Faced with the prospect of lighting this large night exterior — surrounded by a blanket of white snow and without any justifiable means of practical illumination — Kivilo turned to a fairly new tool with mixed results. "Maybe this is a good cautionary tale in itself," he offers. "We used a helium balloon light for the night exteriors on the roadside. It was a logistically tricky location because we were on a small road with two snow fields on either side, so there was no place to drive in a crane or a Condor. The balloon seemed to be a perfect solution. We could fly it up so that it would hover just above the road, and then hide the black cable in the night sky. What I didn't expect was that it got really windy during the night we were shooting. I was operating the second camera, looking at the wide shot of the sheriff's truck approaching, and as the wind was gusting I kept seeing the balloon getting lower and lower in the frame. It never quite dropped into the picture area, but it made me very nervous. Then, at one point in the middle of the first take, the wind blew the balloon into a power line and it made a huge spark. Thank God no one was hurt and there was no damage, but we did lose quite a bit of time. We really hadn't factored the wind into the equation, and because of the white snow surrounding the area, we really couldn't attach extra lines. I thought the light that the balloon provided was perfect — a nice ambient glow and a beautiful night softness — but I was very uncomfortable with it after that first night. On the second night, when we returned to shoot the reverses, I went with a more traditional approach."
Gaffer Yaari explains, "We lit the second night by bouncing an 18K and Maxi Brute off of a 40' by 40' muslin. We put it about 30 or 40 feet away and left both instruments clean to combine the 5500°K and 3200°K for a slightly cool mix."
After their encounter with the police officer, the three men go their separate ways, vowing not to tell a soul about the existence of the money. Hank is the first to violate this pact, returning home and immediately asking his wife, Sarah (Bridget Fonda), what she would do if she found a substantial amount of seemingly unclaimed money. Sarah protests, taking a strong moral stance until Hank dumps the $4 million dollars on the dining room table. Faced with real greenbacks, her morals quickly crumble.
Kivilo chose to illuminate these interiors in a very warm and intimate style. "There was something intriguing about a nice, warm, uncorrupted home, with a normal husband and wife expecting a little child, being invaded by this evil," he muses.
The Mitchell house was built on stage in Minneapolis, where production designer Patrizia Von Brandenstein (an Academy Award winner for Amadeus, who had previously collaborated with Raimi on The Quick and the Dead) accentuated Kivilo's lighting strategy with comfortable surroundings that stood in contrast to the looming threat that would eventually consume the family. Yaari details, "We prerigged the whole stage so that no matter where Alar wanted to look, we were prepared. Practically the whole stage was on dimmers [see diagram, opposite page]. My ideal scenario was to have everything on a dimmer — not necessarily to control exposure, but to be able to turn fixtures on and off quickly. Instead of a half-hour of down time between setups, it might take five minutes to switch over the channels and adjust the floor instruments a bit.
"I hung a couple of Maxi Brutes at any opening off the greenbeds — doors or windows — and diffused them with a layer of opal and then a 6' by 6' piece of bleached muslin. We'd turn those on for the daylight scenes and get about an f2.8 in the windows — just a nice soft glow. [Key grip] Joey Dianda's team had to tease the Maxis pretty heavily to keep spill off things, but at about 20' away, they really gave a beautiful light. We put those on the dimmer board as well, through a whole rack of 12K dimmers right next to a rack of 2.4K CD-80 dimmers for the floor lights and practicals.
"For the night scenes, every now and again I'd bring in something hard, like a cool 10K with 1/2 blue on it, and play it a stop or two under key through a window. Over the sets, Alar had us hang softboxes that were made up of four 4K soft lights hung over 6' by 6' bleached muslin. Again, softness was the key and the 4Ks were all run through the dimmer board. I could bring up three or four units and we were ready to go. We used a bit of coloration for the interiors, sometimes 1/4 or 1/8 straw, and most of the practicals were dimmed down to about 75 or 80 percent. For the floor keys, we would use two Kino Flo Image 80s — one on top of the other — as one source. We'd then put on a couple layers of diffusion, like an opal, 250, or light gridcloth, depending on the mood, and then an 8' by 8' or 12' by 12' piece of bleached muslin. The Kinos are soft to begin with, but they've got a little bit of edge, so if you put any kind of diffusion in front of them it quickly gives them the feel of a bounced source."
For moodier moments, Kivilo used hard light reflected into the sets using beveled mirrors. "I'd pick a dead corner of the set and have Joey black it out so no light was there," The cameraman explains. "I'd then aim Par cans or sometimes HMI Pars into the mirrors and splash light into random spots on the set. I'm always searching for the best kinds of slashes, which have an organic feel, and these beveled mirrors provided that. It was perhaps the only slightly stylized addition I made to our otherwise simplistic regime, in that there was no logical source for that kind of light; my thinking was that it was perhaps coming from a streetlight outside or something. Those scenes were about mood, and it was great to use the mirrors rather than backlight an actor. I'd just bounce a slash into the background and silhouette them against the set."
In fact, an interior scene offers one of Kivilo's favorite shots in the picture. "It takes place late in the film, after the sheriff has found Jacob drunk at the scene of a grisly double murder," the cameraman says. "The sheriff brings Jacob to Hank's house and Hank puts him into the baby's room on a day bed. We had the camera right on the deck below Jacob, with a 40mm lens looking up at him with Hank standing in the background. We're in this warm, comfortable room that's been invaded with emotions of paranoia and guilt, and Jacob asks, 'Do you ever feel evil, Hank? I do.' I like that moment. It's the contrast of the visual elements with the psychology of the story at a very low point in the character's lives."
For a key scene that thrusts the brothers miles past the point of no return and results in the death of not only Jacob's friend Lou, but his wife, Nancy (Becky Ann Baker), the filmmakers chose an abandoned house in Minneapolis. "It was a very difficult location," Kivilo recalls. "It was an abandoned house with very low ceilings and no heating, so we were all bundled up in parkas. Because the performances were so intense, Sam wanted to shoot the scene with at least two cameras, and sometimes three. Lighting for three cameras is a significant compromise, but it was one I was willing to make to lessen the emotional load on the actors.
"After Lou is shot, Nancy runs into a dark kitchen, where I had pre-established a bit of light coming through a window to silhouette her as she runs to a drawer. Hank steps into the kitchen and is also silhouetted [by the light from the living room]. He turns on the kitchen light to reveal Nancy holding a gun; she fires and hits the light switch, which, after a great spark, thrusts the whole kitchen into darkness again. She shoots several more times, with the muzzle flashes providing sketchy details of the encounter, until Hank fires his shotgun and kills her.
"The idea was to keep things quite sketchy in the lighting and not be clear about exactly what was happening. For the overall kitchen light, we hung a China ball from the ceiling, which would reveal Nancy with the gun. Two prop guys — one facing Nancy and one sneaking in toward Hank — used those old flash photo guns to create the muzzle flashes. Those flash guns are great because they have a long burn time and you don't run the danger of having the flash occur between exposures. The flashes were daylight-balanced, but we put double CTO on them to give them a slightly warmer feel. This was something that we had determined through testing in preproduction.
"This is a tricky film to talk about," Kivilo concludes, "because the whole visual approach was to keep it simple and not obstruct the story. It's all about the aesthetics, and we really tried — especially on the exteriors — to keep that Japanese wood-cut aesthetic going. For A Simple Plan, it was a simple shooting style."
