Guilty by Suspicion
Tom Stern brings an elegant simplicity to Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River

By David Heuring • Photos by Merie Wallace

Since his directorial debut in 1971 on Play Misty for Me, Clint Eastwood has been at the helm for more than two dozen feature films, in most cases acting as well. For his most recent effort, Mystic River, Eastwood chose to stay behind the camera, leaving the acting to Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden and Laura Linney, among others. In an interview in the March 2003 New Yorker magazine, Eastwood was quoted as saying “I’m free, free of extra pressure, the constant worry over how I’m doing and what I’m doing. As the director, I want to be watching my actors––it’s fun to watch the emotions in my actors unfold. If it weren’t fun, I wouldn’t be doing it.”

Mystic River, a Warner Bros. release, follows three working class childhood friends who reunite after the death of one of their daughters. Bacon’s character is a detective on the case, who uncovers disturbing evidence, while Penn’s character, the father, struggles with his rage and desire for revenge. All three are haunted by a long-ago incident of sexual abuse.

Mystic River was written for the screen by Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential, Blood Work) based on the novel by Dennis Lehane. The action takes place in South Boston, where Eastwood and his production team, led by cinematographer Tom Stern, shot for several months last year.

Stern served as gaffer or chief lighting technician on a dozen of Eastwood’s films as well as American Beauty and Road to Perdition. His first credit as a cinematographer came on Eastwood’s previous film Blood Work. Stern says that he and the crew worked hard to give Mystic River a “pleasantly accidental” aesthetic and to create visuals with “simple elegance.”

“The first thing you notice about the project is the milieu,” says Stern. “It’s set in South Boston, a gritty, working class, almost isolated world. But the themes, which include fate, guilt and retribution, are explored in an almost classical structure, which is in counterpoint to the milieu. There is a significant amount of dialog, and some moving between time periods.”

The first important decision regarding the visuals was to shoot in anamorphic (2.4:1) format, as they had done on Blood Work. Stern explains that Eastwood likes to manipulate the subjective and objective viewpoints, sometimes in the same frame or even at the same time. In a simple example, a shot will begin on a subject, and then an actor will step into the frame, creating an over-the-shoulder shot, changing it from subjective––in which the viewer sees what the character sees––to objective.

“Anamorphic gives you the space in the frame to do that,” Stern says. “Clint has no problem filling an anamorphic frame in a contemporary picture. The story also has an elegiac aspect, so it seemed better to tell it without rock video cutting and frenetic camera movement. With the amazing cast, we knew this film would be about the performances. All those ideas––as well as ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’––factored into our decision to shoot anamorphic.”

The production found an unused pharmaceutical manufacturing facility that could be used as a location and as a makeshift soundstage. Production designer Henry Bumstead oversaw the construction of police interrogation rooms and the interiors representing South Boston’s trademark three-ups––three-family houses with ground, middle and top floor dwellings.

Stern says the integrity of the sets was generally respected. “We moved the walls only once that I remember,” he says. “Clint likes to work within the space. There’s a certain energy to it, and it can stop you from being too clever. You think twice before you pop the camera outside the character’s space. As far as lighting, you have the ability to pull out pieces of the ceiling if necessary, but generally I try to keep the lights outside the set for the most part. Occasionally, you’d need a little bit of light to bring up something on the mantelpiece, for example. But I don’t think we ever lit the characters from up high.”

According to Stern, one of Eastwood’s visual ideas for Mystic River was to shoot scenes when possible and appropriate with a vertical dynamic, meaning one actor or visual element higher or lower than the other. “There’s a murder scene, and Clint chose a pit as the location of the crime,” says Stern. “So we begin by looking down. Then Kevin Bacon’s character has to descend into the pit, and he––and the camera––look up to Laurence Fishburne. It’s on a very steep angle. Another ubiquitous characteristic of the three-ups are the front porch steps, so we often did scenes with vertical orientation on them too.

“I think it’s a visual reflection of the fact that one’s position in life can change almost instantaneously,” he says. “It’s extremely effective visually. It seems to work on a number of different levels. Using this different approach seems to freshen up all your overs and reverses. There’s a very interesting scene between Marcia Gay Harden and Tim Robbins that was staged on an interior stairway, and there’s a sense of disquiet and possible aggression. It’s very ambiguous, yet the spatial dynamics really underscore the feeling.”

For one interrogation situation, Stern avoided the cliché of the single suspended bulb and lit with an overall ambience unconnected to any visual source. He sometimes added a “driller”––lighting coming straight down from directly overhead and bouncing off flat surfaces.

