Of course, Beristain has also had some experience at the other end of the lighting spectrum. "Ironically, my most complicated lighting has been in comedies [which include Jonathan Lynn's recent films Trial and Error and The Distinguished Gentleman]. In comedy, you have to be very careful not to do a very flat-looking film, yet you don't want to lose the nice moments with the eyes on the jokes. You set one light and that leads to another and another, and suddenly you have a tree of lights and flags. When you are doing a film with a personal artistic look, like The Spanish Prisoner, it is easier to use one light source. It's riskier, but if you have the director's cooperation, such an approach can be very rewarding."
The danger of a one-light source technique stems from the fact that the style requires actors to hit very narrow and precise lighting marks. "As a cinematographer, you have to be very confident and persuasive to convince your director and actors that the results will be worth all of the extra effort," Beristain comments. "When an actor has done five takes and still has not delivered a perfect performance, he or she is probably going to blame the problems on your restrictive lighting marks."
Fortunately, on The Spanish Prisoner, "We didn't have selfish actors, the type who will say, 'You find me with the light.' I was very lucky, because we had tremendously gifted actors such as Campbell Scott, Ben Gazzara and Steve Martin, all of whom understood the lighting and did a great job of playing the light. I would guess that Steve Martin had never worked with as many lighting marks as he did on The Spanish Prisoner, but he used the opportunity to say something with the light."
Thanks to the commitment of the actors and director to Beristain's lighting plans, the one-light source approach, often coupled with a clever choice of film stock, simplified many of Beristain's lighting setups and helped The Spanish Prisoner hew to its tight schedule. "There were scenes where I wanted a little more fill than normal, but I knew that setting up fill lights would be too time-consuming. Instead, I would switch to Eastman Kodak's Vision 320T 5277 stock, because it has a bit more detail in the shadows, which eliminated the need for the fill. Having tested the 320T extensively, I knew I would be sacrificing contrast with that stock, but because I was using the one-light approach, I also knew I would have more contrast in the actual nature of the scene. So in some respects, our time limitations actually helped the look of the film." Beristain also used Eastman Kodak's EXR 5245, 5248, 5293 and Vision 500T 5279 stocks as conditions warranted.
Anyone who has seen Mamet's House of Games will correctly expect The Spanish Prisoner to tell the story of a con game within a con game. The film is mostly set in New York and Boston, and its title refers to an ancient scam which echoes in the plot. Beristain's lighting played a key part in keeping all of the story's balls in the air. Beristain explains, "The lighting of the people around the hero, Joe Ross, works to reinforce the ideas we want the audience to have about them. Characters who are perceived by Ross as his enemies are treated with slightly ominous lighting, and those he perceives as allies are given more flattering lighting. However, few people in this film are really who they seem to be. We used the lighting to help us play the game presented by the very clever script that David Mamet had written, to deceive the audience and keep them uncertain about who is a friend and who is an enemy."
The filmmakers' distinctive approach to the material is evident in a key early scene, when Ross and his friend, company attorney Lang (played by professional card sharp and Mamet mainstay Ricky Jay) present the latest good news about Ross' mysterious new process to Klein and a group of potential investors. The company has gone to the fictitious tropical isle of St. Estephe for a day of meetings about this revolutionary creation.
The meeting scene was shot in an actual conference room at a Florida Keys resort, where the tropical daylight streamed into the room from one side through large windows covered with wooden louvered shades. To recreate the room's look on film, two powerful HMIs were placed outside the louvered windows of the practical location; the strong, direct light they generated was then controlled to a great degree by the careful manipulation of the louvers themselves. Berestain recalls, "I was playing with the louvers, opening and closing them to throw the light in the way I wanted, and I removed some louvers to allow more light in certain places. We had two smaller HMIs inside the room to model a bookcase and a trophy case, but otherwise we only used foamcore boards to bounce and model the light for the close-ups. It was a dramatic yet extremely simple lighting scheme."
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