Weir concurs with his cinematographer, noting that the augmented Florida light was as important to the look and feel of the film as the town itself. "When we got a clear day, the sky was a sort of aching blue and the houses were gleaming white," the director recalls. "Waiting for clear, windless days and then pumping in all of this fill slowed us down, but I would remind myself when I was getting impatient that this was being done in order to make everything gleam and look like a commercial.
"I think when Peter took his first look at the town, he gulped hard," Weir adds. "You had to wear sunglasses just to look at the houses. But I am thrilled with his work."
To help cope with the extremes of contrast still evident in the day exterior setups despite the enormous fill lights, Biziou chose to shoot these portions of The Truman Show on Eastman Kodak's EXR 5248 stock, which is rated at 64 ASA for daylight with an 85 filter. "We used it for its fine detail and excellent exposure latitude," he says. "It was wonderful for handling the extremes in contrast that we weren't quite able to tame."
For day interiors and car shots, Biziou used Kodak's 200 ASA EXR 5293. "I wanted good aperture and depth," he offers. "For night interiors and exteriors I used the 500 ASA [Vision 500T] 5279, which is a great high-speed stock with surprising sharpness and detail."
Throughout the show, the cinematographer worked closely with Deluxe Laboratories, which "gave us consistently good dailies, for which I was really grateful." However, Biziou did extra work to help ensure that his dailies hit the mark. "In addition to the normal lab reports, I sent Deluxe handwritten notes on each day's run, so the timer would be well-informed," he relates. "They said they found these notes useful, as they normally get no such information and don't have any guidance on how to print. Mike Millican, the timer at Deluxe who finished the film, gave us a wonderfully-timed first print."
In order to keep the images clear and sharp, Biziou avoided lens diffusion and filtration during initial photography. He reveals, however, that "we did ask for a slight warm tone on the final grading before the release print. We found this tone in one of our daily runs and just loved the way it looked."
Biziou's camera system was a new choice for him: Panavision's Platinum Panaflex with Primo lenses, which "hold [strong light] before flaring very well and take contrast very kindly. I tested them extensively because I had never used them before. This film was an ideal place to use the Primos because of the wide contrast ranges we encountered in the bright sun."
Wide-angle lenses were used extensively to both emulate the style of television commercials and to approximate the super-wide look of the extreme lenses used on surveillance cameras. Aspheron elements were sometimes added to the wide lenses to make them even wider and further emphasize the off-kilter feel of life in Seahaven. Long lenses were also used to mimic images created by stationary outdoor surveillance cameras, such as those now so popular with television news operations.
In a town with 5,000 hidden cameras, the devices are bound to show up in some unusual places, and Biziou credits his crew with bringing that concept to life. "Our key grip, Chris Centrella, is one of the most imaginative I've ever worked with," the cinematographer attests. "He would put cameras in the most extraordinary places on short notice. If suddenly we wanted to put a camera in the revolving doors of Truman's office building, Chris would have that ready for us while we were shooting another scene. He was always ahead, always asking bright questions and on his tip-toes all the time, but with a smile!"
Biziou notes that Centrella played a hand in creating one of the more amusing and unexpected shots in the film, in which Truman is seen driving his car from a very unusual perspective. The cinematographer explains, "We were using a car that had been stripped of the dashboard and engine to allow us flexibility in camera placement, so we got a wide-angle lens right in there where the dashboard radio would have been, and added a masking gobo in front of the lens. Mike McAllister later composited in some little liquid-crystal digital numbers to reveal that we were in fact looking at Truman from the inside of his car radio."
This scene, like all of the driving shots, was lit with bright diffused light. Biziou reports, "We went to the extra effort of balancing the light levels in the car interiors to the outside so that we would have the same exposure level for both, to get the look of a controlled environment, and the depth of field to heighten it."
The lenses used for the car interiors were some of the widest on the show, including 12mm, 14mm, 17mm and 21mm units. Biziou reports that these extreme optics were occasionally pushed even further with the addition of diopters, which allowed the lenses to be placed even closer to the subject than normal to "add to the uneasy feeling we were after."
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