DEFINITION April 2018

LIGHTING PHANTOM THREAD

GRADE 1 LISTED Mike’s other job is as CTO of LA’s Litegear company which innovates especially with LED products including LiteMat and LiteTile. “Lighting-wise there was a desire to use as much incandescent on the movie as possible, which was a great idea,” he says. “Paul would show me these references photos from various Kubrick films and the movie Rebecca and other Hitchcock stuff he was inspired by. Then we’d go to the location in London and there was no way we could execute it. It was clear that technology was going to be a big part of this journey; then we started to mess around with different LED products and thought we could find the visual look of the film between the LEDs, the photochemical process and the lenses. We were going to throw them all together in a pot and find out what it would take to make it work.” Phantom Thread had no stage for the action, there were only practical locations. Also the main house where everything happens had restrictions. “The house where Woodcock lives is a Grade 1 listed townhouse in Fitzroy Square with insane requirements,” says Mike. “A lot of negatives in what you couldn’t do. We had to shoot only from 8am until 8pm, they wouldn’t allow us any outside control like Cherry Pickers, some of the normal tools you use to control light from outside. We were only allowed four feet of scaffolding outside the windows and so there was a tremendous amount of limitations to shoot in this house for the 26 days. It was very limited in terms of the tools we could use to light.” With this major limitation Mike had to think outside the box and use some of his company’s portable and easy-to-hide small LED designs. “Using our four to five feet of scaffolding, Jonny Franklin, the gaffer

and I talked about doing vertical lines of ARRI Skypanels that could be used on a track; there are three very tall windows there. We could put Skypanels on either side of the window frame and push light in from the side. We were also able to hide a bit of HMI up on the top. The building was facing the direction where the sun was constantly coming in and out. It was a very fluid environment, I’ll put it that way. We were able to do a little bit of attachment to the house, they were very limiting on that so we were able to use some of the LiteTile products from LiteGear into the ceiling that allowed us to push down as a top light. We could make those adjustments very quickly as the exterior levels changed. So that was really critical as we had no time for somebody to come and put scrims in or something like that. But in the UK, just wait a moment and the sun is in again; it’s a very impressive

environment to be shooting in! We also wanted the ability to take up as little room as possible. Once we knew we couldn’t go down a traditional route with maybe a big single source like a Soft Sun on normal support machinery, we ended up using a lot of LiteMat, Skypanels and a lot of some other stuff we had fabricated that was LED. We used Source Fours that were LED based so we could change the colour temperature quickly. We’d used a lot of wireless for networking. Because the house was impractical, the guy who was running the desk was down in the basement so I would just relay orders over the radio

TOP AND BELOW LEFT Daniel Day- Lewis on set with Vicky Krieps. ABOVE Director Paul Thomas Anderson.

PHANTOM THREAD HAD NO STAGE, THERE WERE ONLY PRACTICAL LOCATIONS

DEFINITION APRIL 2018

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