By now, the entire world has looked much closer at American Beauty, a dark, complex film about Everytown, U.S.A. that's gathered heaps of critical praise and secured five Oscars at this year's Academy Awards. Shot for roughly $12.5 million in 55 days, the picture's success took mainstream Hollywood by surprise - after all, it deals with homosexuality, infidelity, drugs, murder and pedophilia, all within the quaint confines of a Mayberry-like neighborhood. But absolutely no one quibbled with American Beauty's distinctive use of cinematic imagery to tell its offbeat story. Of the film's five Oscar recipients, only one had ever been to the podium before. The Academy Award for Best Cinematography was Conrad Hall's second (he received his first in 1969 for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), and an apt bookend to a career spanning four decades and more than 30 feature films and television shows. The American Society of Cinematographers and the National Society of Film Critics similarly honored Hall's beatific visuals.

Born in Papeete, Tahiti, where he still maintains a residence, Hall is the son of James Norman Hall, co-author of the literary classic Mutiny on the Bounty. He first studied under Slavko Vorkapich at USC's School of Cinema-Television. With fellow students, Jack Couffer and Marvin Weinstein, Hall went on to create Canyon Films. On the trio's debut feature, Running Target, all three principals tossed their names in a hat and drew for their respective jobs - producer, director or cinematographer. Eventually, Hall's company shot industrials, commercials and location footage for Hollywood-based shows like Disney's The Living Desert and Vanishing Prairie.

Hall was initially reticent to tackle the dark subject matter in American Beauty (Actor Tom Cruise actually recommended him to director Sam Mendes). But, in retrospect, the 70-something cinematographer seems like the perfect creative fit. Witness Hall's early days in the industry where his work on TV shows like the original The Outer Limits, or such features as The Professionals (1966), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here (1969) cemented a reputation for an artistic command of dramatic subject matter. In fact, a memorable shot in Richard Brooks' 1967 film adaptation of Truman Capote's novel, In Cold Blood, is still cited by Hall's peers as one of the most riveting single frames in all of modern movie history. Unlike many of the carefully designed shots in American Beauty, the director of photography describes the image of actor Robert Blake in his jail cell on the night before his execution "as having been a wonderful accident. I was lighting the stand-in, and this light I had put outside the window created these shadows on his face as if to suggest tears. It was one of those moments when you just know something special had suddenly filled the frame."

More than 30 years later, Hall continues to invent such special images. By his own admission, Hall's experience on American Beauty may have been the most gratifying of his career. Yet, because the film was shot on such a tight budget, in a relatively short production period - 45 days which eventually stretched to 55 due to the large amount of complex, multiple unit setups - Hall had an extremely tight margin for error. "Over 75 percent of American Beauty was storyboarded by Sam [Mendes]," the cinematographer reveals. "We worked together on some of the boards, and aimed for this classic, American Gothic-type look. This approach required a very still camera that is static for most of the movie. All the compositions are centrally composed with people in the middle of frames. The characters are often hemmed into the frames on either side by chairs and lamps and objects which would suggest these people are prisoners within their own worlds."

While American Beauty is ostensibly set in the bright, sunshine-laden world of American suburbia, an overriding darkness literally consumes and takes over the picture's final act. Hall, of course, is no stranger to working with deep shadows and high contrast lighting. His artful use of chiaroscuro - in films like Fat City (1972), The Day of Locust (1974), Marathon Man (1976) and Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993) among others - indicates an artist who does not fear using rich, deep blacks to produce shadowplay so intense that it appears to inhabit a character's psyche. "If we had shot this like a sitcom, with full, bright lighting and clarity across the frame, there would not have been that tension between light and dark that was needed to dramatize this dysfunctional family," Hall observes. "The scene where Ricky Fitts [Wes Bentley] returns to his bedroom and his father [Chris Cooper] is waiting for him in the darkness is a prime example. By placing the father in deep shadow and using a swish-pan to reveal him, there is an element of real fear and menace for the boy. It would have been easy to light the entire room and simply cut to the father waiting there. But we made a decision to go very dark with this film. We wanted to shroud this family in menace and make Ricky's bedroom a terrifying place to come back to."

Hall is the first to admit that the technical aspects of a shot - the "how" - are much less important to him than the "why", which Hall believes are always motivated by storyline. "If I have a specific technique," he exclaims testily, "it's probably as a pointillist - I light just what I want to see, and then add to that what I call 'room tone.' Room tone is a tonality of light inspired from what happens when light comes through a window or a source, and is reflected back from a wall, or whatever, to fill up the room."

