Given the importance of locations, had you ever considered shooting Men With Guns in anamorphic or Super 35 to better encompass the breadth of the locales?
Sayles: I always consider widescreen when thinking through the movie to see if it works for the locations. There were a few places in Men With Guns, such as the dry plain or the cane country, where it would have been a nice format to use, because the landscapes are very horizontal out there. But it just didn't make much sense for the whole picture, especially once you get into jungle areas. The cinematographer, Slawomir [Idziak], would always say that you can't really see the jungle unless you're on the edge. It's just very claustrophobic once you're in it: all you see are the five trees that are crowding you in. There could be a parking lot beyond them, but you're not going to see it. In that situation, anamorphic really wasn't going to do much good. I also find that with anamorphic, the choice of lens tends to be more limited: you can work with a 100mm and a 50mm, but not much else; when you get much wider than 50mm, the edges start to bend a little bit, and you don't want to pan too fast.
Save for the doctor, the various characters view their flashbacks through scenes imbued with an amber haze. Was that achieved with filters on the lens, or via postproduction timing?
Sayles: Both. Slawomir was trying to get a kind of golden look with the filters as we were shooting. In post, we adjusted that slightly to try to even [the filters] out, and give them a slightly different edge.
We used black-and-white for the doctor's reveries during which he remembers his students. We shot those dream sequences on a stage with a white cyclorama behind it, overexposing a little and then printing them to be very contrasty. It's the faces of the kids, and not the details of the room, that were important. All he sees during these reveries are their faces; everything else just disappears to him.
Was the production able to bring much equipment and lighting gear while you were shooting at some of these rather remote locations?
Sayles: Mexico doesn't have a large film industry, but they do have a very healthy TV industry, and [the American production of] The Mark of Zorro was gearing up while we were there. The equipment we got was second-string, so sometimes the batteries didn't quite work, and the lights burned out a little earlier. We couldn't afford cranes, and our car rig really never worked it was a contraption someone tried to make into a Lowboy, but it wasn't low enough, and it really wasn't made for movies. One day the brakes would catch on fire, and the next day the thing couldn't get up the hill. We had a lot of those types of problems.
To light our nighttime scenes, we would usually hang one main source up on some scaffolding for our overall ambiance, along with some supplementary fill, and then add a lot of burn bars for fire effects. We might have some lights on the ground behind trees to shoot light diagonally across the scene, but never in huge areas; we usually let the world fall off into blackness fairly close to base. With the people around firelight at night, you just want light a couple of feet from the fire then let it start to fall and go totally black in the distance. We didn't want to edge the trees with one of those super-flood fixtures that some movies use to light football fields and city blocks.
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