illeana Douglas, Jesse James, Hayden Panettiere and John Savage came onboard later.

Costner is the more recognizable and bankable star, and Deschanel lauds his performance as the recalcitrant Garrett Blake, but he notes that much of the story revolves around Penn. “Theresa is totally built into the film almost from the beginning,” he says. “Her point-of-view is pervasive in the structure of the movie.”

Deschanel credits Mandoki with motivating the actors to find that area where reality converges with allegory. That praise carries extra weight coming from Deschanel, whose directing credits include The Escape Artist, Crusoe and episodes of Twin Peaks.

“Directing is sort of a mysterious process,” he says. “You watch a performance and wonder if it’s gone too far or not far enough. It’s the same with cinematography. Maybe you are planning a shot in sunlight and it rains, or you get a better idea. Or, maybe you see something in dailies that makes you wonder if you’re missing something important. It’s not always obvious. That’s what makes it exciting.”

The original location was slated for Tangier Island, in Maryland, which seemed ready-made for the romantic setting described in the script. At the last moment, the local government decided not to issue a permit because they didn’t approve of some of the sexual overtones and language. That led to a scramble for appropriate locations in New Harbor, Bath, Phippsburg and Portland, Maine, and some scenes were filmed in Chicago.

Deschanel explains that Blake’s hometown had to be an idyllic setting that looks and feels isolated and lonely. It is like a silent character who isn’t quite revealed. There is an overtone of mystery and intrigue.

Message in a Bottle was framed in anamorphic format (2.4:1 width to height aspect ratio), because it felt right to Deschanel and Mandoki. It wasn’t just the obvious horizontal composition of beaches and the ocean, and the shapes of the boats that suggested the wider film format. Deschanel also liked the idea of composing an intimate and romantic story about two people who fall in love in anamorphic format.

It enabled him and Mandoki to show the audience the characters in environments that helps to amplify the emotional content of the story. They composed two-shots without cut-aways, so the audience could see the body language and facial expressions of one character while the other one is talking or just looking at them.

“Part of it is the fact that you can use longer lenses,” he says. “You’re using 50mm lens in anamorphic format instead of a 25mm lens spherical, and that reduces depth of field, so the characters are more sharply in focus than the background. It was fun playing with composition in a more intimate frame.”

The script is rich with verbal and unspoken dialogue expressed with facial expressions, eye contact and body language.

“I’ve always felt that the simplicity of the images is the best way to get the audience to listen to dialogue,” he says. “During the 1920s, there was a machine used to project moving clouds in the background of stage plays. Smart actors wouldn’t allow it, and George Bernard Shaw banned its use when his plays were presented to live audiences. If the images are too strong, the audience doesn’t pay attention to the words.”

When asked what’s more important in a dialogue scene, enticing the audience to listen or drawing their attention to how another person is reacting, Deschanel responds, “It depends on the scene. If a character is telling someone something shocking, then the reaction is probably more important. If they’re explaining why they did something, maybe hearing the words is more important. I take my cues from the actors. It depends on what I see in rehearsals, and how they play the scene. That’s also what tells you if the camera angle should be slightly off-center, or if two or more characters should be in the frame. I believe in the power of an actor’s performance, and saw the anamorphic format as a way to give them more freedom.”

Deschanel says that his early experiences helped him sharpen his sensibilities. “When I was shooting The Black Stallion for Carroll Ballard, an actor told me, ‘I want you to know I act with my eyes. My eyes are the most important thing about what I do.’ Often, an actor’s movements are more expressive than their faces. Sometimes, it’s just the way they turn their heads or slump their shoulders. If you observe people you can anticipate what they are going to do. You’ve got to read the clues they telegraph. Sometimes an actor can speak louder just by how they listen to dialogue.”

Deschanel was generally shooting with a single Panaflex camera using a video tap as a tool for communicating with different departments. He occasionally used a B-camera for additional coverage, usually from a slightly off-angle perspective.

Deschanel used a mix of newer and older anamorphic lenses, after testing to determine their imaging characteristics. A crew member shot the tests with actors and with a flat, graphic design. In addition to edge-to-edge and top-to-bottom sharpness, he was looking for “a certain kind of roundness—a three dimensional feeling—and how different lenses rendered contrast and colors. Some lenses give you a better rendition of the human face and other three dimensional objects. The more contrasty, sharpest lenses aren’t necessarily the best ones in different situations.”

There was only one big set, the newspaper office where Theresa works. About half of the remainder of the film was shot on interior locations and exteriors.

Message in a Bottle is set in contemporary times, but nothing about the look says this is happening in 1999. It could have been anytime during the past decade.

“We were shooting for an other-world look, where the audience doesn’t see everything all the time,” Deschanel says. “We created shadows and let the audience wonder what was hidden in them. There’s always a feeling that something is missing. If the audience sees 80 percent of the scene that’s more interesting (than revealing everything). You can do it with light, choice of lenses and in other ways.”