“You don’t see any lights in the master shot,” he says. “The master shot that we started out with was an impossible shot to light. We were jammed back in the corner with a 35 mm lens and there was a two-way mirror in the background. So we used a technique Conrad Hall called a ‘driller.’ Simply put, you’re normally shooting horizontally across a room, and there are horizontal surfaces, like the tops of mantels and tables. If you come from directly overhead with a light and drill it down onto that surface, it works quite well. It doesn’t seem wrong. If light comes from a place that’s not normal or usual, people seem to accept the element that’s being illuminated without really figuring out what’s going on in terms of a source. Shadows go straight down, so they don’t end up looking strange or calling attention to the source. You see it on the table and then it comes off the table and lights the faces to a degree. It’s interesting because you’re not lighting the people at all. You’re lighting the environment that they’re in.”

Stern adds that the interrogation room had white walls with no decoration. “We wanted to use that to help create the impression that they’re in a void,” he says. “We shot into the corners of the room, but the light is such that you can’t tell where the corners are. You’re captured in this nondescript space without definition. You sense that it’s not big, but there’s nothing to hang on to other than the characters. It’s not really lighting the walls, it’s not lighting them.”

Stern says the picture did not require any zoom lenses, although the production carried a set just in case. For the A camera, E-series Panavision anamorphic lenses were used, and a set of the C-series primes were on hand for Steadicam and handheld shots. Steve Campanelli served as the Steadicam operator as well as A camera operator.

At one point in the film a character says, “God is watching us.” Eastwood and Stern picked up on this story element and turned it into a visual theme. There are a number of “God’s eye view” shots in the film done with a Wescam-rigged helicopter.

“The aerials are integral to the movie,” says Stern. “In a classical Greek tragedy, you have the chorus; for us, it was the helicopter shot that helps us take a step back and moves us from one place to another. We find a crime scene from a series of aerial shots, and also we find Bacon on the bridge in a similar way. The bridge across the Mystic River is an important symbolic element. It helps communicate the isolation of these people and this place.”

Other scenes end with a tilt up to the empty sky, and then transition smoothly to a new scene. Stern says this technique, along with the aerials and god’s eye view shots, reinforces the fatalistic aspects of the story and helps to create a sort of cinematic proscenium.

Stern values consistency of aperture. For Mystic River, he always shot at T-2.8 for night scenes and interiors. “There was one sequence where we had to open up a little bit because I needed the stop,” he says. “Otherwise, one gets one’s eye dialed in for a film stock. What I mean is that when you’re looking at an image, the film stock, the T-stop and the lab process are consistent, and the only thing that’s going to change is the light. That’s the way I approach it, probably because I was a gaffer for so long.”

Another aspect of Stern’s approach to creating “accidental” light can be seen in certain key scenes where he lit elements with as much as twelve stops of range from brightest to darkest. “We anchored the blacks at four to five stops under our exposure, and for the highlights we went as much as eight stops over,” he says. “Then we’d have the actor step into the light during the scene. For example, in one scene, we see Sean Penn’s character come through a very dark passageway and then step into the light, where he’s viewing the body of his daughter in the mortuary. It’s a fantastic performance, and I hope the audience will be totally moved by it.”

Stern notes that this powerful and dramatically lit scene was quite simple in execution. “Throughout the making of this film, the struggle for me was to make it as simple as possible,” he says. “Often we’d be thinking of adding an eyelight or a bit of fill. Clint would look through the eyepiece, and we’d turn it on and off. Invariably he’d say let’s go with it off. He’s into the same drill. If we can do it with one light rather than two, that usually suits him also.”

Eastwood is known as a director who doesn’t use a video tap, preferring to be near the camera and connected to the actors while a scene is playing. “I believe Clint thinks of filmmaking as a living, organic process,” says Stern. “When you push rewind, in a way you’re going back in time, which is antithetical to a living process.”

Eastwood asked Stern if there was a way for him to see the image without creating a video village. A transmitter was connected to the camera’s video tap, and the images were passed through a frame converter and sent to a small LCD television that allowed Eastwood and Stern to monitor framing and composition while staying close to the action.

“It gave both of us more control over the image,” says Stern. “For Mystic River, I was very concerned with allowing the frame to breathe, giving space to the actors and acting as a kind of proscenium. Clint and I have both done many pictures with Steve Campanelli, the operator. If there are two options during a shot, and Steve gets a gentle touch on his shoulder for the choice he made, he knows to go with the other option. With the LCD TV rig, Clint could look down 30 degrees and see the image or look up 30 degrees and look right over the lens and see the performance. And he could do it without sacrificing his connection to the actors.”

