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The tangled web of What Lies Beneath slowly unravels after housewife Claire Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer) sends her only daughter off to college. She's left alone in a huge house while her husband, genius genetics professor Norman (Harrison Ford), labors over a lifetime's worth of research. With much too much time on her hands, Claire starts spying on her new next-door neighbors, a young couple constantly shouting - either in agony or ecstasy. But her time as a peeping tom is cut short when she hears whispering voices and sees the spirit of a beautiful young woman gone missing. What her friends deem a mere case of racked nerves turns out to be much more sinister, as it's revealed that Norman is somehow responsible for the ghostly tormentor.
Though Zemeckis tips his hat to Alfred Hitchcock as being influential to this movie's aesthetic, he does not go so far as to homage "the master of suspense" in What Lies Beneath. Its camerawork does evoke Hitchcockian techniques with elaborate, long tracking motions that creep through the house at a snail's pace, subconsciously filling viewers with a sense of tension, uneasiness and dread. But he cautions against branding such movement as purely derivative. "Hitchcock did do lot of interesting shots where the camera snakes through windows, goes down hallways and drops from the ceiling," admits Zemeckis. "But you've got to be careful, because when you study Hitchcock, he had this mantra that 'the camera must always be invisible.' Yet he would do all these shots where the camera is completely in your face, and calls attention to itself like in a Brian DePalma movie. Hitchcock was writing a language, and that language is constantly evolving." "The most difficult shots are all about suspense, and studying how to create the perfect timing to jolt the audience," continues the director. "If Michelle is wandering through a hallway, as a terrifying moment is about to occur, doing that shot means getting the perfect rhythm. It's a combination of the speed of the camera move being right, and the actor's performance being on - if we're off, it's like bad music. Actually, Michelle coined the phrase that she was 'doing a dance with the camera,' which is exactly what it's like."
Claire spends much of her time alone in the house, while hearing whispered words, seeing objects crash to the ground and catching glimpses of the specter. As she is consumed with her own sense of claustrophobia, the camera relies on tight closeups to relay Claire's constricting sense of self. However, Zemeckis and Burgess opted to shoot What Lies Beneath in anamorphic, even though its most imposing images consist of two people inside a rather sizable house. (Ironically, Cast Away - with its open vistas of island landscape - was filmed in 1.85). Zemeckis argues that this choice discourages the Hitchcock homage motif; when the director did opt for a wide frame format, he utilized VistaVision - on the pictures To Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo and North by Northwest. "Hitchcock hated anamorphic," the director states. "He made a comment that it's like looking through a letterbox, which is what we call it now." Having used anamorphic before - on Romancing the Stone, Forrest Gump and Contact - the director knows that doing great compositions in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio is time?consuming and requires a thoughtful planning of set design. "[But] what I like about anamorphic is that when you've got a movie with giant movie stars, and it's a character?driven piece, you can do a close?up and an over at the same time when the lens is real close," insists Zemeckis. "You still have that voyeuristic feeling of it being an over so that you're not in a 'choker,' which is a very impersonal shot unless, obviously, if it's used for effect." According to Burgess, anamorphic is much better at tying the subject into the scenery, even in a closeup - albeit not one super tight. The wide scope offers increased depth of field, presenting more of the background within shot. Though he always relates his close?ups to the surrounding environment, the cinematographer remains challenged by trying to fix the audience's focus on a shot's central element. But with the suspense genre, that misgiving can be played to an advantage. Toying with shock value, Burgess kept his closeups very tight and totally isolated right up until Claire deciphers out the mystery's unbearable truth. "In a psychological thriller, anamorphic is even more fun because sometimes you're shadowing [the shot] from the left and you're going to 'hit' the audience [with a visual shock] from the right," he maintains. "With what was going in the house, there's always a little bit more happening in frame besides what you are primarily focused at. You're always a little nervous because you know something is going pop out around the corner - the tempo and the pace are already set. Just sitting there and watching it makes you a little edgy." As the movie progresses, the camera tends to descend, working