Toward the end of the film, Channe is seriously adrift in her unsophisticated American high school, which she and her brother both hate. She wears dark glasses indoors and keeps to herself when she is not having sex with boorish boys in their cars. After enduring his children's shared glum demeanor at a high school football game, Bill Willis summons Channe for a heart-to-heart talk, during which she admits that her promiscuity is simply an attempt to find a way to fit in.
In one of his better scenes among his excellent work in the film, Kristofferson explains that boys Channe's age know nothing about sex, and think that when a girl sleeps with them, they are getting something over on her. "Were you like that, Daddy?" she asks. "Of course I was," he responds unabashedly. "It took me a long time to learn that when a woman sleeps with me, she is giving me something precious." He counsels her to ignore the name-calling of her peers and to bring the next boy she is interested in home to meet her father first.
Sobieski is lovingly and ever-so-softly lit in her close-ups in this scene, with a Kino Flo set close to her face and low. She seems to turn into a glowing, radiant, confident young woman before our eyes. This scene is close to the heart of A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, a film that never resorts to flash or melodrama. Its straightforward approach and warm, loving, unconventional family dynamics are likely to move viewers to tears.
Fabre had never worked in the States before and found the American crew "very skillful and professional, but less emotionally involved with the film than a typical French crew. I think I prefer the French approach, but we had a good experience. They taught me a lot and I think I taught them some things as well."
The challenges of working in a house flooded with light were ameliorated somewhat by the larger size of the American crew. Fabre could thus more readily use flags and diffusion, which helped him control the ever-present exterior light. "In France we do not have a key grip who works with flags and diffusion; the electricians handle that," he notes. "Having the extra pair of hands enabled me to have greater control over the light," he notes.
For a memorable night interior sequence in which Willis has returned from the hospital, Fabre created some exemplary night interior illumination. In the scene, the father summons adopted son Billy (Jesse Bradford) to his study. Willis can barely be seen because the room is so dark. When Billy approaches, his father turns on a small desk lamp which adds just a touch more light. Kris Kristofferson's rugged features are dramatically and evocatively cut and highlighted by the close sidelight. "Even after Kris turns on the lamp, the scene is still quite dark," says Fabre. "But by this point in the story, Willis has become quite ill and fading out; he has only a few scenes left in the picture, so that dark lighting seemed right."
In keeping with the idea of Willis's slow fade, another late scene with Kristofferson, Hershey and Sobieski is played in a room lit only by candles and a fireplace (which is not shown). The light is a rich and fluctuating amber; Fabre used a set of gelled lamps running on flicker generators programmed to approximate the fluttering firelight. However, he is used to controlling such lights manually, and was not that happy with the effect. "With the programmed lights, you get the same effect all the time; I normally like to work with it and increase and decrease the changes as the takes proceed. That approach for me is more sensitive." The golden amber and deep amber gels used on the lights, which create a thick, hot, dense reddish glow, did please Fabre, however.
A similarly lit scene in the bedroom of the Willis's Paris home, in which the room's lighting is motivated by a black-and-white television set, was done by turning 1é4 blue-gelled lamps on and off manually, which Fabre thought worked much more effectively.
A key scene in which Willis lies in a hospital bed while Channe types part of the novel he is struggling to finish was the only one in the entire film shot in a studio, because a practical hospital location could not be secured. "It was the only scene lit exactly as I wanted," Fabre says, indicating the depth of the compromise forced upon him by the small practical locations. "I used a mixture of hard Fresnel light on Leelee Sobieski and Kino Flos cut with flags and scrims for the room," which has something of the feel of an Army field hospital, with curtains that suggest tents — a fitting look for the sick-room of a former soldier. Fabre notes that the scene was printed down substantially to give it a darker, more ominous look.
[ continued on page 4 ]