In one dramatically lit scene, the boyfriend of the dead girl is sitting on the edge of a bed, looking out a window at the falling rain. His deaf brother enters the doorway and they communicate, and eventually argue, in sign language. “The whole scene was lit with one hard tungsten light, an ARRI T12,” says Stern. “When I see it, I think of Conrad Hall’s In Cold Blood scene, but we weren’t conscious of emulating it at the time––a subconscious homage to ‘the master.’ We brought one light through the window. In order to light the brother at the door, we used a 4 by 4 mirror just out of frame to the right. The light is modulated by the rain on the window, and it stretched over to the second boy. We were ‘gathering chestnuts.’ It was serendipitous, and it all worked out with one light.”

Reflectors were used extensively throughout the film, usually on the fill side to pick up some ambience or an edge of the keylight, and to redirect some of that light to the fill side. In most cases it was very subtle, however, just reflecting in the shine of the skin. “We used the reflectors as almost more of an eyelight,” Stern says. “There is such tension between these three characters. There are a lot of internal emotions beneath the surface of this movie. I felt that the audience needed to have access to the internal life of the characters, so I tried to keep eyelights going, especially when we’d get in close. Often it was done with a small reflector thrown in at the last moment.”

In keeping with the elegiac, classical tone of the story, Stern was determined to give Mystic River deep, rich black tones with grain-free images. He used no diffusion or filtration other than neutral density and some neutral graduated filters. “For film stock, we religiously stuck with the [Kodak Vision 500T film] 5279 for nights and interiors, and the [Kodak Vision 250D film] 5246 stock for day exteriors,” Stern says. “I overexposed slightly to help the blacks.

“For fill light on this movie, we used either very, very little or absolutely none,” he adds. “I find that with the film stocks we were using, if you’re overexposing a little bit, you can read the shadow detail incredibly well. When I saw the picture at Cannes on the 70-foot-wide screen, on the dark side, which is dead black, you can actually see hairs going into actors’ heads. I found it very interesting. I hope it works on a subconscious level for the audience.”

When it came to lighting the actors, Stern tried to keep things simple while following the “pleasing, yet accidental” aesthetic. “Sometimes what I do is light a chin, as if they are in a shard of light, and leave it at that,” he says. “Classically, the light is supposed to be on their face, but that can be kind of boring. Instead the light hits their chin and shoulder. With their movements, there’s enough visible that for me, they’re perfectly lit. There’s one scene where Sean (Penn), Laura (Linney), Laurence (Fishburne) and Kevin (Bacon) are all in a kitchen. I figured one light would be ideal, and if I couldn’t figure it out with one light I’d have to add a second. We didn’t usually get too far beyond that. Sean is sitting on the sink in front of a window. We brought a light in through the window, so his light is on the back of his head and the same light is keying the three other characters. That’s what I mean by there being a sort of anguished accidental nature to the light. It wasn’t easy to do, but it was all done intentionally.”

The look of Mystic River changed significantly during postproduction. Stern says that as the film was coming together, it became clear that a more desaturated look––almost black and white––was appropriate. “We started experimenting with various combinations,” says Stern. “John Bickford, Bob Kaiser and Technicolor were utterly fantastic. We started with a very solid negative. We pulled out as much color as we could through normal timing. At one point we considered going through a digital intermediate process. We did a series of ENR tests, and ended up at 60 I.R., a measure of infrared densitometry, and found the right look.”

Stern says that in timing, they made the skin tones as white as possible without leaving walls and other objects in the frame looking bizarre. “Our intention was to stop just at the point where it does not call attention to itself,” he says. “We took the whole thing right to the edge of the cliff. Much of the film is delicately balanced within one printer light of chromatic disaster. From my standpoint, it worked out wonderfully because the blacks were already in the negative, and they got even blacker with ENR. It’s about as far as you could take it photochemically, and Clint was pleased. It’s not black and white, but it has that mood. We ended up calling it our ‘northern European’ look. During shooting, I was trying to avoid direct sun wherever I could. I was sacrificing chickens, hoping for overcast skies and we were fortunate. That also worked well in combination with the ENR process.

“There are different ways to make movie images look ‘real,’” Stern says. “One way is to make it grainy and use a handheld camera, a sort of verite style. But I saw Mystic River as a very formal story with informal characters. I felt an appropriate way to do this would be to have a formal image, but to have the lighting look as though it were accidental, so it didn’t call attention to itself. That was our intention. Everybody worked extremely hard to make it simple. It would please me if Mystic River would seem to be one of the simplest films ever made.”

Mystic River had its premiere in May 2003 at the Cannes International Film Festival. At Cannes, the Commission Superieure Technique de L’Image et du Son (CST) presented Eastwood with the 56th Cannes Film Festival’s Technical Prize. The CST noted that the film was made in collaboration with Stern and editor Joel Cox. Mystic River will open the New York Film Festival on October 3.