Yet another approach utilized to distort images was to shoot through large chunks of glass. "I’ve been dragging bits of glass around for years," concedes the cameraman. "Alan [Macdonald] would find these lovely pieces of glass to shoot through." Some of the glass pieces were old, heavy ashtrays, but all were simply held in front of the camera for the shot. Mathieson also used an assortment of old lenses. "We had this odd collection," he says. "We had an old Angenieux, for example, which we did terrible things to with Vaseline. We also took the elements out of some of the lenses, and we also used a Frazier lens once. With the Frazier you have to use the Panavision camera, but the lens system has its own peculiar kind of optics. It does extreme close-ups."
Mathieson also used a boroscope lens for close-ups. "The optical quality of a boroscope is terrible, really," he opines, "but what you can do with them is amazing. They are very good for doing close-ups of things like white mice building nests they’re used by natural history people for studying nature. But we used them for snooping around and looking at bad skin or stained fingers." The boroscope is unusual in that it can both do close-ups and wide-angle shots; the image is distorted at either setting, and Mathieson used this warping effect to lend a repulsive quality to the faces of the people who hung around Bacon, making them appear as they would have had they been rendered by the artist on canvas.
The cinematographer also employed an array of gels to augment his subjects’ more hideous qualities. "We got that Bacon dead-flesh look using old gels," he reveals. "They were strange correction gels for lamps that people don’t use anymore. They have very weird colors, and most have been discontinued. We also used a lot of cosmetic gels, but in a very uncosmetic way. There’s an LCT Yellow, for example, which is a weird, horrible color that makes everyone look ill or dead. Usually when you put a gel in front of a light, it looks very intense and strong, and we didn’t want that. We wanted something more subtle, something dirty, and we found that these old gels really gave us the desired waxy, dead-meat look."
One of the objects that appears frequently in Bacon’s paintings is a bare lightbulb, such as the one which hung from his studio ceiling. Many of the shots in Love Is the Devil also include bare lightbulbs; according to Mathieson, the crew lit the film mainly with these customary household fixtures. "We really didn’t have any big lights at all," he says. "Believe it or not, we principally used lightbulbs. We didn’t want anything as big as a 10K. The film had to look. . . well, wrong. In some ways it would have been wrong to use certain tools or to do certain things that we knew how to do, or things that were easy. We had to try something else, and sometimes it was a matter of putting a lightbulb on a piece of wood and lighting the shot that way." Mathieson does concede to having used Chimeras on conventional lamps. "They’re like little tents that you stick on the lights," he observes. "They’re black on one side and white on the other, so you get this kind of diffusion we used those quite a bit. But we didn’t use Kino Flos or any fixtures like that, because they were too smooth."
Mathieson had little idea if these effects would work or not, and he and Maybury could not rely on video assist to tell them whether or not the effect in question had been successful. "In one instance, it was impossible for the video assist to be used when we disengaged the shutter. Double exposures and different frame rates were also pretty much unknown until we saw the rushes, because the video assist system that we were using was rudimentary."
"We just had to pray," continues the cameraman, who also notes that restrictions were placed on footage consumption. "We weren’t allowed to shoot more than 2,000 feet of film per day," he says, "and we didn’t. With all of the various effects shots, we didn’t have any room to screw up."
While most effects work was done during shooting, four such sequences came to fruition in postproduction. In one shot, for example, Bacon and Dyer walk by a shop window at night; peering in at the display furniture, Dyer sees an image of a raw and bleeding man crouched on a cabinet. "That image was built by computer," elucidates Mathieson. Maybury initially imagined doing most of the film in this mode, but he shifted gradually towards a more cinematic aesthetic. "We made a very conscious decision to avoid too much electronic postproduction," divulges the director. "I very much wanted [the picture] to be filmic, even though it would have been very easy to slip into a kind of electronic panorama representing some of the triptychs by Bacon. But there was also the danger of slipping into [the style of] a dodgy Italian horror film."
One of the flashier postproduction effects starts off as a shot of George lying on the floor, and pulls upward until he is a dark spot at the center of a circle of light in an otherwise black frame. "We zoom out from the studio floor," says Maybury. "We used a crane for the beginning of the shot. Then we picked up the end of the camera move and continued it electronically. The image is actually reduced to a dot, with George rolled in a fetal position in the middle of the screen."
[ continued on page 4 ]