While watching Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019) recently, I couldn’t help but notice the lighting used in the Thrombey Mansion throughout the movie. Set in a gothic mansion in a rural fall setting, the lighting was crucial in setting a mysterious and foreboding tone for the film. While much of the light used in the film is candlelight, there is also a significant amount of natural light that feeds into the sides of the house, especially the large library that all of the suspects are interviewed in at the start of the film.
In order to ensure natural and realistic lighting in the mansion, Arri SkyPanels and custom-built LED panels were set up for the film. Having to battle with the real natural light from the Gothic mansion, the team of cinematographers went as far as using a spectrometer to measure the light in certain regions of the scenes to ensure that the lighting was realistic and constant. Using the custom LED panels, their cinematographers were able to control the brightness and color in each scene, and as cinematographer Steve Yeldin put it: “Work the way we wanted.” Their advanced tools allowed them to adjust the warmth and hue of characters’ skin tones throughout the film, which was central in giving a character an expression of innocence or guilt in a movie so cognizant of facial expressions and the guise of guilt.
In Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), the film also takes place in an historic mansion with a plethora of candlelight and natural lighting. Thus, their cinematography team had to use a variety of artificial three-point-lighting, particularly backlighting, to give the characters an air of love and softness when together, following along the themes of love in the film. Additionally, the light worked to emphasize the color and motion on the characters faces, and make the characters appear as if they were almost in a painting themselves. While both films used their lighting for different purposes, one for the portrayal of love and the other for the portrayal of guilt, they were both equally important in such a rustic setting.