The really interesting thing is we’ve got a little over 1,500 shots in this movie, and the movie’s two hours and twenty minutes long. We did only, like, 38 shots in addition to that that had no visual effects. So almost every shot in the movie is a visual effects shot. The fact that there are only 1,500 of them, when you think about a typical tentpole superhero movie or big action blockbuster, a lot of those films are in the 2,500, 3,000 shot range these days.
When Lily’s in bed she does the table effect maneuver, and then she comes straight into the camera. I have to be aware of the whole action so that you don’t get hair all over the face and it’s distracting. The most challenging scene was of Lily lying in the bed at the end of the film. It was five hours and that blood came out of every orifice of Orlock. So it was quite challenging to restore the wig for the next day.
We built over 60 sets. Like we built all the houses, the monastery, and all the frescoes there. We built the chapel at the end where all the rats are. I built all of that so it could be decaying as well. The roof is falling but you can’t quite see it, which is a shame. We built the Romanian Village. Yeah, we built a lot for this film. All of that was built so for two reasons. One, so that we could get that decayed look, and also because Rob and Jarin liked to do very elaborate specific shots, and camera movements.
I loved the Casa Santa Marta. Its function was very useful. We didn’t have a lot of space and not much money. It had the longest corridor we could afford. Only one room, but it’s on trucks flat, so they squeeze in and out to create slightly different environments depending on whose room we’re in. I love how well it worked on camera. There’s not much ornamentation on it, it’s pretty simple but the simplicity really worked. The balance between the ornate, beautiful balustrades of the church and then this brutal underground bunker, a hermetically sealed prison was perfect.
My favorite scene is when Lawrence goes to confront Cardinal Adeyemi about his past and tells him he’s not going to be Pope. In the script, they pray together and then we see Adeyemi making a vote knowing that he’s finished, but we decided to fold them into one another so that the scene ends with Adeyemi asking Lawrence to pray. I just remember looking at this frame of Lawrence saying yes from another room, and I thought that looked like somebody’s point of view.
Red is a very important color in the Catholic Church, to begin with. Edward and I looked at the shade of red the church is using now and thought it wouldn’t work for the film. This was actually our starting point to say, let’s change the color. Let’s also change the fabric to a heavier, woolen fabric, in a red that embraces you. A color can create a distance and the color can draw you in. Red is the color of blood. It’s for love. It’s for fire. It is a very powerful and meaningful color.
It’s all about the light and how you use the camera. We captured the moonlight that cast an interesting shadow of Lily-Rose Depp’s face on the pillow in the last shot. There’s this monstrous sort of distortion on the pillow that was accidental. I sort of engineered that, you know, the shadow being that crisp and that hard, it’s like a convex mirror.
I do prefer shooting film. All three films I’ve done with Brady have been period films, shot on film. We are much more able to create an image that is more pictorial, and more impressionistic rather than the high fidelity and definition of digital cameras. We can explore more and underexpose.
I think that some of the things that were our greatest challenges became our greatest strengths. I knew that the challenge was gonna be to match the scale of the film with a really small team and on an indie budget. In the costume department, it was really beautiful because you’re in the trenches together and you sort of reach out to your community.
The second stage of aging of old age makeup with a healthy face was tricky, and the stage scene because I knew the audience would be able to compare both sides at the same time you want to do cool prosthetic makeup, but you don’t want to make it too obvious. You want to blend with the face because you are building up with the prosthetics, but at the same time, you see the other side of the face which is not wearing any prosthetics. That’s hard. So there is a balance.
