American Cinematographer, August 2004

Unnatural Surroundings: Director of photography Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC crafts an

eerie atmosphere for the period thriller The Village.
by Christopher Probst

With The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has established a
reputation for crafting brooding dramas that are meticulously designed and executed. “I have very
specific tastes,” he acknowledges, “and I don’t want to blindly try to find the right angles and moves on
the set when I could do a lot of that work beforehand. If I don’t feel or know exactly what the shot is
saying, I get really uncomfortable, and I’ll start playing with the camera until I find a shot that says
something to me. However, there are times when we’ll position the camera as planned in our storyboards
and the shot won’t work. And in those cases, we have to figure out a solution. That’s why it was great to
collaborate with Roger Deakins [ASC, BSC] on The Village — he’s very open and can easily adapt to those
situations.”

Shyamalan had actually approached Deakins about an earlier project, but the cinematographer’s busy
schedule precluded his involvement. And although Deakins had just enough time in his schedule to
photograph The Village, his commitment to another project (The Ladykillers) limited the time he had for
preproduction on Shyamalan’s film. “Because Night works out so many shots and so much staging during
preproduction, I really wish I’d had more time during the prep,” says Deakins. “I’ve always thought the
camera’s placement, movement and framing are the most important aspects of cinematography, but I
tend to make those decisions instinctively rather than intellectually. If I have an idea for a shot or blocking,
it’s usually something that just feels right to me; it’s not something I can necessarily intellectualize.

“Night’s storyboards are very detailed, and they rarely change on set while shooting the film,” he
continues. “I occasionally found them a bit restrictive and the adherence to them a little extreme. Joel
and Ethan Coen storyboard their films just as thoroughly, but on set those [ideas] can and often do
change. But with Night, the film is basically shot before he actually gets on set. It’s an interesting way of
working and very brave, because he shoots very little coverage.”

Details about The Village’s storyline were being tightly guarded when AC interviewed Deakins and
Shyamalan, but the tale, set in the 19th century, centers on the inhabitants of a small village nestled in
the woods of New England. The townspeople maintain a somewhat tenuous equilibrium with their
surroundings, which include some mysterious, unseen creatures. Shyamalan explains, “I had read [Emily
Brontë’s] Wuthering Heights, and I found that kind of pure emotional angst, where people are allowed to
feel and make speeches about emotions, very compelling. I thought, ‘What if I juxtaposed that kind of
angst with something that threatens these characters?’ I thought a period Exorcist kind of movie would be
very cool, so I tried to find a balance between a scary movie in the woods and Wuthering Heights. The film
has a scary, fairy-tale aspect — the idea of Hansel and Gretel stumbling upon a woman who puts them in
an oven is scary stuff! That kind of darkness mixed with absolute innocence [creates] a kind of eerie
beauty that really appealed to me.”

Much of The Village unfolds in one-take shots — long masters that wait several beats before initiating a
slow push in on one character — or through several linked shots that could only be assembled one way in
post. Shyamalan recognizes the risks posed by this approach, but notes that “as a director, I need to take
a stance. In doing so, I’m bound to be wrong some of the time, but in the end, you’ll definitely know
you’ve seen a story told by me because I’m not using my head, I’m using my gut. You will definitely feel
me in the movie. I don’t do traditional coverage per se, where meanings and statements are created in
the editing. With that method, the personality of a scene, sequence and ultimately the whole movie is
often decided and/or found much later on. That certainly works for many filmmakers, but it’s just not my
thing.”
“Night definitely has a different idea about shooting, and it’s very minimalist,” observes Deakins. “Often
we weren’t even in front of an actor when he or she was talking, and sometimes you don’t even see the
actor who’s talking. Night creates a world through the way the camera moves, and it doesn’t necessarily
involve shooting a whole scene the way you would on most films. It’s much more of an abstract,
impressionistic view of a scene — he doesn’t need to see every actor and every expression in every
moment for every scene. He chooses to see a scene or certain aspects of it from a specific viewpoint. The
Village was definitely shot so that one shot would link to another, and then to another. It’s great if it
works, and it’s certainly very efficient. We only shot for about 45 days, which was pretty good given the
difficult weather conditions we were working in.”

Expanding on Shyamalan’s scene construction, the cinematographer adds, “We rarely see the sets in a
wide shot, only in pieces. Night is essentially constructing the characters, the ambience and the whole
story out of pieces. If you read a scene in the script, you’d probably see an overall view of it in your mind,
but that wouldn’t be what’s in the film. Night’s vision is based on one particular viewpoint. In fact, the
camera may even move away from the action at some point and not dwell on a whole chunk of it. He
might play two pages of dialogue as one long, handheld shot of the backs of two characters’ heads as
they’re walking, and it works perfectly. Then he might have the camera come around into a close-up on
one character at a certain moment. We often used that sort of longer development shot.”

