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I was a great admirer of Pat Garret and Billy the Kid. I didn’t ever meet Coquillion as I was only just entering film school when Straw Dogs was being filmed. I remember all the gossip from that set as it was in the daily papers. Straw Dogs, for me, is Peckinpah’s worst film. That and Cross of Iron. I did get to know Dan Melnick quite well by the time I had shot two of his films.
Ah! That’s a question. I never did use a cherrypicker to fake the sunlight on Rev Road so this must have been the real thing.
Well, the choice is obviously motivated by the context but also is an instinctive choice on the day.
Time lapse would be cost effective. You could do a stop motion shot of dust covering a table or an object of some sort decaying. There is always the pages of a calendar flying by!
I would choose a window treatment, curtains or blinds, that let me silhouette a figure against them. Also, if a curtain, and it can be bunched up, I have even more control over what is seen. That is the same technique as I used for a night scene in ‘Empire of Light’. Otherwise, for you, its just a TV, which is fine but will not inform an audience as to the time of day.
That question would require pages and pages to answer. Perhaps you could look into previous posts and in the ‘look at lighting’ pages on this site.
That is always a tricky balance. Of course, many, of not most, of the car shots you see in films or TV shows today are a product of digital composites.
Bouncing light off the walls inside the adjacent rooms seems like a good idea. By controlling the size and placement of the light you can control the way the light will fall in the corridor.
You say they had the firepower ‘back in the day’. They might in theory have had the firepower but it was really not realistic to use it. Until the advent of fast film stock, fast lenses and, eventually, HMI lighting it was prohibitively expensive to light a large set with a soft source. And before HMIs, or more recent LED lighting, a softly lit set would be hot! Some sets even burst into flames under ‘soft lighting’.
The reason I would use multiple directly focussed lamps to create a ‘soft’ source was not only to have control of where the light went. It would have be crazy expensive to do it any other way. LEDs and cameras that can be rated at 800, 2,000, 5000 ASA or more make such choices academic today.
When I started out I would usually have a hair and make-up test day that gave me the chance to study an actor’s face. And, yes, I would move a key light around just to see what effect it might have. Bear in mind that John Alton was lighting with more direct sources than I or most contemporary cinematographers use today so having some test time was even more essential for his method of working.
To experiment in that way on set, on the day of the shoot, creates all sorts of problems. Even if you were allowed the time by a director, actors tend to arrive on set intent to shoot. A camera rehearsal is sometimes frowned upon. It makes the physical similarities of a stand-in even more important.
I don’t remember using a LUT on Jesse James or No Country for Old Men. Of course, I didn’t because I was shooting on film. Was the look of 1917 any different? Did the LUT make it look like it did?
HMIs are an alternative solution. And there are now plenty of Fresnel style LED lights that can run at a daylight setting, a tungsten setting or anywhere in between. Yes, you can gel a tungsten source but, if you mix it with other sources, the color never seems quite right to me.
