Production Companies Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures, DC Comics (Vertigo), Lonely Film Productions GmbH & Co. KG., Donners' Company, Branded Entertainment/Batfilm Productions, Weed Road Pictures, 3 Art Entertainment, Di Bonaventura Pictures
Craig Hayes, visual effects supervisor at Northern California-based Tippett Studio (The Matrix Revolutions, Hollow Man), led a team of artists who replaced the set’s green screens, incorporating photographic elements with digital design for what he calls “a fluidly dynamic effect,” grafting objects onto existing images and generally “adding debris, airborne particles and detritus, burning palm trees and the entire hell-L.A. environment.” In addition to extending and enhancing the focal point of the ruined roadway, the film required realistically scaled hell-scape vistas of Los Angeles extending out in all directions, “starting in Hollywood and going past the Capitol Records building to the right, all the way to downtown,” Fink outlines, “all of it pretty much seen as it really is, with some allowances for the scale to enhance the drama.”
Working closely with both Fink and Shohan as well as with Francis Lawrence, was Oscar-winning director of photography Philippe Rousselot (A River Runs Through It), a master at capturing mood. With more than 30 years in the film industry in both his native France and the U.S., and credits including 1994’s atmospheric Interview with the Vampire and more recently Tim Burton’s Big Fish, Rousselot’s ongoing priority is discovering new challenges. “I’m always looking for something different, and when something like this comes along, that I had never seen or even thought of before, it’s very motivating,” he says.
Basing much of his compositions and stylistic choices for Constantine on the graphic novel origins of the story, Rousselot explains that he incorporated “a lot of wide angles, both high and low, and the kinds of extreme points of view that you often see in comic books, which I thought was very important to maintain. In terms of light, we played a lot with contrast and colors, going with some very deep greens and oranges.” At the same time, the cinematographer was careful not to copy the comic book style, preferring a more subliminal effect and drawing inspiration from many sources, including a folio of photographs from Cuba that Lawrence shared with him. “You can’t transfer pages into moving images; it’s more the general idea of graphic novels that we were touching upon.” Equally subtle were his nuanced depictions of heaven and hell, avoiding “the clichés of light and dark.”
Overall, Rousselot opted for natural lighting, guided by Lawrence’s desire “to keep the light organic and simple.” But simple doesn’t necessarily mean small, as evidenced by the sheer number of lights used, in one instance, for Constantine’s sequence in hell. A total of 60 space lights hung from the ceiling of Stage 21, designed to move freely with the wind created by seven immense industrial fans positioned along one side of the freeway set. Their irregular movement provided an intensely dramatic quality. Additionally, Rousselot ran alongside his camera crew during many close-ups holding an extended pole with a paper-covered China light on Keanu Reeves – a personal touch that allowed the cinematographer to capture precisely the right effect.
Movie Database
In Theaters
