The Art of Dreams
Eduardo Serra, AFC, Colors What Dreams May Come
by Alicia Gargaro

When approached by director Vincent Ward to work with him on a project involving an intense journey between Heaven and Hell—an exploration which would delve into a 19th century painted world and plunge into the depths of inner personal destruction—Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Eduardo Serra, AFC, (Wings of the Dove, Jude) knew the experience of What Dreams May Come would be extraordinary.

Born in Lisbon, Portugal, Eduardo Serra has made Paris his home since the age of nineteen. He worked with Vincent Ward previously on the highly acclaimed Map of the Human Heart. However, it was the story of What Dreams May Come, the Richard Matheson novel adapted by Ron Bass, that intrigued him. Colored by Vincent Ward’s passion for painting and unusual landscapes, the adventure finds Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams) suddenly thrown into his Afterlife. Struggling with an intense longing to be with the one he loves, he embarks on a unique journey that ultimately reunites him with his wife, Annie (Annabella Sciorra). This journey takes him through Heaven and Hell, along the way encountering places such as the Sea of Faces, Marie’s World, the Library, the Ship Graveyard, and every extension of what one man’s vision of Heaven and Hell would contain.

“It was an extremely moving story with an interesting mix because it had a dimension and a vision,” explains Serra. “The effects were something that had never been done before. The special effects were used not to duplicate reality, but to create a reality that is reflective of the characters’ thoughts and feelings. On top of all that, it was basically a love story between people.” Serra says that, ultimately, the huge visionary world was created to complement the love story.

Converted airplane hangars located on the now-defunct Naval stations of San Francisco’s Treasure Island and Alameda Island housed the immense sets required to build a scenic base for the extraordinary Afterlife setting. Exteriors were shot in Montana’s Glacier National Park, which also doubled for Italy.

Production designer Eugenio Zanetti (Academy Award winner for Restoration) had been working on the concept for about a year with Vincent Ward. POP’s effects supervisor Stuart Robertson explains that “their vision, the theology of this, is Buddhist in a way. They were very interested in using spiritual symbols like Hell’s inverted gothic cathedral. They drew from biblical engravings and western Christian symbolism for this stuff. But, all the imagery of Heaven and Hell in the film is what Chris would see. The film allows for someone else to see something completely different.”

Zanetti hired hundreds of artisans, painters and illustrators, including South African sculptor Robbie Guest, who created an eerie “Sea of Faces,” to create the intricate arena for the picture.

Since it was intended as a widescreen film, Serra opted for Super 35 rather than anamorphic. “Two reasons for that,” he explains. “First, considering the amount of special and visual effects, CGI people tend to prefer Super 35 over anamorphic. And the other reason is that when you go anamorphic, which is beautiful and I often use it, you have a limited choice of lenses, and I know from experience that Vincent would require all kinds of lenses and equipment. With Super 35 we would have all the lenses from the widest to the longest that he could wish. I felt that anamorphic would be a limitation of Vincent’s freedom,” says Serra. “And I know that Vincent needs to be quite free to give all of his vision.”

The camera package for What Dreams May Come consisted of the Panaflex Platinum and the Panaflex Gold II. Serra used a wide range of Primo lenses from 10 to 150mm, as well as the Primo 4-1 and 11-1. “We had to consider that we would be putting lenses and cameras in all kinds of odd positions and on odd supports and flying devices,” he explains.

Serra felt that his work with the director lent itself more to a European way, whereby “the director has an input and a decision on the shot setup and on choice of lenses and all that. We used everything, from very wide to very tight on all kinds of occasions.”

As for film stock, Serra usually works with Fuji. But for this particular project, “I believed that it was important to use severa stocks and that those stocks should be quite different. I’ve been lucky and had the chance of doing films that go either for different periods or different situations, and I quite often use Fuji and Kodak on the same film to emphasize the difference either of period or the mood to help the dramatic structure. As a rule, I think Fuji is better to photograph people; especially to photograph women. There is some kind of glamour with Fuji and there’s some kind of strength and boldness with Kodak.”

