BB: We decided that the film’s visuals, particularly when we were on the longest end of the 300-900mm zoom lens, would consist of motionless frames. It was wild to design a motion picture and at the same time advocate for static frames! Our immediate question and concern was how we would animate the screen: What elements would imbue the compositions with motion?
We knew that when George was inside we wanted the camera to be outside and the opposite: whenever George was outside, the camera would be inside. So for every location, in addition to the space which was defined as the set, we needed to find vantage points from which to shoot. For interior scenes, such as ones taking place in the bar, we quickly discovered that locations situated on corners would provide greater depth of action.
We could stage the actors in the mid-ground. Meanwhile, the foreground, being a window, would act as a mirror reflecting any action that would pass by it. The background was another window through which we could also see the movement of pedestrian and traffic. Hence a superimposition of motion in the foreground laid over a background of action—quite a kinetic composition.
Richard Gere plays George, a homeless man living on the streets of Manhattan, in Time Out of Mind
OM: We carried glass in our truck, so that we could “fake” window perspectives whenever we couldn’t get, or weren’t able to afford, a vantage point location. So much of the movie depended on the texture of glass panes, the dirt on glass, the reflections glass conjures, like ghosts moving about.
One of the things we and Kelly McGehee, our production designer, noticed is that shelters were littered with stenciled numbers and letters on walls and lockers and doors, some painted over and renumbered through many years. It’s a bureaucratic system, after all, needing some order and reorder, and so much of the numbering and lettering is confusing. We made these numbers and letters a visual motif throughout the movie, as if everything is part of the same system. Kelly put numbers and letters and other graphic elements on the different types of glass we shot through, creating additional colors, sometimes quite abstract, in frames, but also adding to the random, slice-of-life, uninterrupted feeling of the movie. It’s a visual crossword puzzle which doesn’t add up—a letter here, a number there, symbolizing nothing but the codes of a disjointed society.
BB: The vast collection of varied “windows” became an integral component in our design toolbox. Oren, Kelly and I pored over glass and Plexiglas samples to include various tinted and colored glass, various textured glass, etc. We would hold up prepared panes that Kelly had provided and decide compositionally which graphic shape and coloring of the lettering worked with the frame. In the end, perhaps, just a blurry red streak would be emblazoned across the frame, as the glass was placed so close to the lens. If we liked that element and desired to enhance it, I would often backlight the glass to bring out its color and luminance, more of which we modulated in post-production at the color grading we did with Joe Gawler at Harbor.
Bukowski on set with his ARRI Alexa Plus 4:3
When we were outside looking in, other challenges presented themselves. Often the reflection on the window—into which we were also attempting to partially see through—was so strong that it obviated a view to the inside. The solution was to use a rotating polarizing filter to “dial in” exactly the density of reflection we desired, or to raise the illumination of the interior set.
OM: The result is a highly layered visual world—an organized chaos where one character moves through the movie at his own rhythm. George is not a man in a hurry. He is only thinking about the next five minutes, the next meal, the next bed. His movement contrasts with the city around him, and our still visual approach actually emphasizes that. You see “us”, those fortunate enough to have a home, rushing about at a pace, and you find him, an island in a sea of people, moving through a different sense of time—a time out of mind, beyond memory; just pure existence. Though we drive the movie toward an optimistic ending of sorts, it’s a movie you have to give in to, to breathe with and let it pull you in.
Editor Alex Hall, my partner in all crimes, and I went for an overwhelming soundtrack—the sensory-overload soundtrack of our city—to emulate George’s state of mind. Music and traffic and shouting and laughing and conversations and mechanical sounds and so much more, in so many languages and at varied decibels, blend into an expression of George’s fragile psyche. We recorded sound in MS Stereo while shooting the film (Felix Andrew was the onset mixer, Tony Volante the post mixer), but we also added conversations and sounds we recorded covertly on iPhones or with zoom recorders. To all that, we added additional offscreen scenes we recorded in the studio with actors, as if we were doing man-on-the-street radio.
Jena Malone plays Maggie, George’s estranged daughter, whose pity for his homelessness battles with deep resentment about their past
In a way, Saul Leiter kept guiding us even through the non-visual part of the film, because we kept layering, opening windows and doors, adding random, observational, non-narrative scenes to enhance the three-dimensional world of the movie.
BB: That’s how we did it.
OM: And now it is done and cannot be undone.
BB: But for our own undoing.
OM: Amen. Wait, what?
Tech Box
Camera: ARRI Alexa Plus 4:3 model; shot RAW
Lenses: Hawk anamorphic zoom lenses
Color Grading: DaVinci Resolve in DCI-P3 color space MM
Time Out of Mind opens in theaters starting September 11, 2015, courtesy of IFC Films. This article appears in MovieMaker‘s Fall 2015 issue, on newsstands September 22, 2015.
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