A prime example of Hall's methods can be seen in one of the film's penultimate scenes: anti-protagonist Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is sitting alone at the kitchen table as a solitary light from the nearby island casts rays upon his sad and darkened figure. "He's staring at a photo of his family from much happier days, and this gun slowly comes into frame and drives the camera's action off of Spacey and onto a nearby wall," describes Hall. "This wall becomes the center of a mystery - what is happening outside of frame with that gun? I wanted to dress up that wall with all sorts of shadows and interesting light patterns, but Sam wanted it stark and white. His reasons become obvious when the blood splatters across the wall, solving the mystery. It's a very intriguing shot, and one which was so simple in its lighting scheme."

Intriguing is an excellent term to describe the abundant use of video footage which slithers throughout American Beauty like a viper in the proverbial unfallen garden. Because Burnham's neighbor Ricky Fitts is obsessed with videotaping the world around him, director Mendes was able to weave this digital imagery all throughout the film. "The video footage was experimental in its application, because nearly every frame is shot by the actors as their characters. In other words, the actors who are holding video cameras in the scene are really the ones framing and shooting the image.

"We used these two little digital cameras, along with the main Panavision camera," Hall continues. "I was supervising all the video footage as well as the film footage. People ask why I didn't bother to compose the video footage, but I liked the idea that the characters were composing frames as they would see them, rather than how I would view them through the camera. The headroom is off, or the handling is jerky, which feels so much more real than a professional camera operator setting up the frame."

Despite having amateurs behind the viewfinders, much of the video footage still had to be degraded to suit the narrative. "Sam went too far in that direction [degrading the image] and I steered him back toward the middle," adds Hall. "Nowadays, the quality associated with video is much better in most people's minds than even a few years ago, when all the noise and appearance of grain was commonplace."

Certainly, one of the movie's most persistent video images is Ricky Fitts' chance encounter with a wind-blown plastic bag. Recounted by Ricky to Jane Burnham (Thora Birch) as "the most beautiful thing" that he's ever filmed, director Mendes shot the animated sack on one of the production's off days. Mendes used two wind machines, two sacks of leaves, an empty wall in a parking lot, and a video camera given to actor Wes Bentley during the rehearsal period. "We didn't want to take 40 trucks, and 125 people to go to some parking lot and film a plastic bag against a wall," Hall laughs. "It would have been a huge waste of time and money, and we were already short on both. It made more sense for Sam to go off his own with a little Honda generator, and two people to operate the wind machines, and keep filming until he got what he wanted. Again, the simplicity and reality of the shot comes through very strongly because of it."

Wild Roses and Gothic Guises

Nearly all of the special effects were executed in-camera, except a potent, computerized image of roses bursting from the teenaged bosom of Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari). Most of the truly provocative floral images occur during Lester Burnham's fantasy sequences. One mesmerizing shot featured roses tumbling down onto actor Kevin Spacey, who is gazing up from his bed at the object of his forbidden desire. As shot, actress Suvari lies on the floor amidst a bed of roses - some real, some artificial - with the forced perspective walls rising up on each side to camera. "We dropped roses from above and reversed the footage," Hall notes. "I was up behind the lens with a small paint bucket filled with rose pedals. My AC [Clyde E. Bryan] was sitting on the crane next to me, with a bucket of rose pedals as well. We had a Condor to the right and one to the left of camera, and the prop folks had large garbage bags filled to the top with rose pedals. Because it was a fixed camera, I had both hands free to drop pedals above and below the lens so the flowers would land right on Kevin. We used something like 250,000 rose pedals for that effect."

Roses played a dominant part in the production design by Naomi Shohan (Zebrahead, Feeling Minnesota, Playing God) as well. Yet to continually feature bright red roses in each scene would have numbed the audience to their visual power. "I tried to vary the treatment of the roses from scene to scene, so we wouldn't get too sick of seeing them," says Hall. "For example, take the scene when Annette Bening's character [Carolyn Burnham] returns after having cheated on her husband. Lester is sitting in the living room watching television and she walks in behind him. In the dining room beyond there are fresh roses in a vase. I used a special spotlight to light just pieces of the roses, while keeping the rest of the flowers black. Again, that's a very Gothic touch, and the roses became a symbol of the American dream going to hell. Like a Norman Rockwell painting all twisted around."

Mendes and Hall referenced Rockwell as well as Belgian painter René Magritte and American artist Edward Hopper for some of their visual cues. As in many Magritte canvasses, reflections became a key recurring image. As related by the cinematographer, the goal was to suggest a mirror held up by society so that the characters would confront their own personal dysfunctions. One striking example ensues when Lester Burnham retreats to his garage, intent on bulking up his muscles to seduce Jane's teenage friend. "The camera is hiding behind one of the candle lamps that were in the window," Hall recounts. "Obviously, working with candles means a fixed intensity which is pretty low. The challenge was to create a reflection that was dominant in the frame but not overpowering. We also wanted to see the reflection and the character together at the same time, and still maintain the natural feel of an interior garage at night."