The film encompasses both the present and the past. In and around those parameters are the different worlds illustrating the various points of Chris’s life experience as he makes his journey. Annie, a painter, unknowingly communicates with Chris as she finishes her canvas, which was to have been a present to him. This element surprises Albert (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) who is Chris’s “guide” in his Afterlife experience.

Serra shot the film on Fuji 500, Kodak Vision 500 (5298) and 320 (5277). The last was used in areas where he would normally use Fuji but that involved CGI. “Knowing that we had a lot of special and visual effects, I didn’t want to give them (the CGI artists) Fuji. I know from my own experience in France, where I commonly use Fuji, it is not a problem. I just didn’t want to introduce something they might feel uncomfortable with.”

“We have an area with flashbacks when I used Fuji 500 with pull process (the opposite of pushing the film; resulting in less grain and less contrast) to make it softer and combined that with strong sunlight, coral filters and light diffusion to give it a different look. I always use diffusion on the lamps; I never work with direct light. It’s either heavily diffused or bounced light.”

For Serra, the enormity of the sets that were created to illustrate the connections between the past and present proposed somewhat of a lighting challenge. The sets were designed in halves, with the continuation of their fullness to be created in post CGI. This allowed for tearing down and rebuilding of one set while production filmed on the one facing it. In a period of one week a monolithic library set was replaced by a set of steps known as “Marie’s World.” When the process was finished, it would eventually become what would look like a thousand steps accommodating hundreds of people from centuries past.

This sequence was enhanced by several very elaborate and beautiful matte paintings created by POP Animation’s senior designer, Deak Ferrand, using Photoshop and Softimage software. The paintings included Consciousness City, the surrounding sky, clouds, mountains, water, waterfalls and stair extension. Ward’s wish for a 19th century engraving look for this sequence was achieved beautifully with Ferrand’s paintings.

The foreground element was a set comprised of hundreds of ascending golden stairs which appear to continue for eternity. The compositing team achieved the seemingly endless staircase effect by digitally extending the original 40 foot high, 80-foot wide set to six times its original size.

Marie’s World is populated by a multitude of eclectic celestial residents placed on the stairs or flying in the sky who originated as either green screen actors or computer generated people. In the original live action footage, this scene was comprised of one- fifth the amount of actual people. The camera crew shot a green screen setup of Leona and Chris to matte out the characters as they stand gazing at Consciousness City.

“Production designers often get to the project six months before the cinematographers and so often all the space and money is used up by the time we arrive,” explains Serra. “In this case, since the buildings were not real studios, the set was almost wall to wall and floor to ceiling. If you have a set that is wide, you have to have some distance to cover it with light, which I didn’t have. At some point, with ‘Marie’s World’, I tried for a look in which I have a strong backlight covering all the steps. But the steps were going almost into the ceiling, so I tried to go with mirrors, in order to have a bigger distance, but the mirrors didn’t really hold the heat. It was a big problem. I had to go with more conventional things just on top of the steps, which was not an ideal situation.

“I put Maxi brutes and Dino lights on top of the steps and set the lights. I had to adjust twenty lights to have an even light on all those steps. As a matter of personal taste, I always try to have, if possible, one light and not twenty lights. So I ended up having to go a little against my taste and my manner.”

For the darker aspect of Chris’s journey, the production design crew climbed aboard an abandoned aircraft carrier, docked in Northern California’s Mare Island, and converted it into a virtual Ship to Hell. With no electricity available from the ship, Serra and his crew needed to illuminate the intricate applications of mesh and metal, as well as the hundreds of extras slugging their way on board. They went to work creating a lighting design that was equally dramatic.

“With Vincent, we decided that Hell would always be some kind of twilight, not real night, not real day,” says Serra. “So it would be this grayish light—dusky gray— which we tried to get on the Sea of Faces and on the others. And of course, when you get to the Ship, the Ship is so big that it’s quite difficult to try to keep that light. As a rule, I don’t use strong back lights. I also didn’t want to use any kind of rim light, to separate the ship or the scene on the dock, since it always looks so glamorous and would not have been appropriate for this scene. Instead, I used four helium balloons with 4Ks. They are each about 5 meters, 15 feet diameter, and each balloon has five 4K HMIs which we can separate. I never used full power; it was too strong. I always had to cut a few lamps on each. It really is an amazing amount of light coming from them. We had a wind problem with the helium balloons on the exteriors, but I thought it would be quite good if the balloons were moving with the wind—it would help make it more dramatic. In a way, I regret they were not moving enough. The wind would bring them down rather than make them move.”

