Cinematographer Eduardo Serra, AFC reveals operatic visions of Heaven and Hell in director Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come.
by Ron Magid
Cinematographer Eduardo Serra, AFC reveals operatic visions of Heaven and Hell in director Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come.
by Ron Magid
Based on the novel by famed fantasist Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come is an epic journey which explores the idea that the dead actually grieve for the living, much in the vein of Italian poet Dante's thoughts on the afterlife. In this new film, New Zealand director Vincent Ward combines the quasi-medieval vision of his first feature, The Navigator (1988), with the passion of his most recent picture, Map of the Human Heart (1992), to create a mature, haunting story of heartfelt longing. The picture is beautifully shot by Ward's fellow Map maker, director of photography Eduardo Serra, AFC, whose credits include The Hairdresser's Husband, Funny Bones and Jude. The cinematographer won last year's British Academy (BAFTA) Award for The Wings of the Dove, which also earned Serra an Academy Award nomination in the United States.
"Eduardo is very methodical and particular about light," Ward notes. "He can create what I call 'exotic experiences,' particularly in smaller environments. He paints in tones photographically, so he'll underexpose a background element in a very measured way — by two or three stops — but he's very conscious that that element is an important part of the shot, which creates this very layered, European effect.
"He uses a scale of grays to measure each part of the frame. And even though some elements are underexposed, they're all part of the painting, so to speak. Sometimes the objects that are two stops under are actually the most important aspects of the shot. That [technique] creates a kind of unity of emphasis."
Ironically, Ward originally passed on Ron Bass's script because he felt there was no way to visualize the journeys of Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams) through Heaven and Hell in search of his family. Ward's biggest stumbling block was the fact that in the script, as in the novel, Chris's wife, Annie (Annabella Sciorra), was a caterer, a profession that the director felt wouldn't provide the ideal visual link between the couple. "It was a beautifully written and very emotional screenplay, but there was no particular clue suggesting how to envisage the 75 percent of the story which took place in the afterlife, except for some metaphors in the dialogue about how we paint our own world," says Ward, who had studied as a painter before becoming a filmmaker. "Suddenly I thought, 'What would happen if Annie was a restorer of 19th-century fine art, and she was also painting a picture for Chris as a gift?' One of the great ideas behind this film was that rather than there being an objective afterlife that's the same for everybody, you create your own Paradise, and it's whatever you want it to be. We could say that Chris loved Annie so much that he based his Paradise on a gift from his wife, a large painting of places they've been, and he actually walked into her painting when he died. A month after I got the script, I realized that painting could be the key [to telling the story visually,] and I told Ron Bass, "If that appeals to you, then I'd be interested.' He was very open to the idea and it proved to be a wonderful way for the characters to communicate with each other between the two disparate worlds."
Just as Chris would conceive his afterlife as a series of canvasses based on Annie's style and the 19th-century artists whose work she loved, Ward and Serra agreed on a painterly approach to the film's visuals — both in the here-and-now and beyond. "I wanted the film to evoke a sense of 19th-century painting, because at that time, most people still believed in an afterlife and the notion of Paradise, so that was what we mainly referred to," says Ward.
While the director characterizes Serra as methodical and particular, the French cameraman found Ward's perfectionism to be both demanding and contradictory. "Vincent is only interested in what has not been done before, which is basically the same for me," Serra notes. "He's always invited me to invent things and to use a very wide span of whatever can be done with a camera, so he is very open to all kinds of technical solutions. What makes his richness as an artist is his way of thinking, which is not a scholarly A plus B meets C. Vincent's creative process can be very confusing for people around him; he will say very strange things and make great demands that sometimes contradict themselves. But that's his way of creating and building up decisions.
"Our experience on Map of the Human Heart was very surprising. On that film, some people were quite panicked, coming to me and saying, 'You have to stop him! It's not the way things should be done!' and I'd say, 'No! You have to let him go!' After that, I knew what I could expect with Vincent and how I should be prepared. Eighteen months ago, people said, 'Oh, this film doesn't make sense!' But it now appears quite easy to understand. When we let Vincent's ideas overflow, then we get something wonderful that we would not get otherwise."
In fact, Ward's organized chaos is a marked strength of What Dreams May Come, particularly in that its riotous imagery encouraged Serra to explore multiple emulsions. "I am a great believer in having a choice of different stocks. Most of the time, I tend to use Fuji because it's most appropriate for the kinds of films I have done, but on a film like this it's good to take advantage of different stocks. The basic idea was to use the Fuji — which has a certain glamour to it, especially on women — for scenes set in Paradise and for the happier flashback scenes, where I also pulled the stock one stop to make the scenes softer, and then use Kodak stocks for drama and effects. I used Fuji F-500 [Super F-Series 8571] on sections that wouldn't involve any special effects — like the first scene of the film, in which Annie and Chris meet while sailing. Then I used Kodak EXR 5298, which has a more bold and hard look, when going through Hell and for all of the darker effects scenes. Finally, I used Vision 200T 5277 in areas that were happy and more comedic. Those were situations where I normally would have used Fuji, but the scenes involved special effects."