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feature in focus
True Brit discovers Human Nature way out West
his performance. We’d also do many, many takes of everything.
Q. Can you explain those early “misgivings”?
A. As with all directors, relation- ships can go through good and bad times. Michel and I went through a stage when we weren’t working togeth- er. After a year or so, we got to talking on the phone, made up and this movie came up. I know just how difficult he
is to work with because he’s a very hard taskmaster. Did I need the grief of doing this movie and yet also knowing that if I did do it, it would be brilliant. He has a very strong visual sense but I also wanted to make sure I’d have some input too. I told him that we must work as a team and that he had to give me some slack or else, ‘get yourself a very good gaffer and tell him what to do.’ So we resolved our
street and shoot at dusk, say, two angles with two cameras of people walking by and traffic on busy inter- sections like La Brea. We’d then take that footage and put it on a rear pro- jection screen outside a window of the studio. So there are the actors sitting by the window of a café talking and outside is rear projection of the street at dusk. It was a perfect look outside but with the ease of working in the studio. We’d go to a restaurant and shoot waiters walking around. The actors would be sitting in a corner booth but the walls of the booth are reflective so you look at them talking and reflected in the booth on rear pro- jection was a whole busy restaurant.
We did some wonderful stuff with the forest. There’s an amazing sequence where it looks as if Patricia Arquette has climbed to the roof of the forest at sunset. It’s a combination of a long tracking shot in the forest, rear projection and models. In just one
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Photos main: Patricia Arquette and Tim Robbins in Human Nature; above right: crew on location including focus puller Mike Lohmann, operator Tom Lohmann and DP Tim Maurice-Jones
differences and I had what I thought would be a huge amount of visual feed in. But of course, you get there on set and there’s this ‘put the lights here.’ The first week was quite tough because we had differences of opinion. However, he had so much else on his plate he got tired of
it and eventually left me alone.
Q. Tell us about some of the logistics of the film.
A. A lot of it
takes place in the
forest and a lot is in
a big science labora-
tory. We also then
had about 60 other
locations. In KK
Barrett (Being John
Malkovich), we had
perhaps the best art
director I’ve ever
worked with. He
seemed to under-
stand the whole
thought process
Michel had gone through and was also able to bring so many great ideas to the film. Our forest had to undergo two looks, one which was realistic [a forest near LA], the other a sort of idealistic fantasy. He built a forest in the studio [the old Howard Hughes aircraft hangar at Long Beach] some 200 ft wide and 100 ft deep. There were huge photographic translights; that is, a photographic transparency that was 120 ft long and 20 ft high of a forest of silver birches. We put that up at the back of the studio, back lit it and then put 200 trees in front of it so you had this incredible depth. But the great thing was the big dimmer board which with just the flick of a switch, you could go from day to night, from morning to afternoon; all the looks you wanted ready to go. The lab was built in the hangar too, 45 ft by 30 ft. We also had about forty little four wall sets in that studio.
Q. You have already suggested the film is visually very strong. Give us some examples.
A. Because Michel is a visual genius, we did tons of weird stuff. We had, for instance, lots of scenes in restaurants so we’d go out into the