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Twenty-four years ago, Guillermo del Toro and Danish cinematographer Dan Laustsen ASC DFF teamed up for the Oscar-winning director’s first American feature, Mimic. Since then, the two have collaborated on Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water and now noir crime drama Nightmare Alley.
Based on the 1946 novel of the same name, Nightmare Alley takes us to 1940s Buffalo, New York, where grifter Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) finds himself in psychiatrist Dr. Lilith Ritter’s (Cate Blanchett) orbit, planning a big con.
Although filmed first in 1947, del Toro doesn’t consider his version a remake but more an accurate adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s pulp fiction – and of Gresham himself.
“The novel certainly presented aspects of psychosexual,
mystery, magic, weirdness that were really interesting that were not tackled in
the first version for many reasons,” the director explained.
“Including the fact that there was censorship. It was done during the code. So they really circumvented a lot of stuff.”
Del Toro “very, very pointedly” says he also use Gresham’s biography as the basis for the script. “If you look at Gresham, you find out that he was a seeker, like The Fool, the Tarot card. And he was looking for truth in Catholicism, and psychoanalysis. He was a folk singer. He was in the Spanish Civil War. He became a communist. He was looking for the truth about himself, gets a lot of money and his life unravels rather fast.”
The director had his pick of projects after 2017’s Oscar lauded monster romance Shape of Water and indeed is often drawn to gothic horror like Pan’s Labyrinth or Crimson Tide. Here the opportunity to take on the noir genre complete with a glamorous ice-pick dangerous femme fatale (Blanchett) and characters with a fateful past proved irresistible.
“It’s very adult, no pyrotechnics, no big action. It’s a very intimate, almost like a character portrait,” he said. “I believe that there is a beautiful place for a new resurgence of noir, because it is the most cinematic, lush, glorious genre. And other than horror, it has been my love all my life, both in the novels and in the filming genre.”
The film’s lavish, stylized look is partly the result of the
director and DP’s similar philosophies on lighting, camera movement, and how a
movie should look and feel.
“We have the same opinions about deep shadows, one single source lighting, and moving the camera,” Lausten told Film School Rejects. “Don’t be afraid of the darkness.”
They referenced several landscape paintings (including by painters like Vilhelm Hammershoi and Andrew Wyeth) as well as the original concept drawings to pinpoint ideas. After test they scrapped the original idea of shooting in 4:3 aspect ratio in favor of widescreen.
Del Toro tells Aframe, “We wanted to have the characters live in the shadows so Bradley Cooper is often completely immersed in a bucket of shadows and you don’t see his face.”
They also decided to lower the ceilings on certain sets to create classically composed images where “the camera is always roaming like a curious child.”
An early discussion was whether to film it in black and white, as Joel Coen and Bruno Delbonnel have done with their noir infused studio bound version of Macbeth.
“We don't want to make a black and white movie, we want to make a powerful color movie,” the DP told Slashfilm. “I’ve never seen the black and white version. So for me, when I'm working with Guillermo, for example, I'm coming into the project clean. I don't want to see this is as a remake of something.”
He shot large format on Alexa 65 for scale, supplemented by Alexa mini. “Landscapes have to be wide, wide, wide. The carnival has to be huge. When we did Cate's office, we made it bigger and bigger.
For Blanchett’s character Lausten wanted to light her face and nothing else in old-fashioned ’40s-style. “We have this single source, a kind of follow spot on her that was moving together with the camera. When she's in the Copacabana, standing there with a gun, the revolver, the light on her with the shadows on the front head, it's stuff like that I really like.”
Lighting was also used to divide the story worlds of the carnival and Buffalo. “The carnival, for example, should be a much softer light compared to when we’re coming into the Buffalo world, where Lilith looks more like a very powerful diva queen,” Lausten tells Aframe. “All the light on her is very specific. Of course, it’s a little tricky to do that because, if she or the camera is not hitting exactly the marks, it doesn’t work. It’s a very technical but powerful way to work.”
By all accounts, del Toro is meticulous in planning from production design to shot design with the director not shooting conventional master, medium, and close-up but with specific shots which he is going to use in the edit.
Production designer Tamara Deverell says del Toro wasn’t “particularly trying to be film noir” but did lean into art deco. “We tried to be historically accurate, but I was also looking at modern versions of art deco,” she told THR.
“There’s a hotel in Hong Kong that I use as a direct reference for Grendel’s office — the rich mogul in the movie,” she said. “I looked at a lot of Fritz Lang’s I and a lot of older films through the 30s and 40s had that the deco look to them.”
And while Deverell acknowledges that the film was working mostly in human monster metaphors, she says they did manage to get in a few creepy carnival elements.
“For the human monstrosity, we tried to be very real,” she
says. “For a Guillermo del Toro movie, it was not really monster-based, but we
did do some of the pickle punks and the geek pit. But really the monster really
is the human, ultimately, thematically.”
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