Bad Religion - Article Review

This article was written around the movie “Frailty” and the lighting difficulties that entailed it. Veteran cinematographer Bill Butler, ASC, talks to writer Jay Holben about four scenes that lighting became an important part of the script. First, before we tell why they were difficult to light, let me give you some back ground information. Butler shot the majority of the film in these three scenes and used as little light as possible throughout the entire movie. He wanted the movie to start out bright and cheering so that the children still held their innocence. Yet as the movie got darker, so did the children.
The first scene that became difficult to light was the tool shed, where the first few killings took place. As the father takes the first “demon” (a waitress) into the tool shed, you see a silhouette of him against a foggy background. Then you see him disappear into the blackness of the tool shed carrying the “demon”. Butler put no light into this scene, he left actor (Bill Paxton, who plays the father of two kids) completely black and refused to show the audience any more than he had to. He’s says that this became his “Modus Operandi”. He uses as little light as possible on different areas of the set. When a group of actors walk onto the set he usually uses a single light source.
The next scene was the home-made cellar. You see Paxton digging the cellar at night using only a lantern for his light source, However, this was not enough light when Butler began to move the camera and take different shots. There they took down a dirt wall and backed off a 10k and threw it through 4 sheets of tough frost spaced evenly away from the set. This gave the illusion of a lantern lighting the cellar and also gave Butler the full head to toe lighting he needed for many of his shots.
The last scene, the family rose garden, turns from a happy bright garden to a dark and grim graveyard. In the opening scenes of the movie, the audience watches two children run through the garden with plenty of sunlight and just a good feeling of happiness. Yet, as the story gets gruesome, so does this garden. The next time the audience gets a glimpse of it, the father is burying his first “demon” in the middle of the night while his kids watch him. The father is completely covered in black dirt with blood stain on his shirt. It just totally ruins the gardens innocence for the audience for the rest of the movie.
Now most of this movie is done in flashbacks. Fenton (One of the children and now around the age of 25) retells his gruesome family story to an FBI agent, promising to take the agent to where all the bodies are buried. The last scene that Butler talks about takes place in the agent’s cop-car, on the way to the garden. It’s in the middle of the night, of course, during a rainstorm and all you can see is Fenton’s face with the shadow of the grill between the seats across his face. The rest of the car is pitch-black except for the driver, who is illuminated only by passing streetlights. This scene was shot on stage using many different techniques. The first technique was to tie four lamps to a rotating fan and put it beside the car, giving the impression of the car passing streetlights. The next was to blow a fan at the car, so as to make the rain go horizontally, to make it seem like the car was moving forward. One of the final techniques was to put two penlights on the sides of on end of a board and have an extra dressed in all black walk from left to right behind the car. This gave off the illusion of them going down a road that was not perfectly straight and that there were other cars behind them, off in the distance.
These four scenes, bringing the entire movie together, gave Butler the exact lighting he was looking for. For mostly using only one or two light sources and shooting mostly at night, the film gave off that gritty and gruesome effect that he was looking for all along.