its way from eye level on down to floor level, at times. That decline even figured into elements of the home's blueprint. "Since you're looking up into the ceilings more, its architecture was designed to be quite interesting," Burgess submits. "The ceilings weren't just dry?walled, but had beams across them and molding to create shadow effect and contrast." Occasionally, he breaks up the low shots with a "bird's eye" view - in a Ouija board seance in the bathroom; during the couple's bout of candlelit lovemaking; and as Norman places the paralyzed Claire into the bathtub - sometimes swooping down and panning around to a profile for heightened effect. Burgess shot mainly with a 50mm lens, shifting to a 75mm for tight closeups; as the camera dips further, he went wider, using 30mm, 35mm and 40mm lenses. "It gives you a little more distortion," comments Burgess of wider units, "making the image stranger - everything isn't quite as normal as it once appeared." He did resort to a 5:1 macro lens (150 ? 65mm) for an extreme close?up profile of Claire peering into her neighbor's yard through a whole in wooden fence. Burgess relied on Panavision's inclining prism to acquire ultra low?angle shots. Featuring a 45 degree angled mirror, the device fits right under the camera's iris rods, and can accept any anamorphic lens from 17mm to 35mm. "You can get shots right down on the floor, or float it along the edge of a table. By putting it on the remote head - so that the camera is straight up out of the way - you can do all these nice, low creepy shots." He shoots up at Claire every time she makes a new revelation: be it locating a key to an unknown trinket box; finding a newspaper article about Madison's disappearance; or handing a cordless phone to Norman for him to dial 911 with his long?suppressed info about the missing girl. After paralyzing Claire with a chemical inhalant, Norman drops her limp form into the bathtub, leaving the cold water tap running so that the slowly filling tub threatens to drown her. Burgess filmed her petrified point of view by shooting mere millimeters above the rising water. "Instead of having it submerged, the camera is above the water, and with the arm we bring it down as close to water level as possible," he illustrates. "That way, you could literally see the water level [from her POV] as it keeps climbing all the way up to the [prism's] mirror until it covers the lens. You could simulate the eye perspective of that water slowly coming up to suffocate her. We also dipped a periscope lens down into the water, so when the water actually does cover her up, we can put the camera at her point-of-view to see her take up the chain [with her foot] and pull the plug to keep herself from drowning." In a preceding scene, Burgess manipulated the prism's properties as she crawls along the floor in a vain attempt to escape from Norman. He shoots straight?ahead at Claire, pushing in for a split-second before dipping through the floor to show her drugged?up face from below. The removable section of floor featured a pit so that the camera could be run beneath. After the shot had been executed in "normal" fashion, Pfeiffer placed her face on a piece of glass that replaced the floorboard; so as not to flatten her features against the solid pane, the actress elevated her head slightly. Burgess then repeated the move. Visual effects supervisor Rob Legato (of Sony Imageworks) merged the two passes through a CG composite. House on Haunted Hill Production erected a two-story, 3500 square-foot house on the shores of Lake Champlain in Addison, Vermont. Being set on the grounds of The Daughters of the American Revolution State Park afforded the location shoot the added luxury of security and isolation. During scouting sessions, the moviemakers took three different trips to Vermont to find a suitable plot of land. The first lot had to be scrapped because its surrounding big?thorn evergreens defeated the need to depict the seasonal change from summer to fall that transpires throughout the picture. Locating a second lot, the house's site had to be moved closer to the edge of a hill to make the lake and its dock more visible from rooms inside. Because of actor Harrison Ford's limited availability, not all of What Lies Beneath could be scheduled for a Vermont shoot. As the movie unfolds over the course of a few months, they visited Vermont twice during the three weeks allotted for location work: first for 10 days in August, returning in October after the greenery's leaves succumbed to autumn. The remainder of the 80?day shoot was done at Sony Pictures' LA soundstages. An identical replica of the Spencer house was built on stage, but with the obvious advantage of it having removable walls and floor pieces along with multiple versions of certain rooms. (One of the bathroom sets measures twice as long as the original to increase tension as the camera tracks Norman from behind while he carries his crippled wife to drown her in a tub of cold water.) Besides making the set friendly to tracking moves with a crane, trick photography and visual effects setups, Zemeckis, Burgess