There were a few instances on The Village where the filmmakers deviated from Shyamalan’s storyboards.
“There’s a sequence where we had done an exterior earlier in the day that had a beautiful kind of dull
light, and when we had to do a matching interior shot for the same sequence, it was incredibly sunny and
bright outside,” recalls Deakins. “The first shot of the interior scene involved bringing a girl into the room
as she steps up into a close-up. We had storyboarded the shot one way, but because of the light outside,
that’s not how we ended up shooting it. As a reflection of the girl’s confused state of mind at that
moment, I suggested it would be interesting to have the camera hang at her close-up position and just
hold focus on the foreground and let the background play out of focus until she comes into the
foreground. That seemed to be a good way of portraying the moment, and it also helped with the
problem of the exterior being too bright.”

The Village was filmed entirely on location in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where the production built a
small, practical village set on a pasture adjacent to a stretch of woods. Approximately one mile from the
main sets, a base camp and makeshift soundstage (built inside an inflatable dome) were erected to
provide cover sets, and to accommodate a few sequences that are not set in The Village. Deakins recalls,
“Night very much wanted to shoot as much as possible in the real situations, so we were often shooting
interiors on the main village set with all of the exteriors visible outside the windows. I did feel that more
of the picture could have been shot onstage. When we were shooting night interiors in a house built on
location, for example, we sometimes had to battle the wind and the weather, and in the end, we couldn’t
really see anything outside [the windows], anyway. So there was a bit of a tradeoff between creating a
sense of reality for the actors and taking advantage of the practicality of working in a controllable
environment. On a few occasions when we needed to float a wall to do a certain shot, the wind was
blowing at 40 miles per hour, so Mitch Lillian, my key grip, and his crew had to build a whole baffle screen
just so we could record sound and not have the actors blown about!”

During the construction of the main village set, Deakins had gaffer Bill O’Leary’s team extensively pre-rig
the sets for both interior and exterior work. “We laid an enormous amount of cable,” states Deakins. “It
was quite a big space, and the production wanted to have the flexibility in the schedule to basically shoot
anything at any time. So before the greensmen put in turf around the houses, we dug channels and put
cables not only to just about every house, but also out to the perimeter, where I thought we might want
some night-light effect.

“One particular night scene shows two characters sitting on a terrace, and we wanted a sort of misty fog
in the background,” the cinematographer continues. “To light the effect I envisioned, we needed to
position a pair of large cranes with a couple of 18-bulb Maxi-Brutes in a particular spot way back behind
this grove of trees. But in order to do that, the cranes had to be put in well before we even started
shooting. Because a gravel road would have appeared somewhere in the background of our many 360-
degree shots, and because the ground was so muddy from all the bad weather, we had to tow the cranes
around the perimeter of the set in an area where we wouldn’t see the tracks, and then we basically
buried them there. So we had those two cranes sitting out there, just sort of waiting for us to shoot that
terrace sequence before we could get them out again.”

The filmmakers wanted to shoot The Village in the winter, after all the leaves had fallen from the trees,
and strove to maintain a soft, overcast look throughout the picture. “Night wanted a sort of stark
landscape,” says Deakins. “The film is a very somber piece, and I think the photography reflects that. We
tried to shoot in overcast conditions, with sort of dull light, as much as possible. The days were very short,
so we were often shooting in late light; although that’s ostensibly bad light, it was good light for what this
film is.

“The biggest challenge on this shoot was the weather, which was atrocious,” he continues. “It was
especially hard on the art department — I think it rained nine out of 10 days while they were building the
sets. Working at that time of the year, you can slate the take, and by the time the shot actually starts, the
light has dropped or jumped by a stop and a half! We tried to structure our shooting days as best we
could, and the storyboards were really helpful in that respect. We’d shoot the wide shots early and then
plan to do other shots in a certain direction at a designated point in the day, or in the shade of a building
or tree. There was one weekend when we got about 16 inches of snow that wouldn’t melt, so we ended
up shooting interiors and blowing out the exteriors so we couldn’t see the snow outside.”

Even with storyboards and a degree of flexibility to move inside or outside a set as the weather improved,
there were many instances when the filmmakers had to shoot in less than ideal light — interior and
exterior. “For one sequence, we were shooting inside the largest structure in The Village set,” recalls
Deakins, “and because of the way the windows were constructed and the way the shots were designed,
we could see out the windows on the lower floor, so we had to bring in several lifts just to be able to have
light come in through the higher windows. If we’d shot that location at the right time of day with the
perfect light, we wouldn’t have needed to do anything at all and it would have looked really nice. But you
can’t rely on that, of course, so you end up with four or five Condors with an 18K on each, and then you
have to put in diffusion to soften those up. You end up with quite a big rig just to create what you could
have done naturally.

“As the natural sunlight changed during the day, new problems would arise,” Deakins continues. “One
moment there would be full sunlight hitting the diffusion over the windows, and the next moment there
would only be our lights hitting the diffusion, which created a totally different look. Then you’d go to
lunch, and when you came back you’d find that the light hitting the diffusion on one side of the building
was hitting another set of windows on another side. We essentially had to figure whether we wanted any
natural light at all, and I ended up spending quite a lot of time sitting on the set — in the morning,
afternoon and evening — just to see how the light moved in those rooms. That enabled us to stage the
shots around the way light was going to affect the space.

