Black Beauty
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Black Beauty - DreamWatch Magazine - June 1998
Slaughterhouses, Francis Bacon paintings and the like are the inspirations used by Millennium’s Director of Photography Robert McLachlan. Paul Simpson spoke to him on the set of Roosters.
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As Robert McLachlan takes a brief break from shooting Roosters, the sixteenth episode of Millennium’s second season, I ask him how he became involved with the show. “Before I started Millennium, I was involved with a series called Strange Luck, which was a kind of off the wall thing that had a fabulous concept: whenever the lead went anywhere, weird stuff seemed to be going on around him, so he took advantage of it by being a photographer an being able to get good shots. “A lot of the scripts were a bit thin, and there was a lot of pressure put on us in the camera and lighting department to make it look as interesting as possible to hide the fact that maybe the content was a bit thin. Visually, it had a huge amount of style. We were virtually given carte blanche to create something that was visually interesting to watch inasmuch as you could on an hour episodic schedule. It wasn’t necessarily what I would call good cinematography, but it was a lot of fun and a lot of people in the business noticed the lighting and what we did with it, the creativity that we took. It was a classic case of being able to do the work that you’d like to do now and then, but thought was too off the wall. “Chris Carter, I guess, noticed that and when Millennium was given the go, we had a chat, and he asked me if I was interested in doing it. I jumped at it, because it was going to demand what I do consider to be really good cinematography, which doesn’t announce itself too much. I don’t like camera work that says, ‘Look at me! Look how clever I am!’ I think that good cinematography is the work that becomes invisible. It takes its cue from the emotional content that the scene is meant to have and the location and so forth.” “Chris had some definite things that he wanted to do with the show as well. He had a brilliant ideas, and I embraced it -- in the first season, the farther Frank got from his very colour-saturated yellow house, and the closer he got to the squalid crime scenes, the more we would saturate the colour in post production. After a couple of episodes I realised that if we were going to be taking all the colours out in the areas where we were spending so much time, we ended up with a very flat, muddy picture, so I realised that what we were really talking about here, in order to have any snap, any contrast and crisp images, was that we needed to light it as if it was in black and white. So if you take it closer to black and white, you’re talking about good film noir photography. Cameramen are constantly being told by producers that they want to feel ‘film noirish’, but real film noir comes out of content and the world view that it takes. |
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“In this case, it was perfect. Frank’s world view was ‘things are bad and they’re going to get worse’. That was kind of the stand that great film noir films took in the Forties and early Fifties when they were in their heyday, and I found the more I lit the show as if it were black and white, the better it looked. And we continue to do that when we think it is appropriate, when I know it’s not going to just come across as normal colours.”
“This was a happy byproduct, because I don’t think they were thinking of this in the first place. Of course without light, there’s no dark, and luckily we have the very bright saturated house to counter-balance that with, because if the whole thing was of the same tone, pretty soon it becomes one and the same.” |
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