I T CHAPTER 2 | DRAMA
You have to embrace the darkness and be happy with it. It’s always more difficult to pretend it’s dark and yet be able to see which is something felt rather than seen. You can feel it in a wide, open space, but that requires a lighting plan, as Varese explains. “You can have a big light, but expose only for the highlights, so everything else becomes dark, or you can have a cluster of little lights that light corners and surfaces. It has a lot to do with a brilliant production design and a great art department. You go on-set and ask to make this shiny or that reflective, so it reflects the window, but it doesn’t add light to it; you only see a lot of reflective surfaces. All that helps you make it feel darker without being dark. Darkness is about the amount of light you don’t have, not the amount of light you do.” A good example of this is the scene where James McAvoy’s character goes into a house of mirrors. It’s very well-lit, but the mirrors give you a sense of darkness, because you can’t see anything beyond them and, as an audience, you know a mirror is very thin glass, “so anything can happen behind it”, adds Varese. “It’s what you don’t see that makes it scary. That’s a lot of the fun and the trickery of filmmaking.” GEAR UP It Chapter Two was shot on the Arri Alexa, with four in the first unit, of which two were SXT (the more comprehensively equipped
then her husband arguing with her. You almost don’t see their faces, but only their silhouettes caught against the windows. That was a very specific and deliberate decision not to see them – or to see very little of them,” Varese explains. EMBRACE THE DARKNESS As new, more low-light friendly sensors emerge and cinematic lighting becomes more of a modelling technique than a revealing one, as Varese says, you have to embrace the darkness. He clarifies: “You have to embrace it and be happy with it. It’s always more difficult to pretend it’s dark and yet be able to see; you have to bathe the environment with a little bit of light even though the characters may have a torch, for instance. So, all of a sudden, you may have five or six guys who have flashlights, but you have to pretend for the audience they can’t see in the darkness. You need to see, as an audience, what they’re not seeing, because the scares are related to that. It’s a very fine balance, but a deliberate fine balance that requires a lot of trial and error.” For Varese, finding this balance is a combination of all the usual lighting techniques, and relies on the set. He wanted to create a claustrophobic atmosphere,
ABOVE DOP Checco Varese at work, and a still of the Losers’ Club all grown up
2.5 The number of hours it took to apply Bill Skarsgård’s clown make-up 34 How much longer It Chapter Two is than the first film (in minutes)
NOVEMBER 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 25
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