AmericanCinematographer201201

Fincher and production designer
Donald Graham Burt decided to reconstruct
the cottage onstage at Paramount
Studios and the boathouse and dock at
Red’s studio.
“It was a huge set, and I wasn’t
really sure how to approach it,”
confesses Cronenweth. “There were
some practical lights on the dock that
gave us a base look, especially when we
added atmosphere. We decided to use a
single 2K out from the cabin to the
water and hillside — we hung blacks
and added some sky augmentation in
post — and it was perfect.”
“We slipped a bare 2K globe
inside a Big Eye 10K housing with no
lens, just to protect the globe and create
a very large open-face source,” says
Skinner. “The dock lights were all clear
25-watt practical globes, so we added
some 1 ⁄4 CTO to the 2K to match their
warmth. We augmented with a single
1K Baby Fresnel to help when we were
doing turnarounds and the 2K got a
little too garish and flat, but that was it.
It’s very simply lit and very beautiful.”
A night scene that shows
Salander meeting Blomkvist at his
Stockholm apartment required a
massive shot that encompassed several
blocks of cobblestone streets. “It’s an old
part of Stockholm on this grand hill,
and David wanted the coverage to
encompass all four directions at night
for about two blocks,” recalls
Cronenweth. “In and of itself, that’s not
such a bad thing, but in April in
Sweden, you only have four hours of
darkness! So the challenge was to light
two blocks in each direction and have
the ability to quickly do turnarounds, to
move into any direction and switch our
backlight and whatever keys we had on
the fly. Our rigging crew spent an entire
night setting it up.”
“We had eight construction
cranes, four generators and 20 electricians,
and the special-effects team was
making snow at the same time — it was
quite the expansive setup,” adds
Skinner.
“In the end, we got it in our four
hours, and everything worked fantastically,”
says Cronenweth. “David’s final
establishing shot was done just as the
sky was starting to change colors, but we
got it in under the wire.” ●
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