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Lighting Sicario’s Opening Sequence
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Top and middle: Kate brings Jennings (Victor Garber) into the cartel’s safe house. Bottom: This lighting diagram illustrates Deakins’ rough plan for the interior.
38
October 2015
American Cinematographer
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merican Cinematographer: During the first sequence, Emily Blunt’s character leads a SWAT team in a truck that crashes into a house. Where did you shoot the interiors? Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC: The scene is a mixture of shooting on location and shooting on set. We had a location that we really liked, but it was much more practical to just shoot the exteriors there, and to shoot the interiors on a sound stage in Albuquerque. We matched what was on location as best we could on the set, but we didn’t have a big enough space to match it completely, and it would have cost too much in terms of space lights and rigging, so we used false perspective to shorten things. There was an exterior garden, which was basically desert, and a falseperspective wall in front of a print backing, which was a photograph of the location. So we could actually shoot out of the livingroom windows, and there are a couple of shots where you see a character outside. The lighting diagram indicates the lighting units that were used, and 65 space lights don’t seem very many for this day-exterior set. Deakins: No, it’s not very much light, actually. I wish I’d had more, because I would have liked to shoot at a higher stop. But we were restricted by budget and we couldn’t set up a huge amount of light just because I wanted to shoot at T5.6 instead of T2.8. The six T12 Fresnels provide spots of hard sunlight inside the house, aimed through the garden windows and three skylights. Why did you use 12Ks instead of, say, 20Ks? Deakins: If you had 20Ks at that distance, they wouldn’t be quite as sharp and they’d be a bit harder to control. The T12 actually gives you almost as much light as a 20K, and it’s a smaller bulb and smaller Fresnel lens — so it’s very hard, very sharp and very white as well. I had to calculate the spread of the T12s: One lamp hit where the truck crashes the wall, one spread across the big living-room windows, and the third lamp hit another room that you see momentarily as the SWAT team