“We also had to contend with days that would start out sunny and then darken and bring on a drenching
rain — and, of course, all of the footage had to match. But that’s generally what you’re up against when
you do a picture like this on location.

“Matching interiors and exteriors was often tricky,” he adds. “It wasn’t like doing an interior in a house on
a street with a road outside. This was a house surrounded by green grass, and our set included the grass
outside because we might need to shoot that exterior the next day. So we often had to put planks down
for the scissor lifts, and we couldn’t leave the lifts there overnight or it would’ve killed the grass. And
when it rained, we had to maneuver the scissor lifts without leaving big tracks all over the location.”
Deakins’ camera package consisted of an Arriflex 535B and a Moviecam SL (for handheld work), Cooke S4
prime lenses and Cooke 18-100mm T3 and 25-250mm T3.7 zoom lenses, all supplied by Otto Nemenz of
Hollywood. He photographed most of the picture on Kodak Vision2 500T 5218 but used Vision 200T 5274
for some of the brighter day work. Both Shyamalan and Deakins were adamant about having access to
projected film dailies throughout the shoot. “We had a dailies truck with us on location,” states the
cinematographer, “and that was really important to Night as well, because film dailies allowed everybody
from each department to see what we really had.”

At press time, Deakins was actively involved with supervising the digital intermediate [DI] color correction
of The Village at EFilm. “Even though we were shooting during the winter months, autumn was a little late
and had been quite wet, so the leaves stayed on the trees quite a long time,” he says. “We therefore
ended up shooting through the full fall colors and into true winter, so I’m going to adjust some of that
footage in the DI, where I’m working with [colorist] Steve Scott. I’ll just tweak the colors a bit here and
there to take them down. I also plan to slowly leach some of the color out of the image as the story
progresses, but it’s a naturalistic piece, so that work will be subtle.” He notes that all of the film’s release
prints will be made from the original Estar-based output negatives.

Because The Village is set before the widespread use of electricity, Deakins’ interior-lighting designs were
motivated by window light and firelight. “The overcast-light motif from the exteriors was somewhat
carried over into the interiors,” he notes. “However, the film features quite a lot of night work as well, and
all of the interior light was motivated by practical oil lamps and fires. At first I considered using real flames
throughout, but for the most part, we used oil lamps with glass chimneys so that everything could be
dummied and made electric, and then we put everything on dimmers and flicker boards. We started by
dimming things down to get the right temperature, and then we created little bounces with gold cards to
add some shape and modeling to the actors’ faces. I wasn’t trying to make things look pretty; I was just
trying to make them look naturalistic.

“I go back and forth about how I light scenes and what sort of units I use,” he continues. “Sometimes I
bounce light, and sometimes I project it through diffusion. Of course, it also depends on the film in
question and the style of that film, as well as the practicality of a given technique for a certain location.
When you’re in a restricting location, you often end up bouncing light because you don’t have the space
to project it through frames of diffusion.

“I tried using honeycomb grids on the light coming through the large diffusion frames, but I found that
they were sort of self-defeating,” he continues. “When you put a grid on and then stand off to the side of
the diffusion, the grid starts to narrow the light down, basically creating just a circle of light in the middle
of diffusion. It’s controlling it, but it’s also narrowing the source and therefore making the light less soft.
So I tend to control the light with separate flags. There are loads of little tricks I’ve come across over the
years, little things I make up. For example, if I have a large, soft source where I’m projecting light through
diffusion, I’ll sometimes put a horizontal row of about 15 6-by-2 blade flags in front of the diffusion, with
each flag slightly angled. A person in the middle of the light can see the whole of the diffusion or bounce
source, but if you move toward the side of the shot, you won’t see any of it.”

Throughout The Village, the filmmakers used zoom lenses much more frequently than Shyamalan had in
his previous work. “I think it surprised Roger when I told him that I wanted to use zooms a lot on this film,”
says the director. “For some reason, it just felt right for the movie. Rather than cutting to the close-up, we
slowly zoomed into the close-up. It creates a different emotion — when you zoom in, it’s like focusing on
a detail in a painting. It’s looking at a painting and realizing there’s someone in the corner of that room,
holding a knife. When I started thinking about The Village, zooms were one aspect of the visuals that
popped into my head. When I look at the film now, it takes me a while to remember they’re in there;
they’re so integrated that you don’t notice them that much. Also, Roger sometimes buried the zooms
within other camera moves so the camera move and the zoom overlap and you don’t really feel the zoom
even happening.
“I never try to justify a camera move first,” adds Shyamalan. “First I feel something, and then I justify it
intellectually. If we’re pushing in on a character and the camera’s low, and I look through the camera and
feel it’s not right, then I’ll find an intellectual justification for why it doesn’t feel right. It may be that the
lower angle makes the character feel too strong, and at that moment the character is making a decision
out of weakness rather than strength. How do you convey that? Roger may just know that by gut, but I
need to work through it in my head.”

“I think The Village is a very individual and interesting film,” says Deakins. “Night is very specific, and
working with him was a challenge. He has a vision and knows what he wants, and having something to say
and finding your own way to say it is what filmmaking is all about. Visuals are very important to Night, and
that is something to which I can really relate.”