John Bailey Holds Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

by Bob Fisher | Published January 20, 2009

(L-R) Julianne Nicholson, Dominic Cooper and John Krasinski on set with John Bailey, ASC (center) and first assistant director Thomas Fatone (far right) for Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (2009). Photo: JoJo Whilden.

John Bailey, ASC is doing double duty in Utah this year as two of his movies, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and The Greatest, are screening in the Grand Jury competition at Sundance. In addition, the nearby Slamdance Film Festival asked him to participate in a seminar about the aesthetics and costs of moviemaking. The cinematographer, who has earned some 60 narrative movie credits over his career—including Ordinary People, The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Silverado and Brighton Beach Memoirs—brings a broad and eclectic perspective to his work and appearances.

But despite a moviemaker’s experience, it’s rare to find anyone with more than one project at Sundance in any given year. So how did it happen? When preparing to shoot License to Wed in 2006, the movie’s director, Ken Kwapis, informed Bailey that John Krasinski, the romantic male lead and star of “The Office,” had adapted a novel for a movie he planned to direct. Kwapis suggested the two men talk.

Krasinski’s screenplay for Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is an adaptation of the David Foster Wallace novel of the same name. Some 60 to 70 percent of the story takes place on a 12- by 18-foot set of a room where a graduate student is doing research for her thesis by asking men to share memories of their experiences with women. The rest of the story is made up of transitional and flashback scenes.

“John and I talked at great length about the content of each interview and how each actor would be interpreting his monologue,” Bailey says. “It was a springboard for me to think about how to light each character while he was talking about his experiences with wives, girlfriends, parents and friends. I used lighting as a variable, to get us into each character’s soul.”

The interview room set had four wild walls that could be moved independently if Bailey needed more space for lighting, or if he wanted to work with the camera further away with longer lenses. He decided to film each of the interviews with the camera at basically the same height and distance, with the same focal length lenses. “Since the image sizes, angles and focal lengths were consistent, the defining characteristic was lighting,” he adds. “I had complete control over colors and the quality of the light since the office had neutral colors and no character or presence of its own. Sometimes I bounced light coming off the floor as though it were reflected sunbeams.”

Produced mainly at several small studios in Brooklyn that were previously warehouses, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men included some exterior scenes filmed at a Boy Scout camp on Staten Island. There were two windows on the left side of the set that were off-camera most of the time and a third one directly behind the person being interviewed. Sometimes Bailey brought hard or soft light through that window depending on the time of day. A few daytime exterior and classroom scenes were staged at locations on the Columbia University and Brooklyn College campuses.

“I saw the film in my mind in anamorphic format while I was reading the script,” Bailey says. “I told John it would give us more flexibility for composing intimate portraits of the men with medium and close-up shots that have a feeling of depth. It would also enable us to put faces in interview scenes in slightly different places in the frame and to play with positioning of heads. That would give me a larger canvas behind the heads to paint with light and subtly differentiate characters.”

When working on his other Sundance premiere, The Greatest, Bailey recommended the same 35mm anamorphic format in 2.4:1 aspect ratio and coupled with answer printing at a film lab.