and production designers Rick Carter (Forrest Gump, Amistad, Cast Away) and Jim Teegarden (art director on ID4, Amistad and Cast Away) drafted its construction to complement the anxiety-ridden camerawork. The house's design is such that its form is little off?kilter - none of the architectural lines are straight. The doorways between connecting rooms - say from an archway into a study into a living room - are not set at right angles. "The camera always had a chance to see into a room, but also look around the corner at the same time," explains Zemeckis. "In other words, whereas you always have the sense that you could do a diagonal camera move, you'd have doorways and archways 'twisting' in an interesting way. You think the camera is going straight into the room, but as it's going 'straight,' it creates the illusion of coming around the corner - always subconsciously giving the audience the feeling that something is going to jump out at you." Its split?level design adds to the nervous energy, as the actors constantly have to tread up and down stairs. In fact, Burgess made the most out of the stairwell's positioning. He tracks Michelle Pfeiffer's climbing feet until she comes to the open bathroom door, which is spewing forth clouds of steam. Later on, he shadows her from the lip of the top stair as she slowly backs down, armed with a shard of broken mirror, cutting to a close?up of her feet as she nears a dead body. "We designed the stairway inside the house to come apart so that we could do all sorts of Vertigo-ish down-angled shots," expounds Burgess. "By rotating the axis [of the Libra 3], you get the whole architecture to spin with you as the subject is coming up - it throws great shadow patterns on the wall." Inside both homes, Burgess wired small lamps cans (with MR-16s) in ceilings and along walls, controlling them via dimmer as he also did with the practicals (decorative lamps fitted with 15- to 25-watt bulbs.) The cans lent the rooms shafts of a spotty source light, which he augmented with multiple fluorescents and Chinese lanterns. Small, diffusion-covered lightboxes rigged with a 100?watt globe - either placed outside of frame or hidden within frame - generated motivational light as well as the throw for ominous wall shadows. Outside windows, he bounced light (10Ks and 20Ks) off of muslin. He's also situated a 5K somewhat further back, aiming it through panes to send hard shadows on the wall. For night ambiance, he plied 20Ks gelled with a 1/4 blue, often using the exterior fog as diffuser. All the lamps (along with effects for fire and candlelight) were controlled on a computerized dimmer-board. Being able to program lighting cues into its memory helped Burgess maintain consistency; he often had to replicate the exact aura for a scene that would be photographed both in the Vermont house and the LA soundstage. Each time the phantom manifests itself (to signal the start of Acts II and III), Burgess further muted the look. The lighting scheme's about-face from bright to dark runs concurrent with the shift from summer to fall; with the Sun sitting lower in the horizon, more mood comes about through shafty, direct light. The cinematographer also softened the image in the latter acts - exchanging his 1/8 ProMist filter for one in a 1/4 strength; this swap rendered greater halation in highlights on interiors, which Burgess captured on Vision 500T (5279). (Production designers Carter and Teegarden did up the abode in deep shades that played well in both bright ambiance and stylish shade - deep blues, thick browns and dark grays. They also darkened the bathroom's slate gray walls by several shadings between Acts I and III). "I took it down to real bottom levels, clinging to the edge of darkness, but I tried to do that without creating any hard backlights," reports Burgess, who lauds his "light?oriented" gaffer Steve McGee and key grip Steve Smith for their sensitivity in helping maintain appropriate moodiness. "I established a minimum amount of practicals being on [which he warmed up with 1/4 or 1/8 CTS], so that the moonlight coming through the windows, and the light reflecting off the lake, creates a colder feeling. It lends itself to that 'I don't want to be walking around in this house alone at night' look. If you relate it to key light/fill light, the fill light starts dropping off - there's more contrast, more mood and more dark and light relationships. You can barely see the environment around the subject, but there's enough detail to give you a sense of where you are. I also let the faces fall off, with just enough light hitting the eyes to define them. I See Dead People As a rule, the ghost's guise, or hints of it, always appears in a reflection - slightly below a lake's rippling surface; in a fogged?up bathroom mirror or cascading across a full bathtub's still waters. The one exception is when it's layered onto Pfeiffer's face as Claire falls prey to an instant of demonic possession while trapped in the bathtub. "You've got to do something that's stylish," asserts Zemeckis. "It's infinitely more interesting than having some wispy ghost