He also made scenes warmer and colder, using gels, lighting and lenses, depending upon the scene and the mood or environment required by the story.

How much of the final footage was planned and storyboarded?

Deschanel answers, “You plan on 100 percent of the film, but it usually turns out to be about half. The rest of what you shoot is determined by the actors, locations and nature.” He cites a seminal scene where Theresa finds the bottle.

“We planned to shoot in bright sunlight, but it was an overcast, foggy day,” he says. “It was a totally different scene, and yet it worked on another level. Maybe you see the way an actor responds to the fog, and decide that a wide shot of someone on a lonely beach is more powerful than a close-up of someone’s eyes.”

Deschanel says he and Mandoki discussed ideas for designing and decorating sets, and the colors and other choices of costumes, such as whether they should be upscale or downscale, but he doesn’t believe you can intellectualize those types of decisions.

“I trust my instincts,” he says, “but I also trust the actors and their feelings. They understand their characters. They have to be comfortable wearing their clothes.”

Deschanel notes that colors, or the absence of color, can create mythologies or visual signatures for characters. “There are infinite shades of green, red and yellow, and each one probably has a different meaning for different people,” he says. “Different artists define what different colors mean all the time. Look at Van Gogh’s paintings, and you can almost feel the insanity shining through in the yellows and greens he uses. That may not be the truth in an abstract expressionist’s use of those same colors. Each artist defines the colors by how he uses them. I don’t believe there are archetypal colors, like green with envy!”

Deschanel and Mandoki tended towards using earth tones in Blake’s costumes and surroundings, which helped define the sparseness of his existence.

There was some camera movement in almost every shot. Deschanel opted to use a Steadicam only in situations where dolly moves weren’t possible or practical. For instance, if there were obstacles that were difficult to move around, he used the Steadicam.

Deschanel used a combination of hard and soft light. “I like the way the film reacts to hard light,” he says. “You can create contrast which draws attention to people and objects. One thing Gordon Willis taught me is that you need to light color film the same as black-and-white film in order to create contrast and brightness, which attracts the eye to certain parts of the frame. If you look at the paintings which inspire us, the classic artists we admire created contrast with highlights and shadows as well as colors.”

Deschanel observes that contemporary camera films allow cinematographers to work with relatively low key light without amplifying the ‘grittiness’ of grain, which audiences typically associate with period looks. He designed an essentially grainless look for Message in a Bottle, and used filtration to compensate for differences in sharpness when zoom and hard lenses are used in the same scene.

Deschanel matched different camera negatives in Kodak’s Vision family to the requirements of the scene. “I preferred using the slower films in order to minimize grain.

“The obvious advantage of faster films is that they allow you more freedom to work in lower key situations. I usually prefer a deeper stop, at least T- 4, when I’m shooting with anamorphic lenses. But sometimes I wanted the images to fall off, so we used the sharpest anamorphic lenses available at stop 2.8.”

In a crucial storm sequence on the sailboat, he used a more compact Aaton 35 camera, and the daylight-balanced, 200-speed Vision film, in part, because it eliminated the need for putting a color correction filter on lens.

There are several shots where he used the new Kodak SFX 200T film to record actors in front of a portable bluescreen, with other picture elements added to the image during digital compositing (see sidebar).

Deschanel did his own bluescreen photography, and his camera operator Scott Sakamoto, SOC, filmed some of the background elements.

As for what he expects from a film lab, Deschanel says, “Gordon Willis would shoot a test roll of 1,000 feet of the same subject, and break it down into 50-foot rolls, which he sent to the lab over a three-day period. He’d make a one-light print of the 50- foot rolls spliced together. Gordon expected consistency in colors, contrast and cleanliness from the lab. That was a great lesson. It taught me to expect consistency from a film lab.”

The Panavision camera package included a remote focus and T-stop control system that first assistant Jamie Barber used to seamlessly adjust the stop on dolly moves and during certain pan shots. “Say you’re dollying, and the camera goes through a door into a darker room,” he explains. “We can continue shooting while opening up the lenses.”

Deschanel recalls that he has been using that technique since he shot It Could Happen to You in 1994. It is one of many tools that he first used for TV commercials.

When asked how directing and shooting commercials influences his approach to narrative filmmaking, Deschanel explains, “If you are shooting and directing commercials, you can actually sit in an editing bay and play around with the images at video resolution,” he says. “It opens your eyes to a lot of possibilities. You can ask, ‘What if we made that person purple?’ and actually look at it. It’s comparable to the way Picasso must have painted. I don’t think he woke up one day with a fully formed idea for painting Guernica. He probably had an idea and started experimenting to see what worked. Something he saw inspired him to try something else. We can do that with film today.”

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