Hall and his crew faced a similar challenge in another reflected shot that happens earlier on. While Lester Burnham toils away in his office cubicle, his face is blended in a wide angle with images bouncing off his computer screen. Director Mendes carefully storyboarded the shot to ensure that the reflected imagery kept with the overall visual plan. "Sam wanted the computer writing to be very definite vertical columns of numbers which looked like prison bars," says Hall. "This was to maintain the visual theme that these characters were imprisoned by the environment around them."

Hall recollects having a conversation with Mendes, which likened the moviemaking process to that of a snake shedding its skin. "There's a little molting going on with rewrites and changes on the set, but there's no doubt those of us in production only get to create the outside of the snake. Once the editing process begins, the skin we provided is shed and it becomes a different creature." Such an analogy seems well suited to Hall's experience on American Beauty, as a great deal of elaborately staged production footage never got past the editing phase. In fact, Hall estimates that nearly 40 percent of the total exposed footage didn't appear in the film.

Surreal sequences dominated the unused footage. The $1.5 million special effects budget included a nine-minute montage meant to close the film as well as greenscreen effects of Lester Burnham flying over his neighborhood prior to relating his story. In the finished film, all that is seen is an aerial POV track from up high, and Lester heard in voiceover. "What's in the final version as Lester looks back on his life is only a fraction of what we shot," Hall marvels. "We shot footage of Kevin flying above his neighborhood and seeing what he left behind. We shot police investigations of the murder, the trial where Ricky is pronounced guilty, the press interviews with the guilty father still hiding his homosexuality even after his own son has been convicted. It's almost like another movie."

In fact, when Hall met with Mendes in an early production meeting, the director sat him down and had the cinematographer read the final montage with all nine minutes worth of Pink Floyd music playing behind the stream of written images. "There was a huge amount of surreal images which, ultimately, did not belong in this movie. We were going to put all that footage into the DVD version, but decided against it. Things like the Colonel coming into his study after the murder and pulling out a photograph of himself as a young man in the army with his arms around his two buddies. We cut to a fire effect under a very wide-angle lens as he burns the photo in a rush of emotion and tears. I could win another Oscar for what's sitting on the cutting room floor!" he laughs.

Few viewers have left a screening of American Beauty without commenting on the final act, which occurs entirely in a nighttime rainstorm worthy of any film noir classic. As if returning full circle to the shadowy imagery of In Cold Blood, Hall utilized shadowplay through various set windows for the movie's waterlogged final act. "I had rain boxes built," the cinematographer declares, "which were approximately eight inches thick by four feet-by-four feet. They look like big fishtanks and each one sits on an easel at an angle, with a rain bar at the top to drive water down the Plexiglas surface. You can shine a light through each rainbox, and control sharpness and focus according to how the light is positioned and what type of intensity light is used."

Hall got innovative with the rain in one of the climax's key dramatic moments. Angela has just run from her best friend's bedroom, despairing at the truths hurled at her by Jane and Ricky. As the teary-eyed girl curls up on the stairwell, Hall introduces softly lit shadows of the rain outside as texture on the balustrade and walls behind her. It's a sad, yet ominous moment, and a prelude to the pending tragedy as Lester finds the distraught girl in the rainy darkness of his own living room. "Sam sat down with us all in an early production meeting, and was extremely explicit where the rainstorm would begin in the film's chronology," recollects Hall. "We were all on the same page as to how long this driving rain would go on and exactly where in the film it would start. Obviously, my challenge is to make sure it's raining in every single shot - interior or exterior. The rain allowed for great stylization with lighting and composition. I could place shadows of the rain on people's faces, or behind them on walls and such in every scene. The effect was a build-up of tension and drama - it can't rain that long without all the animals eventually getting aboard the Ark!"

As if to echo the serendipitous aspects of Hall's own Hollywood career, the Burnham house in American Beauty was the very same one used by the cinematographer in 1967 when shooting Debbie Reynolds and Dick Van Dyke in Divorce American Style. He also served as an assistant cameraman for such television shows as Leave it to Beaver, and Dennis the Menace, on the same backlot streets featured in American Beauty. The Burnham home also appeared in Pleasantville (1999), complete with garden and picket fence. "It's so much fun to take something that's been seen on screen before and make it special and unique," beams Hall. "American Beauty is a very long way from Leave it to Beaver - I'm just so honored that it has found such a large audience, and was embraced by the Academy. It really represents how magical movies still can be, when we can take the same streets and neighborhood seen on an old black-and-white TV show and transform them into such an intense and daring modern-day story. It makes the cinematographer's job that much more satisfying."

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