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Man of Light

Feb 25, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

Roger Deakins shares his wisdom for Doubt and Revolutionary Road.

John Patrick Shanley Returns

Despite his screenwriting success (1987’s Moonstruck and this year’s Doubt), John Patrick Shanley has been, first and foremost, a theater man, writing a string of theatrical hits—including the Broadway play Doubt—and he is perfectly content with that life. In fact, Doubt is only the second motion picture he has directed and his first in 18 years, following 1990’s quixotic Joe Versus the Volcano.

Bringing Doubt to the big screen was easy in a sense, Shanley admits, because this time around he had an all-star cast and an all-star crew to help him along. Still, much of the process was entirely different from the process back in 1990, and Shanley says it took some getting used to.

“I was terrified to make this film,” he says. “Extended dialogue scenes, no gunfire, no cars—could we hold an audience? We worked day and night to address that problem while we were shooting. But when we did Joe Versus the Volcano, we were cutting that thing with razor blades—digital editing wasn’t happening yet. The editorial process is an entirely different one now, but fortunately, a much better one. It is so much quicker and efficient now. I had to bring myself up to speed on those things, but that is part of what preproduction is for—to get up to speed on the latest technology and how it affects your particular film.

“But shooting was pretty much what it has always been. Figuring out where the master shot would be with extended dialogue scenes was tough, especially because some of those scenes were so long. I would say, ‘Maybe the camera should be over here,’ and Roger Deakins would nod and agree with me, but then point to a totally different place [to put the camera]. It was Roger Deakins, after all, so I felt like he knows more than I do, so I would defer to him on those kinds of shots. But otherwise, the breakdown on individual shots and extended dialogue was usually pretty obvious—the acting dictated camera placement most of the time.”

Shanley says that he was particularly fortunate to get Deakins to help him out to begin with. Their partnership was made possible when actress Nicole Kidman became pregnant, holding up production for The Reader, which Deakins was already committed to. Because of this, Scott Rudin—The Reader’s co-producer—handed Shanley’s Doubt script to Deakins, who wasn’t enjoying the unscheduled hiatus.

“For me, it was a lucky stroke of fate to get Roger,” Shanley says. “I had started with another cameraman, but I realized it wasn’t working out, and around the same time, The Reader shut down production. They were holding onto the crew, and Roger was stuck in Berlin. Scott asked him to let him know what he thought about my script, and Roger said he would like to do it. So Scott flew him in just a few weeks before we started shooting, he got up to speed, and it worked out really well.”

Shanley asked Deakins to reference Carol Reed’s 1948 film, The Fallen Idol (shot by Georges Périnal). With that film in mind, they set about designing the palette and shot compositions for Doubt.

“The scale of Fallen Idol was similar to our film, and Roger knew there would be the occasional Dutch angle that I would want in this story with all the extended dialogue,” Shanley says. “We had all these people in a room, and I didn’t want a Law and Order camera going on. So we had to figure out how to keep the camera alive past a certain point. There are tricks like blinds opening and closing and light bulbs blowing out and phones ringing and things, so we tried to use the physicality of the space to motivate camera moves. But in addition to that, I also felt I was going to need the occasional Dutch angle to keep the audience from being visually lulled into not listening to dialogue. Roger went with that and helped me compose some really beautiful shots.”

Shanley had strong opinions about the film’s color design—preferring to take the story in an entirely new visual direction from the play version.

“I didn’t direct the stage play, but they did a wonderful job with a photorealistic kind of thing where they went back to the church school I went to as a child, photographed the rooms, and recreated them on stage. For the film, I felt the autumnal colors we had for exteriors [the film takes place in the Bronx]—the grays and dull browns—would be nicely offset by some vibrant interior colors. I told our production designer [David Gropman] I wanted particular colors on the walls of the rooms. They would basically bring me big pieces of plywood painted different colors until we found the ones I liked. So the church office is a very rich and vibrant green, and that’s a powerful and very different green from what we had on the exteriors. The sort of Virgin Mary blue of the nun’s sitting room is another one of those colors, and so is the kid’s red room at the start of the picture. My hope was they would make you want to stay in those rooms because they were colors you would be starved for. They are much stronger colors than David would probably normally use.”
—M.G.

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