Using Reflected Light rather than Direct Light

David first used the technique of reflected light rather than direct lighting on a documentary film he was doing about London Transport buses (All That Mighty Heart 1962). “And it had a scene in Welwyn Garden City. In some house there was a housewife tidying up and vacuuming before getting on a Green Line bus. And I decided I would do this – this was the first time I, or anyone else,  had done this – was to aim a brute through the window of this house, but that everything inside should be reflected.”

Then he left documentaries and started doing commercials, sometimes using that particular kind of reflected lighting. “I still did key light, filler and back all the time, but now and then, when I thought it would be suited to it, I would use that technique. So I did it on a Shredded Wheat commercial for Richard Lester at Viking Studios. I didn’t think much of it, I thought it was nice, and that was that. The next day Richard had seen the rushes. I hadn’t. And I remember he came up to me in the street outside and said ‘I can’t believe that, it looks so beautiful.’ He took me aside and said ‘I’m just going to do this feature film with Rita Tushingham, will you do it? But you’ve got to light it all that way.’

Reflected light allowed you an easier time, “… at a time when you had lamps that could spot and flood – you can have a room like this with a white ceiling, and  you can have a 5k aimed full flood at the ceiling, all you have to do is to go from full flood to spot and the entire character of the light in the room is changed. And all you have to do is pan the light around the ceiling and I’m changing the lighting all the time.”

“When you light with reflectors, and you do put a direct lamp on, it’s like a knife cutting though butter. Cameramen of the old school could light better than I could with direct lighting, it took longer and looked artificial. What I did was quicker and looked better. The argument from the production office was this used more lights and that it was more expensive. My retort to that was that the expensive item on a film was not the lights but the time taken to set them up. And once I’ve lit a set, normally with the old system you’d shoot the master and then go in for two shots or over the shoulder and it would re-light everyy time. . It’s very unusual unless I have got a reverse. This happened recently on the tests for Nostromo which David Lean did not live to do, I lit the master and we shot it. Wee then went for a close-up and I looked through the camera and I said I was ready. David Lean said, ‘Young man, young man this is where I normally go and sit down for twenty minutes and think what I am going to do next.’  So you save time and it looks better and it’s easier for the actors who don’t have to hit marks.

Another thing is that if somebody walks towards a direct light, a cameraman knows that they’ll get burnt up and you have got to put bottom halves and a double bottom half and all this sort of thing and smooth it out. Well if you have a reflector, a studio wall say, you don’t have to worry about that, they can walk right up to a camera and they don’t get any brighter because of the distance and the size of the lights. What it meant was that I would light a set, I would watch a rehearsal and then I would actually go to sleep and it’s the one thing on a film set that makes you less tired. And I fortunately don’t snore. I’m not droopy when I wake up. It certainly got me a bit of a reputation and it certainly caused a great stir the first time I worked in America where they are used to cameramen trying to look like cameramen all the time.”

In Marat/Sade “…[there was a] scene where Marat had a nightmare, and I had discovered funnily enough doing a shot in The Knack that if you have something out of focus, in fact the out of focus part of the image is in fact translucent. And so if you have something out of focus on a hot background, the bit that’s out of focus disappears. So basically what I did was shoot all the nightmare against the hot wall and out it literally out of focus and people became like a cross between Henry Moore and Giacomettii, as simple as that – easy.”

“We had three weeks to put it on film the RSC having done it as a play for about two years. We had a sound stage at Pinewood and I thought there was no way we were going to shoot it in three weeks. Peter wanted to get rid of the idea of the proscenium and divided the stage into two with a row of iron bars. I thought very carefully about an oblong divided into two squares but as the bath house was all white would he object to the other side being all black? floors and walls being completely black. And he said that would be fine. I chose one side of the bath house and got them to construct a giant side of tracing paper – there was none of this 2-16 or whatever it was, and the tracing paper wall was going to be my only light source. I had a marvellous old gaffer at Pinewood called Tommy Heathcote. I said to him I want the maximum light coming though this tracing paper But I want to be able to stand anywhere on the set and not see a hot spot. And I went back home and stayed for the week. Then he had it ready for me and I went back to Pinewood and he’d got it perfectly. There were 26 x 10ks behind this thing which which was christened the Hot Wall. If you were to walk from the centre of the white square to the centre of the black square you would disappear which was a great advantage that if the sound crew should be in shot it wouldn’t matter, and that if Peter were on set he could point the camera in any direction. The lighting would be different wherever you pointed the camera. If you aimed it against the hot wall you would obviously get a silhouette, a burn-out, but nothing that was unpleasant to look at. If you went at right angles you were cross lit either way, cross lit with the white background or cross lit with the black. If you shot with your back to it, you were completely flat. The film was shot at the same aperture and it didn’t matter where the camera was, the labs had no problems. Normally on a film you get the labs phoning and saying you’re putting too much into it. It didn’t matter. It was fine.

INTERVIEW WITH JOHN LEGARD AND ALAN LAWSON 1994

Expanding on a reference made in the above interview, Gil Taylor used reflected light with Polanski at Twickenham. on Repulsion, 1965. Polanski wrote in his autobiography  “Our first day’s shooting left me amazed and a bit perturbed by Gil Taylor’s way of doing things. He mostly used reflected light bounced off the ceiling or walls, and never consulted a light meter. As the rushes were shown, however, he possessed such an unerring eye that his exposures were invariably perfect.”