Fans of DePalma’s fluid, voyeuristic storytelling style will get their fix early on, as Snake Eyes opens with a technically demanding, seemingly edit-free 20-minute Steadicam sequence, shot by renowned operator Larry McConkey, which follows Santoro (Cage) through the Forum. "Of course, you only have 500 feet in the magazine," notes Burum, "so when it got to the end of the roll, we would either have a wall or a person wipe in front of the camera, or we have the camera do a swish-pan. We used those moments as our opportunities to cut. It’s an objective shot with a 50mm Panavision lens, and it introduces all of the major characters in the movie. Santoro meets Dunne, and you learn a little about both of them. Santoro shakes down a drug dealer and you learn that he’s not the most honest policeman in the world. He talks to his wife on his cell phone, and then he flirts with a girl. The sequence travels all over the place, so all of those areas had to be prelit. The camera goes just about everywhere except for the hallways on the side of the pay-per-view booth and the lobby."
In keeping with his color-coded strategy for the main floor of the Forum, Burum paid similar attention to detail in handling the arena’s auxiliary areas. "The access hallway entrances to the arena couldn’t be too bright, because Costello [Carla Gugino] sees someone with a gun there, and you can’t have someone walking down the middle of a brightly lit hallway with a rifle!" Burum says. "So once again, we used pools of light. Even though you can plainly see a person with a rifle walking down the hallway, you have the idea that there’s some sort of cover. To create the pools of light, we used hundreds of custom-made fluorescent fixtures and placed them in such a way that they made a definite light-and-dark pattern. They had Kino Flo 3200°K tubes fitted with high-frequency ballasts and commercial grids that focused the light and increased it by a stop. These lights had to be seen in the frame, so we couldn’t use regular Kino Flo fixtures. They also had to be powerful, because often we had to move in one shot from the arena, which was already lit at a high level, into the hallway.
"We also had three stairwells by the boxers’ dressing rooms that needed to be lit, as well as another three that went up to the television pay-per-view booth. We generally lit those areas with four to six 1K nook lights bounced into 4’ by 4’ and 4’ by 8’ beadboards. We tried to make them look as natural as possible, but we also had the walls for each staircase painted different colors so that the audience would know exactly which one they were on that was the most important thing."
Since Snake Eyes relies heavily on not only the subjective viewpoint of the Santoro character but also his reactions, Burum paid particular attention to Cage’s close-ups as his character begins to piece the witnesses’ puzzle-like fragments of testimony together. "At the start of the film, Nic’s character is a handsome young guy on the move," Burum describes. "He’s very attractive to women, he’s in control of everything because he’s a cop, he grew up in Atlantic City and he’s got the whole town wired. So [in my lighting], he’s made to look brash and open, very much in control. In one scene, Nic questions Carla’s character in a stairwell, and I wanted to foreshadow that there might be a romance between them. I used ’butterfly’ lighting on him, doing some nice modeling on the side of his face, using 2K zips with snoots to make him look as handsome and appealing as possible.
"As the movie goes on and things start to get tough for him, we shadow his face more and hide his eyes a little bit. At the end of the picture, he’s done the right thing, but because of his other transgressions he’s had to pay for it. You see that price in his face he’s not lit to be quite so handsome or powerful. We realize that this guy is a bit more human, but there is also hope at the end of the rainbow for him."
Burum stayed with the high-speed Vision 500T 5279 stock throughout the entire shoot. "I usually only use one or two emulsions on a film anyway," he says. "Kodak has gotten the grain structure, the contrast and the color of their films so close to each other that it really takes someone who’s an expert to be able to tell the difference. It’s designed so that if you shoot in the sunshine with the 45, then go right to a scene in the middle of the night with the high-speed film, you’re not going to see a big change. If you want to make a film look different [in various scenes], I think you’re better off doing it through some sort of development, printing or filtration scheme."
Despite the intricate logistics of a location shoot like Snake Eyes, as well as the technical demands of working with an ambitious visual stylist like DePalma, Burum offers a reminder that a cinematographer’s artistic instinct should never be supplanted by mere technical expertise. "An 11-year-old child could learn the mechanical craft of cinematography," he maintains. "The difference between cinematographers who do great work and those who just do okay work is some gift you have, some sense of taste. I think you’re always frustrated when you’re doing it, because you have this idea in your head and you can’t quite get there, even though everyone else says that what you’re doing is great. You’re always dissatisfied because you want more from the cinematography than you’re capable of giving. You can look at [fellow ASC member] Connie Hall’s films and say, ’This is just fabulous, I could never approach that’ But Connie Hall is tearing himself apart! Cinematography isn’t easy for anybody, and the more you do, the harder it gets."