floating around through frame. I don't even know what that type of ghost would look like - maybe Casper!" The face of supermodel Amber Valetta (who embodies the dead spirit of Madison Elizabeth Frank) was scanned electronically so that Sony Imageworks' artists could composite a realistic representation of her long?deceased likeness into any reflective surface. "We computer-scanned Amber and also shot live images of her so that they could use both to create the ghostly image," recalls Burgess recalls, who shot all ghost images on Eastman's EXR 200T (5293). "They sit her in a 'dentist's chair' and take a three?dimensional picture to generate into the computer, so that it gives three?dimensional dynamics of the shape of her face. To artistically create the ghost, they could rotate the head around, create all its different dimensions, take her away or put her in [the image] and change the skin color or the eyes." To amp audience anticipation of the apparition's arrival, and form another 'image' within frame, mirrored surfaces figure predominantly in the production design. In the bathroom, Burgess angled various glistening surfaces against one another to produce a multiplicity of reflections. Both walls are adorned with mirrors, and several hang from the wardrobe closets; also, there's the gleam of placid water in the bathtub; and a high-gloss sheen coats the tiled floor, which cast interesting reflections in low-angle shots. "Working what I call the 'reflective angle suspension?in?space' picks up all these different angles in one shot," details Burgess. "But whenever you do scenes against windows and mirrors, the problem is that you have a dead reflection back onto yourself. You're always finessing the angle to get it just right, so you can get a reflection of them and not see all unwanted images. It can get tricky especially when the camera is moving, which it always is in What Lies Beneath." Given that the production shot scenes in, around and outside the house both on stage and in Vermont, Burgess often found himself filming the same sequence two to three months apart. (For this reason, Panavision's Preview system became invaluable as a continuity source since it offered references for filmstocks, lens size and quality of light.) One night, the still curious Claire ventures outside with a flashlight, ready to fish an ornamental box from the bottom of the lake. Burgess first shot Pfeiffer from behind, looking out onto Lake Champlain; months later, he photographed the actress on a fogged?in stage, standing on "shore" before a miniature house with a vanishing perspective dock. With wintertime temperatures in Vermont lingering around 30°F, most night exteriors were done on stage: many of these sequences are set in winter, and consisted of Pfeiffer clad only in a damp nightgown. Surprisingly, the most extensive effects work does not even involve the phantasm, but rather some of Zemeckis' signature shots: those sweeping moves that appear as one continuous pass but are comprised of several separate elements. Evading her murderous spouse, Claire takes off in her truck, speeding across the bridge because at a certain distance, the cell phone will activate, enabling her to contact the cops. The shot starts above the bridge from a helicopter-like angle, and then rapidly pushes into the windshield of the moving truck to close in on a cell phone lying on the dashboard. For the chase's running interior shots, a section of the bridge was constructed on soundstage in a Hughes' aircraft hangar in Playa Del Rey. Using Kodak's SFX 200T stock, Burgess photographed Pfeiffer in a mock-up of the truck's cab against a greenscreen backing. A computer model of the bridge allowed him to design a proper shot angle to be married into the CG composite of the receding bridgeway. Claire later loses control of the truck, driving it off the bridge and into the lake, with Norman still close behind. Burgess shot the stunt of the truck's watery crash on three cameras: the A-camera shooting on a 50mm lens; B-camera and C-camera on a 100mm lens, with the latter set at a different frame rate. To mimic sporadic washes of light slicing into the water from a nearby lighthouse, he replaced the tower's fixture with a 12K Par. To do tight shots of Claire and Norman tussling, production reconvened at the water tank on Sony's Stage 30 (a former site of Esther William's water ballet pictures). Though the tank runs 20?feet deep, it contained the Spencer's truck and a rotting car with Madison's decomposed corpse inside. Aquatic cinematographer Mike Thomas shot this watery scene through a Hydroflex dome port housing on a 40mm and 50mm lens. "In trying to create the illusion of the tank being deeper than it is, you use very wide lenses because going underwater tends to magnify them anyway," states Burgess. "But then you have to work out the density of the water. We literally used powdered milk to cloud the water to the degree that it looks realistic to the lake, versus crystal-clear water. We had the lighthouse effect coming through the water - the real spot Par part of the [12K HMI] light that we threw from