"Of course, because we were doing [a continuous] shot, we ran the risk of seeing some of our lights [in the frame], but David and I talked about it and decided that no one would notice the lights unless they were really looking for them," the cinematographer adds.
After Ross is duped into letting the only copy of the process out of his hands, he goes to the police, who immediately question the veracity of his story. Ross soon finds himself in the familiar Hitchcockian situation of the good man falsely accused of terrible wrongdoing. Creating the provocative lighting for the various rooms and corridors of the police station, Beristain says, was "like being in a playground. We wanted a intensely hostile and scary environment, but we didn't want to go with the typical fluorescent lighting and Steadicam approach that is so often used in that type of setting. We decided to make each room in the police station look worse than the previous one. It's like Dante's Inferno; each place seems like it must be the worst, but it turns out to only be purgatory, and you keep going deeper and deeper into the gloom."
The filmmakers succeeded in creating a dreadfully dingy, dark and dungeon-like space. As Ross is led from a stark, dreary interrogation room and down a crowded, murky hallway, we see the wildly exaggerated shadow of a security gate playing ominously against one wall. At the end of the hall is a room we cannot see clearly, but the doorway resembles the side view of a particularly unpleasant, sickly yellow, scummy aquarium. This area was actually a holding cell set, where Ross was placed in a scene that was shot but not used in the film. In the finished movie, the purpose of this strange, discomforting area is left up to the viewer's imagination, making it all the more effective.
At this point, the already edgy film takes an even grimmer turn. "We were preparing the terrain for when Ross arrives at the apartment of his best friend Lang, which is the ultimate dark moment," says Beristain. "There is almost no light in Lang's apartment at all just a slit of light coming from the bathroom and, briefly, a bit coming in the window from a car passing by. Suddenly Ross sees something in a mirror, so he grabs a small lamp and turns it directly on his friend, and that light starkly reveals just how much trouble our hero is in. It is the darkest place in the story from a dramatic point of view; it is where the nightmare really starts."
For this scene, where a cloak of darkness was crucial to the surprise plot twist, Beristain abandoned the one-light source approach, using small, closely placed instruments to selectively accent his dark canvas. "I would have been placing flags all day to get the room dark enough to use the one-light approach," he says. "Instead, I used 100- to 300-watt Peppers on dimmers to point the precise amount of light exactly where I needed it."
This teasingly underlit scene is the last such image in The Spanish Prisoner, however. Running counter to genre conventions, most of the rest of the film takes place during an overcast day. Elaborating on his choice of a daylight ending, Mamet submits, "The Spanish Prisoner is an attempt to embrace the Hitchcockian form of the light or romantic thriller. One of the things Hitchcock did time and time again was to set the final confrontation between good and evil in a place where one wouldn't think people would get into trouble, a place where help would not be available. I decided to place the denouement of The Spanish Prisoner on a nearly empty moving water ferry. Many of these scenes in Hitchcock's films occur in daylight; it simply never occurred to me to set it at night."
While the lighting in The Spanish Prisoner is unconventional, Beristain's choice of optics was not. He did not want his lenses to telegraph anything about the characters. "We used 40mm through 75mm lenses for close-ups. We had thought about using 200mm and 300mm lenses for a lot of the close-ups, but we were afraid that might provide clues about the characters' true natures. If you use a very wide or very long lens on a character, the audience knows that something is up with that person. We wanted the audience to be as unsure as the hero was."
The cinematographer's use of filtration was minimal, consisting mainly of soft graduated neutral-density filters to bring down bright skies, and polarizers for the tropical skies. Beristain did use a selection of corals and color-compensating filters to help him deal with shifting location color temperatures. He adds, "I also had the gaffer read my HMIs with a color temperature meter constantly, and write the results of the readings on a sticker placed on the lights, so I always knew exactly what kind of light they would produce, no matter how old the bulbs were. We knew that we would not have the luxury of 25 color timing runs on our small budget. Besides, it is silly to spend hours timing one shot to match when this can be done on the set with a little extra effort."
The cinematographer's A-camera was a Platinum Panaflex; Beristain says that he would have preferred to use multiple-camera setups, but the budget didn't allow it. He also tested a bleach-bypass process, but it was determined that a special process would complicate production of the low-budget film. "We decided to keep things simple and straightforward," he states.
Beristain jokes that he would always like to work with "six Platinum Panaflex cameras fitted only with Primos, shooting on [100 ASA] 5248, but one doesn't get that luxury very often. Besides," he concludes, "I love the challenge of making the most out of the tools at hand."
