Mounting a Case A Civil Action was shot with Panavision Platinum cameras and Primo prime lenses set almost exclusively at Hall's preferred T1.9 aperture in the standard 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The cinematographer used Eastman Kodak EXR 5298 for most interiors and night scenes, as well as EXR 5248 and 5293 for day exteriors and brighter day interiors. The film was shot on location in Boston and various New England locales, as well as on stages in Los Angeles. Principal photography began on stages at Hollywood Center Studios, where production designer David Gropman designed the interior of Schlictmann's law offices, and then moved to the Universal lot, where an immense federal courtroom set was built, before the production moved to Boston for six weeks of location work.
"The law offices were built on Stage 4 at Hollywood Center," notes gaffer Randy Woodside, who has worked with Hall since Jennifer 8 (see AC Oct. '92). "The set was built on a 10' platform because we had established the real Boston location as being on the second floor with a big bay window, and we wanted to be able to feel the street down below. Initially, we began lighting outside the office, over the courtyard patio, with a 10' by 20' soft box containing multiple 1K nook lights. But we still had a large space [representing the street down below], for which we had to provide some toplight ambiance. Also, we wanted to be able to get some hard light into the set from that direction. We asked key grip Bill Young to fly a 20' by 60' light gridcloth that went up to the permanents, and he tied that to the handrail on a set of greenbeds across the 'street.' Then, up in the permanents, we used 2K mighties to get as much spread on the gridcloth as we could for our general toplight outside. I then placed four 20Ks on the handrail of the greenbeds, aiming them at the set for our hard light."
"Schlictmann's office was a beautiful set," comments Hall. "However, I did have the [production design team] change the color of the walls. When we first walked in there, it was a little too warm a shade of beige. To get a little more of the cold feeling of Boston, I had them paint the space a bit more neutral and toward cyan. The set had hard ceilings, so I basically treated it like a real location and lit through the windows with the 20Ks. I like to use big lights to encompass an area as the sun would encompass an area.
"Source lighting is some-thing that the inventors of cinema brought forth as a technique, and it's a good starting point when you're telling a story, but that doesn't mean you have to follow it," adds Hall. "If I have an interior daylight scene, I usually struggle to use one light coming in through a window. Inside, I use smaller units and practical lights, and I also figure out how to take light away and create the little separations that provide depth. I can use practical lamps a lot as lighting sources, but I will often add to that with additional 'movie' lights. However, you have to make sure that the additional lights you're using on an actor are not also lighting the practical.
Finally, I add the proper amount of fill light, which I call room tone, to give the blacks the right tonality. Light bounces off of every surface in a room — the walls, the floor, the furniture — and that's what room tone is. I usually hit a white card above the set or directly on the ceiling so that it doesn't cast shadows on the walls. If you were to turn off all the other lights, you'd barely see anything, but everything would still be visible. There's no directionality to it. Room tone is very important, and you can use varying amounts of it depending on the speed of your film."
Since several major scenes occurred in the law office set, the filmmakers wanted to create several distinct looks, via lighting and a physical representation the firm's decaying assets. Woodside recounts, "I was looking at our 20' by 60' light gridcloth 'sky' one day, and I began thinking about all of the different days that transpire in the film on that set. The gridcloth was hung up there to provide a toplight, but I realized that if we dropped it on the bottom end and let it hang in front of the 20Ks, we could have a 60'-wide source out there — with the 20Ks just the right distance behind it — to provide a large ambient light across the entire set. When we came to a new [narrative] day in the offices and we talked about having a sort of gray quality of light outside, I proposed the idea to Conrad, saying, 'Is this a good time to drop the cloth down and take a look at it? It's quick enough, all we have to do is loosen some ropes and the lights are already in place.' When we lit three 20Ks across it, we suddenly had this beautiful soft light coming from the other end of the set, and it provided an entirely different look. Conrad had the crew bring a large teaser inside the set to cut the light off the back wall and let the light fall off. We really had the natural feel of a gray day outside."
As Zaillian and Hall began to craft the story visually, the duo adopted blocking and composition methods similar to those they'd established on Bobby Fischer. "Composition is terribly important, and such a crucial tool in storytelling," opines Hall. "You use the frame to communicate the feelings you want to convey in the shot. By centering a character, placing them on a side, or short-siding them, you use the composition to support the moment that counts dramatically. The one moment where the composition makes a dramatic statement is what is important. Otherwise, in a lot of situations, composition isn't as critical. You don't necessarily have to have a great composition every second. But when the dramatic import of the scene is crucial, the composition should reflect that and aid the shot in being effective."
Courtroom Tactics After completing the scenes in Schlictmann's offices, the production moved to the massive Boston federal courtroom set erected within Stage 29 on the Universal lot. The set featured towering 24'-high walls, several equally large windows on the defense team's side, and a monolithic judge's bench, echoing the neo-classical style of Third Reich architect Albert Speer. "The courtroom scenes were difficult for me," Zaillian says. "The set was very big, and because courtrooms have been filmed a thousand times, they always tend to look the same. How do you shoot a judge sitting at the bench in some other way than everybody else has done it? It's really hard, but I think it's important to keep things visually interesting. Our set was really good, and that wasn't an accident. We spent a lot of money on it. We wanted a very imposing, austere design with sandstone and very neutral colors. Travolta's character had never been in a federal courtroom, so it had to have some scale to make him feel a bit intimidated."
"Even though the set was large, it was tight inside the courtroom because everything was built right up to the permanents," expands Woodside. "That's actually getting to be more the norm than the exception. The set could very well have been built on [the larger] Stage 12, which would have allowed us some working space to do certain things, but those types of hurdles can be overcome. We had the whole set surrounded by muslin, which was hung on track so that we could move it out of the way when necessary. We then lit the muslin from above and below with 10K cyc lights. Since we had no reference to what the background was supposed to be, we decided to just light a large white background rather than confuse the audience with irrelevant things outside the windows. "Next, we hung a 20K for each of the large windows on the defense team's side of the set. To create a toplight ambiance that we could completely control, we hung a 10' by 30' soft box with 26 1K nook lights inside. The grips then skirted the box and baffled it within into three 10' sections. We could then work each end of it separately. We were trying to keep the foreground faces down, and yet we needed some toplight ambiance. There might only be one nook light on at one end and four more on at the other end, but each was also on its own dimmer channel, so we could easily turn one off and look at another. Additionally, we set up a multitude of other lamps, ranging from pepper lights to 20Ks, and worked in Conrad's pointillistic fashion, just nicking the heads of the people in the background or pieces of the blinds, providing a hot spot on the sill.
"If there's, say, a group of pictures on a wall in the shot, Connie will often say, 'Give me dot-dot-dot,'" Woodside continues. "In order to provide separation between the picture frames and the wall, rather than lighting the wall up, we'll take a small unit like a pepper and come around to the most radical rake on the wall so that the light is only hitting the picture frames. That way, you provide vertical highlights on the frames in the background in order to get more separation. Basically, we're playing with reflective angles. We will also do that same technique from the front. If you're in a church on a wide-angle lens that reveals the whole church and all the pews, you want something on the reflective angle to bring out highlights. Everybody's first instinct is usually to use a backlight to find that reflective angle. However, people seem to forget that 180 degrees to that, there is also the same reflective angle which is coming from the camera. The courtroom in A Civil Action had seats that were very much like church pews, so we took a light on the pin and raised it up so that it would just nick the edges. We came in from the front to define those areas against the darker background."
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