Realizing that black-and-white films are not seen as economically viable from a marketing standpoint, Richardson began to toy with the idea of combining color footage with high-contrast black-and-white stock. Given U-Turn's relatively modest budget, however, the cinematographer deep-sixed that concept and eventually wound up shooting nearly 75 percent of the picture on Kodak's 5239 color reversal stock. Rated at 160 ASA, this Ektachrome film was developed for research and design purposes: automobile manufacturers used it to document high-speed collision tests, while both NASA and the U.S. Air Force used it for on-board aircraft surveillance cameras.
Though Richardson had previously experimented with reversal stocks in the Super 8 and 16mm formats for both JFK and Natural Born Killers he was not overly familiar with its attributes. For advice on the finer points on this temperamental emulsion, he and Stone contacted director Spike Lee and cinematographer Malik Sayeed, who had exploited 5239 on Clockers (see AC Sept. '95). Lee had also utilized 16mm 7239 for Get on the Bus, photographed by Elliot Davis (see AC Nov. '96).
Stone himself had used reversal stocks in the early Seventies during his film school days at New York University, due to their cheap cost. He surmised that the reversal's unique qualities could compensate for the variable sunlight of an Arizona winter, as well as reflect the movie's crazy-quilt mix of both light and dark narrative tones. Richardson concurred: "Personally, I wanted to embrace the deviant nature of the stock. The characters in the film were wildly swinging, the town was wildly swinging, and almost everything within this set of circumstances sent them into sudden, unexpected 'U-turns.' So why shouldn't the film stock replicate the narrative's central tenet?
"I shot with the 5239 during all times of day, and that stock is not easy to use," the cameraman continues. "If you're shooting a scene from early morning through late afternoon, some footage might have a very cool fringe, while the rest might have a very warm fringe. The stock reacts so rapidly to any shift in color temperature that it's virtually impossible to keep a consistent look. And if you don't embrace that inconsistency as an ally, you're going to get pummeled. A lot of directors of photography would never want to attack 39, because the principles of image consistency no longer apply. If you're expecting consistency, you're probably wrong to choose it unless you can control it for very specific sequences."
As a case in point, the filmmakers welcomed 5239's instability for a heated confrontation scene between Bobby and Jake McKenna. The site of the scuffle McKenna's office was lit with a combination of bounced and direct lighting provided by four 18Ks and four 6K Pars. The first part of the argument was shot on 5293, only to be switched to 5239 when the men's rage erupted; once the feud simmered down, the cameraman returned to normal negative. The grainy texture of the 39, as well as the abrupt color shift from the smooth 93, is meant to register Bobby's feelings of paranoia and instability. Originally, this encounter was filmed as two separate incidents: the first fight began with 5293, peaked for eight shots on 5239, and then subsided with 5293; the second skirmish (which occurrs after Bobby and Grace first make love) started with the 93 and switched to the reversal stock for the rest of the scene's duration. But while editing, Stone decided to combine the sequences, resulting in an extended use of 5239 during the quarrel's flare-up.
Complicating matters for Richardson was 5239's slim exposure latitude: underexposing the film could render the image too dark to recover in timing, while overexposing it would cause the color to bleed out completely. Such traits make it difficult to manipulate 5239 in strong sunlight and shade, conditions which prevailed in Superior. Since extreme image contrast is a hallmark of classic film noir ambiance, Stone and Richardson considered applying Technicolor's ENR process to U-Turn in order to achieve the crushed blacks and blown-out whites characteristic of the work of master noir cinematographer John Alton. At press time, however, Richardson had concerns regarding the manner in which ENR mutes the 5239's hot, primary hues and grainy quality, and was not sure if he would actually apply the process.
Notes Richardson, "The cause-and-effect interaction of shooting our reversal stock in the desert was constantly evolving. The desert is a blinding place, and almost all of the characters parallel blindness in their vanity and their wants. To get the audience involved in a sensory manner, I designed a complex interaction [between the characters' questionable ideals and the properties of the 5239]. To achieve that, I started overexposing the stock by two, three, or even four stops. I felt that we had a very dark and demented love story that should break the rules of the traditional romantic love story. I wanted to enhance the bleak romantic sensibility running through the script, put noir back into the hearts of the characters, and let the streets burn with white-hot passion."
Stone adds, "Part of the idea [of overexposing the footage] comes from the opening of Camus' novel The Stranger: a guy comes to a town where the sun is beating down on his head, and he commits a murder that he can't figure out. Overexposure lends itself to the heat, and compensates for some of the cruder aspects [of the reversal stock]. The grain could sometimes get in your face it was supposed to be gritty, but not in a documentary style. If you overexpose, however, you don't notice the loss of detail you get with reversal. On normal stock, you'd really get a nice palette from black to white, with gradations of black all the way down to white, and lots of detail. You can't do that with reversal stock, because there's no contrast: it's crude, primary and volatile, and it hits you weirdly with every different setup, depending upon where the sun is. U-Turn is strange film with a lot of different looks, but I'd ultimately say that visually, it's a cross between Touch of Evil and Duel in the Sun. It's all hot desert and dark blacks desert noir or spaghetti noir."
Once 5239 had been chosen to capture some of the more surreal moments of U-Turn, production designer Victor Kempster altered his artistic concept of Superior, adding primary colors which would be highly accentuated by the cross-processed reversal stock (see sidebar on the film's production design). Richardson recalls, "Oliver, Victor and I decided to design a town which appeared to be bland, bleak and faded by time and sun, but still had all of these edges and highlights. Tests with the 39 definitely showed promise: the browns were left intact, while the highlight colors reds, pinks, yellows, greens and blues really popped. Victor's choices [for the palette] were inspired, but the tests sparked him to go back and change the overall tonal quality of the facades, to enhance the yellows within them and paint in cracks. [Lead painters] John Kelly and Bill Darrow are geniuses at their craft. The 5239 grabs onto those colors, and they just snap. The end result was phenomenal."
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