Going somewhat against the expected casual look of a business meeting set in a tropical vacation environment, Beristain tried to create the subtle sense that the men watching the presentation by Ross and Lang were representatives of the old guard conservative barons of money and power. "We wanted to subconsciously create the feeling that these people were like the old formal portraits on the wall of a bank, the people you never see who really run things," he relates. "The scene is shot with great formality; none of the characters are seen moving very much, and the shots of Klein and the investors are brief. You get only glimpses of these people, so there is a sense of things being hidden. Some of the investors are shot in profile only, and no one ever looks anyone in the eyes. There is a also lot of chiaroscuro [lighting]."
Ross is later told by his mysterious and wealthy new friend, Jimmy Dell, that without a solid written agreement, his employers will not pay him anything other than his salary, if even that. The inventor is subsequently suddenly called into a meeting with his boss and some company lawyers, who ask him to revalidate his employment agreement. Sensing that he is being asked to formally agree that he is entitled to no special compensation, Ross becomes indignant and says he will not sign until his attorney reviews the agreement. He then storms out of the room.
"What can you do in a scene in an office between four people?" Beristain asks rhetorically. "We started with the idea that we would again avoid frontal shots and eye contact, to convey a sense of how ominous this situation is for the hero that the lawyers are trying to deny the hero his due."
The office interiors had a claustrophobic feel due to the location's small, high-set windows, which presented the cinematographer with a choice. "With these strange windows, you could either block them off and avoid getting them in the frame, or use them," he says. "I thought we should use them, so we placed HMIs outside of the windows. As in the conference room scene, these HMIs became our key lights."
As a result of this unusual lighting, the scene has an off-kilter feel, and the room is full of pitch-dark pockets. The cinematographer offers, "In that office set there were places where I could not put any lights, [which led to] gigantic gaps of darkness. We tried, where possible, to use darkness in this film the way a playwright might use silence, where the lack of words says something very important. I've always believed that sometimes lighting, as opposed to illumination, is more about sub-tracting light."
Given this offbeat lighting scheme, the actors again rose to the challenge. "There are moments where Campbell Scott is in almost complete darkness," Beristain notes. "Then he steps out of the shadows and delivers a powerful line. One of those moments is actually a turning point for his character, where he goes from being pushed around to standing up for himself. He steps out of the darkness and into the light and says, 'How dare you, after what I've done for the company?' He challenges his boss for the first time."
Afterward, when Ross finally realizes that Dell may not be all that he appears to be, he springs into action. Passing by a secretary's desk in his office, he retrieves the business card of an FBI agent he met briefly during the tropical retreat. The room's paranoid atmosphere is enhanced by some clever production design; the space is festooned with archaic wartime posters bearing bold legends like "Someone talked!" Ross' suspicions motivate him to find a private place from which to phone the FBI, and he opts for a darkroom lit only by a red photographic safelight. Mamet explains that this setting, and its unusual lighting, came about because "it made sense that at the point where Ross' world begins to completely fall apart, everything suddenly turns red, the color of danger."
From that point, Ross moves on to a fateful rendezvous in Central Park, where he is working with the FBI to entrap Dell. The meeting is set for the park's famous carousel, an homage to the climax of Hitchcock's 1951 suspense classic Strangers on a Train. Given its circular shape, the enclosed carousel presented a formidable lighting challenge that was used to the story's advantage. "The scene where Ross actually gets on the moving carousel was meant to underscore his confusion," says Beristain. "We had a light shining through every gap and every window in the carousel's enclosure, which helped us to create a feeling of confusion. We could not get any lighting direction that way, because it was all crosslight and flare and backlight, then darkness and strong frontlight, then sidelight. It helped to communicate the utter confusion in the mind of the character about just what is what and who is who in this nightmare.
[ continued on page 4 ]