Gritty Mystic Mood

DP Tom Stern Matches Mystic River Imagery to Eastwood's
Themes

Clint Eastwood (right) asked DP Tom Stern (center) to give Mystic River muted color tones during principal photography. Photo: Merie W. Wallace

Director of photography Tom Stern is smart enough to point at his
boss, Clint Eastwood, whenever any discussion of Mystic River's
critical success is raised. The riveting and disturbing story of
murder, betrayal, and revenge is among the most highly praised films of
the year, and of course, directly represents Eastwood's vision. Still,
Stern's cinematography on the piece cannot be overlooked when
discussing the dark, gritty, worn-out mood for this story set in a
working class, Boston neighborhood.

Stern, Eastwood's longtime chief lighting technician before becoming
DP for the first time on the director's last film, Blood Work,
did not face any effects challenges, wild logistical impediments, or
unusual lighting or mechanical requirements for the job. Rather, his
mission was to produce images during 39 days of principal photography
in the Boston area last year that would please Eastwood's "sense of the
story," as Stern describes it.

"Even the score of the piece is somber, and Clint insisted the
images match that," Stern explains. "It was decided early on to
desaturate the color a lot. At one point, Clint even half-joked that he
wished we were doing the film in black-and-white. So the big thing was
to take color out of it, to subtly capture the wonderfully textured
sets and walls created by our production designer [Henry Bumstead],
and, at all costs, to preserve the blacks. Clint likes resounding
blacks in his films very much—real solid blacks. It isn't always
easy to get them in-camera, so that was a big focus of the lighting.
You do that partly through exposure—making sure you do not start
with a dense negative, and you need to stay on the low end of the
film's dynamic range.

"Beyond that, there was a certain amount of mechanical stuff done to
remove stray light. Often, away from the key side of the frame, we
would normally set up black fabric panels to absorb light. Overall, we
wanted a kind of refined simplicity—my F-stops on the lenses were
always reasonable enough to keep a very sharp focus, and we never used
diffusion on the lenses."

At the start of the project, there was "extensive discussion" of
performing a digital intermediate on the film in order to further
desaturate the imagery to suit Eastwood's vision, according to
Stern.

"Logistically, though, there just wasn't enough time because we were
coming up too quickly on our date for our Cannes Film Festival
screening," he says. "We only had an 18-day window, and we didn't feel
that was enough time. We agreed that we might bring the movie back and
master it digitally after Cannes if we weren't satisfied with the look
we got out of the photochemical process [performed at Technicolor,
Burbank, by color timer Bob Kaiser]. As it turned out, we got a
beautiful print out of that, and there was no need to alter it further
after Cannes."

Stern exclusively used Panavision prime lenses on the piece,
shooting Kodak 5246 stock for exteriors and 5279 for interiors and
night work. Beyond the color and lighting issues, Stern adds that he
used a fairly classical framing approach.

"For a lot of moments in the film, framing is pretty static and
classical, and then it's periodically broken up with Steadicam stuff
for dynamics," he says. "But we always keep returning to the static
sort of frame. There is also a series of shots that tilt down to the
ground from the sky and up to the sky from the ground. Looking down
from the sky was a thematic thing—I considered it heaven, God's
POV. There was a point where the character Jimmy Markum [played by Sean
Penn] remarks that 'God is watching.' So that type of shot pays tribute
to that sort of a reference. The big challenge was making this film
look sort of classical, yet not too beautiful since we didn't want to
lose the grit of the piece."

To read more on Mystic River check
out these Millimeter stories:
Interview with Clint Eastwood