Bless the Child opens as drug-addicted single mother Jenna (Angela Bettis) unceremoniously abandons newborn baby girl Cody (Holliston Coleman) with her sister Maggie O’Connor (Kim Basinger), a hardworking nurse. In the six years that follow, Cody fills a void in the life of childless Maggie. Despite —or perhaps because of—her apparent autism, the child demonstrates some unique and seemingly miraculous abilities. Those events do not escape the notice of dark forces prowling the city for—and abducting—unsuspecting children, each of whom share Cody’s birthday. Years later, the now-married Jenna turns up to reclaim Cody. When Maggie resists her entreaties, Jenna’s husband Eric Stark (Rufus Sewell)—leader of the New Dawn Foundation, a self-help encounter group that fronts for a diabolical cult—spirits the six-year-old child away.  Maggie joins forces with former priest-turned-FBI agent John Travis (Jimmy Smits) to rescue the little girl. In truth, Maggie is a powerful spiritual nexus for God, making her a prime target for Stark, who desperately desires to convert her into a servant of Satan.  

For cinematographer Peter Menzies, Jr., Bless the Child marks a contrast from his action-adventure features, such as Die Hard with a Vengeance, The Getaway and the 13th Warrior. Despite its supernatural subject matter, this movie is more in the drama-driven vein of A Time to Kill, The General’s Daughter and, most recently, the Disney comedy The Kid. “Mace [Neufeld, producer of The General’s Daughter] put me up for this project and introduced me to director Chuck Russell. I’d not previously worked with Chuck, though I was of course familiar with his previous work as director of The Mask and Eraser.”

As per his usual wont, Menzies elected to shoot Bless the Child in the anamorphic format. “We always use Panavision and, this time out, we had two Platinums plus a lightweight Steadicam for the run of the show. The Steadicam gave us a chance to impart a sense of suspense and anticipation to certain scenes.” He relied entirely upon Kodak stock, employing EXR 100T (5248) for day exteriors and Vision 500T (5279) for both interiors and night shoots.  

Considering the potentially melodramatic trappings of its flavor-of-the-month subject matter (consider Stigmata, End of Days, The Ninth Gate and the upcoming Lost Souls), one might expect Bless the Child to rely on a sturm-und-drang approach that emphasizes spectacle and sensation over character and plot. That, however, is not the case. Instead, Menzies readily acknowledges that a more subdued and naturalistic treatment was always the intent. “Right from the beginning, Chuck and I were in agreement that too much in the way of camera tricks would have detracted from the story and its core emotional focus on the relationship between Maggie and Cody,” the cinematographer admits. “I always try to make an effort to ensure the camera doesn’t interfere with performance, simply because I prefer remaining true to the drama, which means it is my job to illustrate these points. The other way of working — by superimposing a photographic style upon the content and characters — runs the risk of overpowering everything you’re supposed to care about in the film.”  

In the case of Maggie’s sister, Jenna, Menzies chose to bring out the strung-out streetwalker’s unhealthy look as simply as possible—by altering the angle of light playing across her features. “Rather than use a lot of gimmicks, I lit her with a 2K or 5K Chimera slightly from above to a degree well beyond what I would normally do with any actress. That emphasized the bags under her eyes. Then, when she is looking a bit healthier later on in the film, we took it back to a more traditional ‘glamour lighting’ position with the same 2K or 5K Chimera or 2K Mole Richardson Zip light from eye level or slightly below.

”Maggie first realizes Cody’s supernatural gifts after following her into a local church. In astonishment, she watches Cody cause an array of unlit candles to alight before her eyes. “A series of motion-control moves were needed to create all the information needed to put that shot together,” relates Menzies. “One pass was with no candles lit, then another with just a few, and another with more lit, and so on. This afforded the visual effects boys a range of timing options when assembling the final image. We’d hoped to shoot this part of the sequence in an actual church, but the rig, which included a small crane, just wouldn’t fit into any of the practical locations we examined. So production designer Carol Spier [The Fly, Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, Crash] wound up building an altar on stage.” 

“Carol and I spent quite a bit of time together during prep and built up a great rapport,” he continues. “I feel very blessed to have enjoyed a series of successful relationships with production designers on past films who really understand and respect the function of the cinematographer, and she’s certainly no exception. Carol is very director of photography-friendly, and loves that we can do things with the camera that not only show her sets in a good light but also help tell the story visually.” Many of the six dozen sets built by Spier, including Maggie’s apartment and the local police station, featured windowed environments. “As a result, we wound up using quite a lot of TransLights for views outside though another approach that looked and worked great for us utilized straightforward painted backings.”

