After completing the Los Angeles-based portion of filming, the production packed up and moved to Boston for location work that would help sell the film's East Coast setting. Since the story centered on an ecological incident, much of the remaining scenes were exteriors. The filmmakers sought to infuse these sequences with a stark winter ambiance, and selected locations near rivers and swamps to reiterate the film's unifying symbol of the water which killed the children.
Zaillian notes that he made a conscious decision to use water as a recurring motif. "That idea occurs at various points in the script, but once we started shooting I found myself sticking a glass of water in every scene. If you look closely, there's a glass in almost every shot, but a lot of times you don't notice it. For the same reason, there's a lot of rain in the movie. If you go too far with a [visual symbol] it can become obnoxious, so we tried to be as subtle as possible. But water is the opening image of the film, and that's what story is really about — the river, and the drinking water. The sickness and the death in the story is all tied to water."
"I love location work," Hall declares. "However, we prayed for overcast weather, but we didn't get much of it. When we could, we tried to stage our days to take advantage of early morning light where the sun still hadn't burned through yet. We tried to shoot as much as we could in those conditions, and then deal with the matching later. Quite often, we also shot into the evening after the sun had gone down, when the meter was not reading anything at all. David Gropman did a beautiful job creating the J.J. Riley Co. [a local tannery where chemicals were spilled] out of an old electrical plant that we'd found. He aged it down to make it look as if it had been built at the end of the Industrial Revolution. Of course, when we went to photograph it, the sun came out. The sunlight took nine-tenths of the aging out of the factory, and made it look more like a modern structure. However, we did try to mute the visuals to reflect the feeling that the lawsuit wasn't going so well.
"I work the high end of the [printing] scale. If 50 is the high end of the scale, I'll be working at 48 or sometimes even over 50, which requires the lab to shift the scale to 60 and then print it back. That removes the contrast, and if you time the print to be cool, it can give the appearance of a less sunny day."
Elaborating on the exterior work, Woodside recalls, "When we did have the good fortune to get some overcast weather, we'd often underexpose the faces and expose more toward the sky, which created some modeling on the faces. I love that technique, because it really provides a more downcast feel. The brow-line shadows the actors' eyes and there's a shadow under their chins. You get more definition in the faces that way. We also used some negative fill to take light away from one side to provide some shape. We were trying to provide a bit of contrast to every shot in a situation that didn't really lend itself to it. On wide shots, we obviously did what we could with the lens aperture, but when we got into coverage, we began shaping the faces by taking light away. When we did add light, we added it in a very subtle, naturalistic way to help get rid of some of the toplight. If you don't do it subtly, things start to get out of balance with everything else in the background. We'd use 18K HMIs through a 12' by 12' — or if it wasn't too windy, a 20' by 20' — with light gridcloth and then place opal or sometimes a heavier diffusion between the lamp and the cloth. We'd then take that a ways back. We always tried to leave some room for everybody to do their job. Unless there was very specific reason to bring the frame up close and maximize the falloff, we'd take the large sources a ways back. At times we'd have two or three 12' by 12's or 20' by 20's lined up to make a large source for light to come across."
The production also utilized several historic locations in Boston which were selected for their rich architectural design and characteristic New England flavor. A key location was the historic Athenaeum Library, one of the oldest and most distinguished independent libraries in America.
"The Athenaeum was a major location," notes Woodside. "We filmed scenes that took place in [defense lawyer] Jerry Facher's office, during which he's bouncing a tennis ball off the wall while having a conversation with the other defense attorney. We weren't allowed to put any lights outside the windows, though, because the graveyard where Paul Revere is buried was just beyond them. Instead, we had to use lamps that were five times the size that we normally would need, because the light wasn't optimally aimed.
"We also shot on the top floor of the Athenaeum for a scene in which Schlichtmann meets a character named Albert Eustis [Sydney Pollack]. Trying to bring window light into that room was quite a feat. The windows were inset about 25' from the rest of the building, and the street was 115' down. The street was also very narrow, and we couldn't close it off because it was in Boston's historic financial district. Placing a Condor in a normal position wasn't going to work. We contemplated lighting from a building from across the street with a huge array of 18Ks or a Musco Light, but neither of those options really gave us any flexibility. We wound up using two 138' Condors with articulating arms; each one had an 18K lamp with 1Ú8 CTO on it. We were extremely lucky to find those units in Boston, but it was a still difficult setup. We had six large windows to light, and we could only park these two units on the street. We had to be selective about their use."
Hall expands, "We were fortunate that there was a building across the way; if we did have a sunny day, we knew the sun would bounce off it and bring light in the windows. We had our lights out there as the light faded or changed, and we could duplicate the light that came in. The Athanaeum's windows were huge, so there was no way to eliminate the bounce from the other window. If it was a gray day, that was one thing; if it was a sunny day, it was another story. But we had the lights to deal with it. There was a lot of light coming in through those windows, but we needed to have some hard light slashing through, so we used 18Ks and 12Ks for that. It's always best to try to get your wide angles first so you'll have something to match to. If you shoot your tight angles first and the light changes, you have to accept whatever it is by the time you get there."
Reflecting upon his experience working with Hall, Zaillian notes, "When I'm writing a script, I cannot help but visualize it in my head. In fact, I can't write it if I can't see it. In a way, I've already directed the film just by writing it. It's then a matter of either trying to capture what I imagined, or being open to another idea that's better. Since Bobby Fischer was my first film, I was literally terrified and had planned a lot of it out. I actually sat down and wrote up shot lists and my own little storyboards. I could only get through the first two weeks of shooting, however, because I was too overwhelmed to think beyond that. Then, when I showed up the first day with all of these storyboards, Connie basically didn't want to have anything to do with them! He just wanted to know what I felt the scene was about. Even though he had read it, he wanted me to explain to him what I felt. Somehow, while we discussed a scene, we would arrive at some way of shooting it. He taught me not be too set in what I thought the scene should look like until after I had seen a rehearsal. Once I got over the terror of showing up for work without knowing exactly how to shoot something, it was very exciting. We'd make discoveries and find things that never would have occurred to us, which Connie calls 'happy accidents.'
"Conrad always finds a place to sit to watch a rehearsal," Zaillian concludes, "and no matter where he's sitting, his stock line is, 'Well, it looks great from here!' Basically, that means I can shoot the scene from any side of the room I want — he'll make it look great from that point, or make it look great from the other side if I change my mind. In that way, we work almost like a documentary team. We basically let the event take place — which in this case is a rehearsal of a scripted scene — but we don't impose some preset idea onto it. That was a great lesson for me."
