Production and Post on HBO's Conspiracy
By Bob Fisher, May 23 2001

How do you tell a story about the most horrific crime of the century, and maybe of the ages? What do you do to grab and hold the attention of the audience and leave them with a memorable impression? How do you do justice to that story within the confines of a television screen? Those questions must have been rolling through Stephen Goldblatt's ASC, BSC mind when he was asked to shoot Conspiracy. /.../

At the beginning of his career, Goldblatt was a news and rock 'n roll photographer in London. He subsequently segued into shooting documentaries, commercials and ultimately narrative films. Goldblatt's distinguished body of work includes Oscar nominations for Batman Forever and The Prince of Tides. His other notable credits include The Cotton Club, The Hunger, Young Sherlock Holmes, Lethal Weapon and The Pelican Brief.

The cinematographer considered the possibility of shooting in digital HD format, but the cameras were too big and cumbersome and he didn't want to be tethered to cables. Neither did he wish to abandon the look of film. /.../ "We'd have to convert the video to film anyhow, so I didn't even see a cost advantage," Goldblatt says. "If you make a film like this, you don't want to compromise."

Goldblatt had only three weeks to prepare and 23 days to shoot a 120-page script. He envisioned recording the story almost like a theatrical play and structuring the shooting schedule with as much continuity as possible. Goldblatt had shot "a million feet" of 16mm and Super 16 film during his days as a documentary cameraman. "I wanted to bring that feeling to 'Conspiracy.' I did not want the film to have a Hollywood gloss," he explains. He planned to shoot 10 to 12 pages at a time with the camera providing a subjective perspective./.../

The main set was built at Shepperton Studios near London. There are big windows in the meeting room set that motivates natural daylight. The exterior is a painted backdrop. Goldblatt used part of his prep time shooting tests to see how far the backdrop should be from the window for a natural look. /.../ "The set is historically accurate except it's a little longer and wider than the room where the Nazis met to accommodate sound, lighting and the camera," Goldblatt explains. "It was very chilling reading the script and understanding that real people actually participated in this meeting. I wanted to get into their minds because it is important to understand that ordinary people can do incredibly evil things.

"I looked at some old German newsreels just to get a sense of their look and feel, including film of Heydrich and various other people who were at the conference," he says. "It is remarkable how glamorous Heydrich seemed. Frank Pierson and I were very clear that we didn't want to make these people look evil. During staging, I asked that we always had Heydrich facing the windows, so he's not seen in sidelight. I wanted him to always have soft frontlight on his face."

Goldblatt emphasizes that the techniques he employed were dependent on the talent of the actors who were capable of handling 10 to 15 pages or more at a time. "It comes from the story and the actors," he says. "Their performances draw the audience into the story. There was terrific communication. The place was electric with their intelligence. The piece just drove itself and we went with it."

Branagh was carefully positioned before windows Goldblatt worked at keeping precise eyelines between characters engaged in discussions. In one scene, Dr. Stuckart gets into an angry confrontation with another character who is seated at the table. There is a tense discussion. Goldblatt had a camera looking straight into each character's eyes. The dialogue snaps back and forth and you can feel the adrenaline flowing. It's like seeing each character through the other one's eyes.

Goldblatt observed that it was an intensely personal experience for the actors. In favored shots looking down the side of the table, he notes that you can see that all the actors are in full character all the time whether they have lines or not. When Pierson called a halt to shooting at the end of each day, the cast and crew were exhausted from the experience.

While Conspiracy is reality-based, filmmaking is still an interpretive art. Goldblatt consistently orchestrated lighting in seamless ways to amplify moods and dialogue. At a particularly tense moment, for example, he assumed that a passing cloud had temporarily blocked the sun and the light bouncing off the snow outside became slightly dimmer. It's almost imperceptible, but it gives a darker texture to the angry words.

"Finishing in a digital suite allowed us to manipulate colors and grain," Goldblatt explains. "We didn't want this to feel like a bunch of actors in old time uniforms doing a historical piece. We wanted a slightly washed-out look, as if it were a color film from that period.

Conspiracy was one of the most intense experiences I've ever had making a film and it was about two-thirds shorter in shooting than just about every other film I've worked on."

To be precise, it's not a totally handheld film. Sometimes the camera was held on the conference table with sandbags. Often it was on a dolly. However Goldblatt didn't generally worry about using a head on the dolly. Instead, the operator (Trevor Coop) would just sit on it holding the camera. They would roll from parquet to wood floors and then carpet. Trevor's body absorbed most bumps and Goldblatt didn't worry about the rest. "I just cared about the energy," he says. "I wanted it to feel like the Nazi SS had allowed a documentary crew to be present at the conference. It's a different grammar." /.../

He used soft, direct light mainly from about ten Dinos, diffused and placed high above the big windows, about 35 feet away. There were also Space lights scattered throughout the set in niches in the ceiling and a few little floor units for fill. "Once in a while, I'd bounce a little light off some cloth or the stage floor covered in artificial snow onto someone's face," he says. "It feels like ambient light from the window."

Since the Aaton camera bodies are only a couple inches wide, Goldblatt was able to place the two cameras side-by-side, so that the eyelines remain consistent. One camera was usually on a medium or close-up shot, and the other one recorded a wider angle. "Often I used profile shots," he says, "because you can see the backgrounds and expressions on the secondary characters faces.

"There wasn't a safe place on the set," he says. "The cameras are always prying. That also helped to keep the actors focused. The fact that we didn't pull walls or ceilings meant that the break between set-ups was usually no more than ten minutes."

"We also shot exteriors outside the actual house near Berlin and footage of them arriving and leaving the mansion. Heydrich makes a grandiose entrance. "You can't see his face until we cut away to a beautiful close-up. He looks like a movie star."

There is one helicopter scene that provides an overview of the house. Goldblatt recorded that shot on 35mm film because he knew they were going to add digital snow to the scene, so he gave the effects facility a bigger frame to work with.

"In one scene, Kenneth Branagh is next to the window and there's a red rose in the shot," he says. "Stephen wanted the rose redder, so we added saturation to the hue of the red without affecting flesh tones or the gray and black tones in his uniform."

Goldblatt sees digital mastering as a potentially powerful extension of the role of the cinematographer into post-production. "It is totally interactive," he explains. "You sit in a suite, look at an image on a monitor and tell the colorist, 'make it a little lighter, less contrast, now make it a bit darker and as we move through the shot let's bring it up. That guy is too magenta.' The colorist is responding and you are seeing the changes. It's got to be a collaborative process because the colorist doesn't know the context or emotional meaning. "I believe that as this technology evolves, we are going to have to re-think the role of the cinematographer,"Goldblatt observes. "We are going to have to be there to control or we will lose control of our images. It's not something you can do in just a few days. You go through every shot in each scene."

Goldblatt lauds HBO for it's pioneering use of digital film mastering technology without interfering with the creative process. "They have been models of discretion," he says. "They encouraged me to explore all possibilities for making this a better program without interference. We were very fortunate to be working with an enlightened company."