In the first of a series of increasingly desperate attempts to wrest Cody back from Stark, Maggie visits the New Dawn rehab center in an attempt to meet and reason with him. “Even though the Foundation complex is supposed to be a bad place because of who runs it, I didn’t feel the need to be too dramatic and go over-the-top with moody shadows. After all, we didn’t want to give it all away too early in the game,” he reasons. “We also had to consider that the Foundation’s outward appearance had to be a place that is a benefit to people in need.  The actual location we used was a blood bank with very extensive skylights, so there was a nice sense of daylight permeating. We got really lucky with the time of day we shot, since the skylight just came streaming through beautifully. To break the contrast down a bit on the skylight, we floated these enormous 8K helium balloons that must have measured 10 or 12 feet in diameter. That softened things a bit, which reinforced those false ‘good-will-to-all’ aspects that Stark’s foundation is trying to project.”  

Maggie learns that a satanic cult makes up the core of the New Dawn Foundation from Cheri (Christina Ricci), a disillusioned and frightened former member. When the two meet in a diner, Cheri imparts dire warnings to Maggie regarding Cody’s ultimate fate if the little girl remains in Stark’s dark sphere of influence. “There’s a heavy storm-like rain going on outside this diner, and that’s where the principal lighting in the scene comes from,” reveals Menzies. “We had three Condors outside on the street, each with 20Ks angled to backlight the rain and come in through the windows. For the interior, I used just a couple of 2Ks to light Kim Basinger and Christina Ricci. That let me keep things rather low-key, which helped the kind of nervous feeling, since the girl fears she will be discovered by the villain’s helpers at any moment—which is, of course, what happens.”   

Fleeing outside into the stormy night and into a subway station, Cheri gets chased by a gang of Stark’s goons. When the well-meaning Maggie attempts to intervene on the young girl’s behalf, she becomes victim to a savage beating. To convey Maggie’s groggy POV after being bludgeoned into a comatose state, Menzies relied on an in-camera effect.  “We set up a number of strobe lights, but made sure not to synchronize them with the Panavision camera. The result was a kind of visual stutter, since only a certain percentage of the time would any of the strobes be firing when the camera’s shutter was open. There was a bit of setup time for that one, so we wound up picking that up much later on—after the main unit production shoot had wrapped—during our greenscreen shoot, which was handled in Los Angeles.” 

In an update of ‘poor man’s process,’ many of the driving scenes were also photographed against greenscreen and finessed during postproduction, such as shots of Maggie attempting to escape from her car as it teeters over the side of a bridge. One greenscreen element accomplished during shooting occurred in the subway station. Awaking from unconsciousness, Maggie finds Cheri sitting silently on a bench. While trying to shake her awake, Maggie watches Cheri’s decapitated head topple right off her shoulders. “In addition to the usual make-up bits, they worked up a greenscreen bib around Christina Ricci’s neck, which allowed for her head to be split out later on,” Menzies explains. “There were nearly always two supervisors present whenever greenscreen was shot, or if any kind of matte work or plate work was going to be done. One was Glenn Neufeld, whom I’d worked with previously on The General’s Daughter. Joel Hynek, an Oscar winner for What Dreams May Come, was the other—he supervised the digital work done at MVFX.

“As a result of needing to do post work on some of our shots, there were some VistaVision plates done, but it was pretty limited. That was my own strong preference, as I’d much rather have all work being done off the original negative.  Unless it was absolutely necessary to shoot Vista for visual effects, I always pushed to shoot anamorphic. Fortunately, Glenn and Joel shot a lot of test images with all the various lenses on their cameras, so they were able to match them back to main unit shoots and not create any continuity issues with respect to image quality.

”In an attempt to sway Cody from her destined path, Stark takes her on a nighttime excursion to the roof of a high-rise.  Unsuccessful in his wheedling, Stark next challenges the little girl to put her faith in God and leap off. When she issues a good-natured, and innocently sarcastic, refusal, he is barely able to keep himself from flinging Cody over the side of the building. Again, production designer Spier built the rooftop on stage. “One of the defining aspects of New York City at night is neon light. Of course, I immediately wanted to play with the notion a bit. So I decided that we should see some cold blue wash from KinoFlo, chroma-key blue fluorescents, which are almost ultraviolet blue in color, reflecting that kind of source in the mid-ground distance, as if there were a big neon sign just off-camera. It also gave the scene a bit more depth.” As Cody stands on the building’s ledge, the camera executes a startling boom-up, ending by looking straight down at the girl and the vertiginous drop-off to the ground far below. “The set was about 30 feet up, which was high enough to make it a little scary for the girl, who was cabled off quite securely. Then we had a greenscreen down on the floor, and after we shot the move, which used a small remote head, the visual effects team shot a corresponding plate in New York. Then, they did an amazing job of matching their plate to the reveal we did with that remote unit.” 

