To help keep things under control during the 61/2-week production, Maybury opted to shoot almost all of the film on sets. "They were beautifully made," he says. "All of the walls could fly out with incredible ease, and anything could move if we needed to change angles." When the production did go on location, Maybury was careful not to abandon the restraint he had exercised on the sets. "The agenda that I set for John when we were shooting on location was to make that footage look more like the sets than the sets themselves did," he explicates. "It’s a problem, especially with low-budget English cinema, when there’s this restraint [that’s suddenly lost] when filmmakers go out to locations, where things open up in this absurd way it’s almost gratuitous. Instead, we kept closing the thing down, trying to keep that claustrophobia and intensity. The only scene where that isn’t the case is Bacon’s vision of a car crash involving a nuclear family in their bright, primary-colored outfits, sprawled on the ground with the blood sparkling through star filters."
This particular accident image is almost an homage to Jean-Luc Godard, and indeed, Bacon often painted from photographs or film stills. He was interested in the work of Eadweard Muybridge, for example, and used several of Muybridge’s motion studies in his own work. He also referenced the famous shot of the nurse with the bleeding eye from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) in several of his paintings from 1949. Perhaps one of the biggest influences on Bacon’s work was John Deakin, a photographer known for his dark and macabre portraits, which tend to emphasize the ugliness in even the most beautiful of subjects. "Deakin was a very short man," relates Maybury, "and he often used a box camera often on a tripod. Because he was so short, he had a tendency to shoot up at people; as a result, the pictures have a very unflattering quality. Even the fashion work that he did for Vogue has this extraordinary nastiness to it because [that upward angle] is very rarely used to shoot people." Bacon would often ask Deakin to shoot particular subjects; the artist then painted from the resulting images.
The other "pointer" that influenced Maybury, Mathieson, and Macdonald was color. "Very early on we decided to restrict the color palette of the film, in much the same way that Bacon does in his paintings," says Maybury. "There’s a predominance in the film of the green hue from the Colony Room [a pub where Bacon and his cohorts would often go to drink], but there’s also a tendency in the film toward bone or flesh colors, dark reds, and the dreadful sallow color of the nicotine-stained, alcohol-sodden, sun-deprived English skin."
Working from these general visual strategies, the filmmakers got to work. Mathieson used an Arriflex 535 for most of the film, and the smaller 435 for more difficult shots. He shot on Kodak Vision 200T 5274 stock, and used the Vision 500T 5279 for nighttime scenes. This, however, is where the conventional discussion ends; for much of the production, Mathieson tried to toy with his equipment and lights in order to alter or distort the images he was getting much in the manner that Bacon warped and stretched his own imagery. His description of techniques is a tour through the don’ts of filmmaking, and yet the results are extraordinary.
Mathieson shot some scenes using a 5x4 Sinar plate camera, which he would place in front of the Arri without its plate. Where the plate would normally go, he positioned a piece of tracing paper. "The image would be soft, sort of blurred," he attests, and this effect not only framed the subject like a still camera would, but made images that approximated the blurriness of many of Bacon’s paintings.
Another technique involved removing the shutter from the Arri 435. "We disconnected the shutter, keeping it open," Mathieson discloses. "Then we’d use a domestic drill with a handmade shutter in front of the camera. It would run asynchronously, and we’d rev it at different speeds to make the image flutter. If you moved it away from the camera, you’d get these great flash-frames that would stretch and tear from top to bottom, creating images that jumped at you."
Mathieson continues, "We did our own fogging in the camera as well, using the Arri VariCon, which enables one to fog the film using different colors. We also tried putting red gel on the side of the camera, then opening up while we were shooting to make a more ’brutal’ fogging effect." According to Mathieson, the technique was popular in the Seventies, but has pretty much been abandoned since then.
Mathieson also did a lot of double exposures in the camera. One of the film’s final scenes shows Bacon in a bathroom, where Dyer appears as a ghostlike presence. Similar images abound throughout the film, and while budget may have been one of the reasons for doing this and many of the other effects in the camera, Mathieson and Maybury felt that the old-fashioned technique lent the film a certain ambiance. "When you double-expose [a shot], there’s something about the way it sits on the negative, with the light passing through and hitting the emulsion it just sits better than if you mix it or do CGI to it," says Mathieson. "It’s also a lot more fun, and you can relight things for different exposures or use different colors. Anyway, John would get so excited about the rushes you’d see the shot right away."
[ continued on page 3 ]