Indie View
Winter 2004


Steve Gainer on Greg Araki's bizarre drama Mysterious Skin

"I don't just move the camera to move it... that's pointless.
But I love to tell the story with the camera."

Steve Gainer has shot more than 300 music videos in his career and he could be pretty sure those calls would keep coming. But he came to a point recently where he felt he'd veered too far from the path he'd set out on to shoot feature films. He had photographed a few movies but the overwhelming amount of work seemed to be in videos. Within a week of resolving to tough it out until he could land the next motion picture gig, he was offered the DP job on former NYPD Blue star Rick Schroder's directing debut, Black Cloud. Before that had wrapped, he was set to do his next film, Mysterious Skin, for experimental indie filmmaker Greg Araki, whose Nowhere and The Doom Generation had intrigued critics and audiences alike.

Araki had first taken note of Gainer's talents when the director had seen his tough, gritty approach to shooting the harrowing drama Bully for director Larry Clark. Starring Brad Renfro and Nick Stahl, that film recounted the true story of a group of dissolute Florida teenagers who end up murdering one of their friends. Gainer's approach involved a lot of harsh, naturalistic lighting and a constantly roving camera, which forced audiences to confront the situations in the film head-on.

Mysterious Skin is an unusual drama based on the popular novel of the same name by Scott Heim. Starring young actors Joseph Gordon Levitt (10 Things I Hate About You) and Brady Corbet (thirteen), the film concerns two young men, one of whom begins to suffer inexplicable incidents in which he blacks out and comes to in some remote place without any recollection of how he got there. His search for an explanation leads him to some disturbing conclusions.

"It's a heavy-duty film and I wanted to bring it a look to match," says Gainer "I really strove to create something I hadn't been able to before, something incredibly dark that also had loads of information throughout the frame. Greg believed in me and let me create some very interesting tableaus, dark tableaus. A lot of the lighting is just backlight with zero fill."

The film overall, says Gainer, needed to be literally, as well as thematically, dark. "It's not that kind of chiaroscuro film noire style where you have slashes and such," he says. "But it just wouldn't make sense to have too much fill light everywhere. To me backlight is photographically beautiful. It's that kind of Caravaggio or Rembrandt sort of thing. They mostly used 1/2 and 1/3 light, but it's that kind of effect that I'm talking about where the light just outlines things. To me, it's just more beautiful than flat lighting."

Gainer decided to go with a single emulsion - Fuji 500-T - for the entire show. He had used Fujifilm stocks on a number of successful music videos and Araki was impressed with their look. "I used the 500-T for everything; Interior, exterior, day, night," he says, elaborating that he chose to rate the stock consistently at El 250. "I overexposed a stop to begin with and then printed it down. That gave me a great deal of latitude especially in high contrast situations. it allows the film to see even more into the shadows than it normally does."

Though it might intuitively seem that this stop of over-exposure could cause some problems in the highlights, Gainer reports that the film has so much over-exposure latitude that he didn't even have to worry about losing highlight detail - except in the rare day exterior with a powerful reflection of the sun in a window or off a car, which would blow out regardless."

The DP also notes that he favors the stock's skin tones normally, and finds that for the look he desired the overexposure enhanced the quality he likes further. "It gives it just a little richer feel when you print it down, it enriches the skin," he notes. "Of course, in this movie it was primarily young people anyway and they all had fabulous skin to begin with."

Araki's films previously could be pretty easily identified by their use of a fairly static camera. This was something Gainer wanted to augment and Araki was open to many of his ideas. "We have a lot of fast pans," Gainer notes. "I tried to use movement to build certain energy into the emotion of what was going on

"I don't just move the camera to move it," he elaborates. "That's pointless. But I love to tell the story with the camera. I'm not as interested in seeing an insert of a key going in the door and then an insert of the person's face as they go through the doorway and then a shot from inside the room where the door opens and so on. I love to see the doorknob move, the camera booms up and finds the face and follows the person into the room. I don't like cuts as much as I do the move."

Gainer operates the camera on most of his videos and on some of his features, including Mysterious Skin. Over the years, he has developed a technique of keeping the camera (in this case it was a Panavision Platinum) mounted on a head attached to a six-foot jib arm, and then monitoring what the lens is seeing via a pair of video goggles. The goggles themselves, made by a company called Optex and designed originally for microsurgery applications, have served Gainer's needs well on literally hundreds of jobs.

"They don't make them anymore," he says, "but you can still get them at a few rental houses. I don't understand why people insist on looking through a hole on the camera and having to move their whole body around it. Why not have the camera be independent of the limitations of the body?"

Instead, he can stand with the jib arm and see what the camera sees through this virtual environment wherever he turns. As for the arm itself, Gainer can't see how some people would still use sticks. "In the old days a director might say 'a little bit higher' and everybody would get around the tripod and change it and then he'd say, 'I meant a little bit lower.' Now you just move the jib arm and say, 'how's that?' "

And, he adds, depending on which head the camera's mounted on, the jib arm can allow for some pretty amazing moves. "I can have the camera go from an inch above ground level to overhead in one second-whoosh-and I don't physically have to change position. Obviously, you're limited by your takeoff and landing on a shot like that, but that's an example of the versatility of it. On a simpler level, if an actor misses a mark, it allows me to compensate. I can pull back or push in without having a handheld look or needing a Steadicam.

This sort of camerawork, he says, requires an excellent assistant pulling focus remotely. "T-2.8 was the stop du jour," he says, "we were there most of the time and often the camera was just three feet from the actors. My camera assistant Shereen Saleh kept everything in focus beautifully. She is an absolutely amazing focus puller."

Gainer prefers to light everything with tungsten units, rather than HMI, whenever possible. "Even for day exterior I used tungsten lights corrected for daylight," he says. "Skin tones react so well to the tungsten light and I love the units themselves, the Dino especially. With the Dino you have 36 1000-watt bulbs spread over an area almost 8 feet wide. You're instantly dealing with a much smoother light than say an 18K HMI. It's something that wraps around the subject much easier."

In one scene, two characters end up at an abandoned drive-in movie theater. Shot in one of the few drive-ins left - a theater in Long Beach - Gainer lit the entire scene with two units. He bounced a 10K into the movie screen and backlit the rest of the scene with a Dino. This simple set-up, says Gainer, "created an amazing ambience. And then our special effects department made it start snowing at the end of the scene. It really works nicely."

Gainer continues to follow his bliss shooting feature films and recently completed his next film after Mysterious Skin, the John Waters comedy A Dirty Shame (also shot on 500-T), starring Tracey Ullman, but he admits he hasn't given up the short form altogether. He has bills to pay, and besides, "music videos have been very good to me," he admits. "They've allowed a huge window for being creative. There's very little you can't attempt in a music video if you explain yourself to the director."


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