Serra enjoyed shooting the entire film, but found it fun in the end when they shot scenes at Annie’s Hell House, which rests upon the apex of a Cathedral ceiling turned upside down. “When they get to the house in which Annie is residing, which is inside this upside down Cathedral, we went with a completely different kind of lighting. It was more traditional lighting. In all the rest of the film I often tried to avoid any flavor of the traditional and on that one I was allowed to go with smoke and strong beams of light and all those dizzy and beautiful things.”

Because this was Serra’s first time working in America, he had to trust recommendations from other filmmakers in collecting a strong camera crew.

“Obviously, there were many people from San Francisco who work very often and know the place and know how to do work there. It was a kind of ideal crew. It was really a good collaboration between production and myself. They gave me choices and helped me to find people.”

His crew consisted of A-camera operator Anastas Michos, B-camera operator Kim Marks, second unit director of photography Richard Michalak, and gaffer Jack English. When Anastas had to leave the production, Kim Marks took over for A-camera and Richard Michalak for B-camera. It reassured Serra that members of his crew had worked with friend and fellow cinematographer, Philippe Rousselot.

Serra attended film school with Rousselot in France. He was an assistant for about thirty features before he became a cinematographer.

“I was never an operator. I never operated for anybody else, and I’ve shot almost forty films by now. I was very lucky in the very beginning because people often start on terrible jobs and things like that. I had to wait a few years…but when I got my break it was with Pierre Lhomme, who I believe is the best French photographer since the war— and I think he is the father of modern cinematography in France. So I was very happy to start immediately as a loader, as a second assistant, with him. I worked with him on a few films and then I moved along.”

Serra’s work on such films as Jude and Funny Bones has been highly acclaimed in the past, but The Wings of the Dove brought him his first Academy Award nomination, as well as the British Academy Award (BAFTA). The experience going from The Wings of the Dove to What Dreams May Come couldn’t have been more different.

Serra explains that The Wings of the Dove was a very structured and calm and organized film. “It was not a special effects film at all. From the script and from the basic option of the director and production we knew that the idea was to have a period film that could be read as a modern story. So, on one hand we had a very serious job with this period look of the film—hopefully not conventional, but extremely serious. On the other hand, the drama was understandable and quite modern. Oddly enough, on that film we ended up having to use lots of CGI for an unexpected reason. Every time we needed rain on that film, and we used rain often, we would have unbelievable sunshine. Either in England or in Venice. So most of the rain scenes are created in CGI later, to change the skies and have some kind of stormy look. It was really ridiculous to always have rain, with a very blue sky and bright sun.”

Not only did What Dreams May Come provide Eduardo the opportunity to work with his first American camera crew, it was his first experience working with American actors and their process of bringing characters to life.

“I’m sure this must sound silly for the Americans, but I remember one scene when we had about nine pages with seven actors, and not an actor missed one word or one line. Being a European, I was amazed by that. In Europe, we don’t have the same respect of the text of the script that we have in English speaking countries. I was very impressed how professional and how serious the American actors worked.”

For Eduardo Serra, What Dreams May Come was an amazing flight into an immensely colorful world. It was a merging of several visionaries who were able to conceive and create this surreal world. All the rules were broken on this film, where lines blurred between what is reality and what is not. Serra admits that his approach to cinematographic techniques involves assessing tradition and rules. With every experience, the challenge becomes to enhance and recreate worlds according to the script and dialogue; but for Serra, his focus is to look at the given situation and apply his process to each unique project. “The most important part of my work,” he says, “has always been to try to reassess the rules and decide if I want to go with a particular rule or if I think that rule is not accurate anymore.”

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