posted 04-19-2004 10:23 AM                       

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QUESTION: Did you use any of the 5247 color negative, or was it all 5254?

ALCOTT: We used the 5254, because the 5247 wasn't available even at the time when we finished shooting. It came out something like two months after we had finished the main shooting of the film...

QUESTION: Now we come to the scenes which have caused more comment than anything else in this overall beautiful film - namely the candlelight scenes. Can you tell me about these and how they were executed?

ALCOTT: The objective was to shoot these scenes exclusively by candlelight - that is, without a boost from any artificial light whatsoever. As I mentioned earlier, Stanley Kubrick and I had been discussing this possibility for years, but had not been able to find sufficiently fast lenses to do it. Stanley finally discovered three 50mm f/0.7 Zeiss still-camera lenses which were left over from a batch made for use by NASA in their Apollo moon-landing program. We had a non-reflexed Mitchell BNC which was sent over to Ed DiGiulio to be reconstructed to accept this ultra-fast lens....

QUESTION: And those scenes were illuminated entirely by candlelight?

ALCOTT: Entirely by the candles. In the sequence where Lord Ludd and Barry are in the gaming room and he loses a large amount of money, the set was lit entirely by the candles, but I had metal reflectors made to mount above the two chandeliers, the main purpose being to keep the heat of the candles from damaging the ceiling. However, it also acted as a light reflector to provide an overall illumination of toplight.

QUESTION: How many foot-candles (no pun intended) would you say you were using in that case?

ALCOTT: Roughly, three foot-candles was the key. We were forcing the whole picture one stop in development. Incidentally, I found a great advantage in using the Gossen Panalux electronic meter for these sequences, because it goes down to half foot-candle measurements. It's a very good meter for those extreme low-light situations. We were using 70-candle chandeliers, and most of the time I could also use either five-candle or three-candle table candelabra, as well. We actually went for a burnt-out effect, a very high key on the faces themselves.

QUESTION: What were some of the other problems attendant to using this ultra-fast lens to shoot entirely by candlelight?

ALCOTT: There was, first of all, the problem of finding a side viewfinder that would transmit enough light to show us where we were framed. The conventional viewfinder would not do at all, because it involves prisms which cause such a high degree of light loss that very little image is visible at such low light levels. Instead, we had to adapt to the BNC a viewfinder from one of the old Technicolor three-strip cameras. It works on a principle of mirrors and simply reflects what it "sees", resulting in a much brighter image. There is very little parallax with that viewfinder, since it mounts so close to the lens.

QUESTION: What about the depth of field problem?

ALCOTT: As I suggested before, that was indeed a problem. The point of focus was so critical and there was hardly any depth of field with that f/0.7 lens. My focus operator, Doug Milsome, used a closed-circuit video camera as the only way to keep track of the distances with any degree of accuracy. The video camera was placed at a 90-degree angle to the film camera position and was monitored by means of a TV screen mounted above the camera lens scale. A grid was placed over the TV screen and by taping the various artists' positions, the distances could be transferred to the TV grid to allow the artists a certain flexibility of movement, while keeping them in focus.

It was a very tricky operation, but according to all reports, it worked out quite satisfactorily.

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posted 04-19-2004 03:34 PM                    

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I would be surprised if a limited release of an older film like this would be "mass printed".

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posted 06-10-2004 07:59 AM                       

quote: John Pytlak

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Perhaps a duplicate negative was made from a duplicate negative, adding two generations of duplication?

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