Eventually, Maggie succeeds in freeing Cody from Stark, and attempts to flee the city. Throughout her travails, she is aided by one of several kind-faced people who deign to offer unsolicited help. Whether these human guardians are otherworldly creatures or just enlightened beings is never specified, but Menzies interpreted them to be angels. “We made a deliberate choice to separate the look of the angels out a bit from the rest of the characters in the story. The best way I could think to do that, and the approach that just made sense to everyone, was that angels would have very honest undisguised features, so I kept all the contrast off their faces and let the skin textures show through.” By way of contrast, Stark’s accursed nanny Dahnya (Dimitra Arlys)—while attempting to force her way into Maggie’s subway car—shows an entirely different skin, transforming into a demonic apparition. “We shot her with, and without, the full prosthetic make-up, then visual effects created a morph transition between the two. There was a nice sense of distance to it, because this all happens on the other side of the train’s glass door.” 

Even as Stark’s forces reclaim the child from Maggie, agent Travis enters the New Dawn Foundation’s basement and uncovers hard evidence linking Stark to the murder of other children—a point graphically revealed by an ultraviolet light scan of the grounds that unveils remnants of human blood. “That was another practical location Carol found for us, and [because of its low ceilings] we wound up bumping our heads on the overheads time and again—more often than I could count,” offers Menzies ruefully. “To simulate the effect of this scan, we used Xenon hand units. Something like a still photographer’s sun gun, they were a simple enough unit that the actor could easily pan it around. To push it more deeply into the blue range, we added a full CTB filter, which made it that great bluer-than-blue. Then we put some bounce cards around in various spots so that some of this light would wash back on Jimmy Smits and the other actors in the scene. There was a bit of VistaVision involved there as well, since Joel Hynek and his guys went in after that and shot a whole series of plates to which they could add the blacklight/ultraviolet look for the blood and markings on the walls.”  

Joining forces, Maggie and agent Travis run Stark to ground at his rural retreat. Prior to attempting to rescue Cody, Travis pauses in his exploration of the grounds, gazing out at a mood-drenched, foggy moonlit vista. The source lighting for the Moon, also used for other night exteriors throughout production, was created with what Menzies calls “a fantastic lighting system known as an LRX. It is quite like a Musco light, very controllable, with a throw of about 110 feet. Rather than try to filter it, we kept the LRX at full daylight, and instead used filtration on the camera to bring the color temperature back to 4,000 degrees. That way it didn’t go too terribly blue, and instead there’s just that little bit you always get when using smoke, because there’s always a bit of blue in the smoke.” 

The action concludes in Stark’s Gothic-styled church, an exterior/interior set erected in a former sugar refinery that ranked among the most elaborate construction efforts mounted for Bless the Child. Having been captured, Maggie is threatened with death unless Cody acquiesces to Stark’s demands. The full power of Hell’s forces reveal themselves as multitudes of bats orbit overhead and then rats swarm onto the altar to form an iconic representation of the Devil himself—all realized through MVFX’s computer-generated effort combining on-set live-action plates with custom digital character animation. But when all seems lost, the wrath of God—along with that of the local law enforcement—rains down on Stark’s church, with both angels and gas grenades penetrating the ancient edifice. Hynek’s MVFX team also produced the angels digitally. Many effects houses prefer to receive plates requiring animation enhancement without any interactive lighting present—in the belief that what has been done on-set can limit the flexibility and effectiveness of their CGI work. But for Bless the Child, Menzies elected to establish very distinct interactive sources in the live-action shots. “We had some 500-watt and 1000-watt Chinese lanterns made of grid cloth suspended on poles that could move and swing to simulate the movements of the angels [heavenly forms] over the heads of the actors. Our principal interactive sources were 20Ks capable of up/down motion, and together these provided solid reliable cues that made for a good starting point from which visual effects could build their CG angels.”          

With all the gunfire and spiritual forces battling within, flames erupt inside the medieval chapel, and Maggie—resurrected by divine forces after taking a bullet meant for Cody—is able to pull both sister and niece to safety before flames consume the Satanic church. Both during this sequence and an earlier one (when Stark casually causes a homeless man to incinerate himself), Menzies elected to expose for the yellow hue of flame. “I really enjoy blowing flames out and letting them go white some of the time,” he acknowledges, “but then there are always thoughts about trying to do something different. I had just let fire go white on the last show I’d done [The General’s Daughter] and, for this movie, it just seemed more appropriate to show the color and texture of the blaze, which worked well with the walls of this old chapel set.” 

But director of photography Peter Menzies’ finest memory of working on Bless the Child is the exhausting setup for a lengthy shot preceding the climactic conflagration. “As we start to build into the final act, Jimmy Smits comes in via helicopter to meet Kim Basinger outside a diner,” Menzies relates. “We put a Xenon light on the aircraft and let that serve as a principal source of illumination for the scene, so controlling and directing that light was a key in making the shot work. This was especially tough because it was an all-in-one Steadicam shot, with Smits emerging from the chopper, getting into a car with Kim and heading off to rescue the kidnapped girl. At this point in the story, everything really kicks into high gear. So coordinating the helicopter and the Xenon light and the car with the movement of the actors — then capturing all of this with the proper sense of drama and dynamics via Steadicam — made for quite the bit of fun that night. I’m very happy with how it turned out, and, indeed, the fabulous effort the crew put throughout the entire show.”