the actual lighthouse location. We supplemented that with the headlights of the truck, and another warm light source [2K tungsten Pars] that made it possible for objects to be seen underwater." The slowly sinking truck has dragged a pole from the boat trailer into the water with it. The rod plunges to the lake floor, piercing the disintegrating auto's hood. Madison's ghost emerges from the car, floating up towards the embattled Spencers. The apparition comes toward camera, allows Claire to free herself and, in an act of poetic justice, drowns Norman. To lend ethereal momentum to Madison's spirit, Thomas overcranked camera speeds at 28, 32 and 36 frames-per-second, and shot the ghost from awkward angles. The apparition consisted of a herky-jerky moving puppet as well as a stuntwoman on wires. "The stuntwoman could hold her breath for a long period of time, and then let herself float up from a depth of 20 feet," remarks Burgess. "It's difficult because you just can't ascend if you're on an aqualung. Breathing air out of a tank will make your lungs expand [during the ascent] so the air has to blown out while going up. The only way for her to do it was blow out the air [while at the tank's bottom] and then ascend - you can't have any bubbles [coming out of a ghost's mouth]. With the wires, we could guide her up, rotate her at a certain point towards camera and hit a specific mark. You're not quite sure what it is, but by the time she gets to camera, it rolls over at the last minute to reveal the face of the ghost." When compared to the generational globe-trotting of heroic idiot savant Forrest Gump and the existential, extraterrestrial musings of Contact, director Robert Zemeckis and cinematographer Don Burgess, ASC seem to have made quite a departure with What Lies Beneath. Not only in this one-camera show's intimate scope, but also in the terrorizing tone of its plot. But Zemeckis sees this spooky shocker as merely an extension of his previous pictures, irrespective of genre. "The comment that What Lies Beneath is not the type of movie that I generally do is interesting because all my movies are laden with suspense, even though some are uproarious comedies," Zemeckis points out. "The reason that I've always been attracted to suspense is because it's filmic. You can do it in a novel, but the reader can always flip to the end - he's in control. I suppose, you can now do the same with a VCR. But with film, you can do it like you never could before. That's when all the elements of film storytelling come into play - manipulation of time, manipulation of space, camerawork, editing - and all become part of this experience. To me, the same techniques used to tell a [cinematic] joke are the same used to create a terrifying moment." Email the author with questions or comments |
This
supernatural thriller reteams director Robert Zemeckis(Romancing
the Stone, the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed
Roger Rabbit?) and cinematographer Don Burgess, ASC (Forget
Paris, The Evening Star), his collaborator on Forrest Gump
and Contact. Shooting on What Lies Beneath occurred
during downtime on the upcoming Zemeckis?Burgess production, Cast
Away, while lead actor Tom Hanks grew his hair out and lost
weight to look like a man marooned for months on a deserted isle.
Zemeckis is a longtime fan of the horror genre, as evidenced by
his involvement in the Tales of the Crypt series, and his
production company Dark Castle Entertainment, which did a remake
of House on Haunted Hill and has revisions of 13 Ghosts
and Macabre on deck. 
Both
he and Burgess watched some of Hitchcock's more taut films - in
particular, Vertigo (shot by Robert Burks) - and read Francois
Truffaut's book?long interview with the British director for insight
into his process of effecting fright and apprehension. What Lies
Beneath is shot mainly from Claire's point of view. But as she
goes on the mystery hunt, Burgess would drop back to shadow her
journey from a more objective standpoint. The cinematographer realized
that the key to true suspense lies in "knowing when the camera
needs to move and what pace the camera should be moving at. For
the feeling that you're closing behind someone who is looking the
other way, it probably takes a little longer to get there then it
should." To create that prolonged pace, Burgess shot most scenes
within the house on one camera: a Chapman Lenny arm-operated, Panavision
Platinum attached to a Libra 3 remote head, which can rotate on
three axes. "The timing has to be laserpoint accurate in creating
these seamlessly floating camera moves that subtly come to a stop
and then move again without anyone realizing," he imparts.
"Since we did everything on a crane, I had one dolly grip [Jeff
"Moose" Howrey] on the end of the camera arm, and another
dolly grip [John Murphy] on the dolly chassis. Besides having them
help me make all these beautiful, sensitive, soft moves, I also
had a great camera operator, Robert Presley, and focus puller, Tony
Rivetti, all of who have to be in sync. Everyone is on headsets
talking to one another so that we can all adapt along the way."