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“The art department created lantern units for us to use, working on the idea that as the battle went on, the electricity would fail and the Japanese would resort to lanterns,” says Dunkerley. “We rigged those up with our bulbs and power, but none of that put out enough illumination to actually light anything. We didn’t even try very hard to sell the idea that our light was coming from them. It was just coming from somewhere.” Stern and Dunkerley agreed that the best way to sell darkness was “to not only use a lot of black, but also have some really bright brights, with little in between,” says the gaffer. “If you’re walking down the street at night and a car shines its headlights on something, there’s nothing but black and that very bright light. You can clearly see the thing that’s illuminated, but the range between the darkness and light is so extreme that it reads as dark. We used some pretty extreme lighting ratios on this picture to achieve that same effect.” These extreme bright highlights were generally sold as daylight stabbing inwards through an opening in the ground, and the filmmakers could sometimes rely on the real thing, “but for the most part, we were using 5Ks or 10Ks hidden around a corner,” says Dunkerley. “Any time we had an opportunity to throw in something really bright, we did, to help sell the darkness. One thing that really helped us in this regard was the fact that the dirt and rock down there wasn’t really kicking anything back. We wanted to control the blacks, and that was made easier by the fact that we could add those very hot sources and not have the light bounce all over the place.” Stern frequently employed washes of light across the jagged rock walls, which not only enhanced the texture of the location but also created a perfect backdrop for playing scenes with the characters in silhouette. “It was similar to an approach we sometimes used in Million Dollar Baby,” he says. “For most scenes, there’s always the question of whether to light characters or light the background and play them in silhouette, but I didn’t have a lot of choice on Letters. The decision was just made shot to shot, in part because Clint doesn’t like to over-prep. “About 100 feet down in those mines, the trick was to treat each shot individually because, well, there was nowhere to go,” he continues. “Forget about pulling a wall. But it was a great source of discipline. I think it’s great to always see ceilings, and, in this case, we had a lot of them.” Dunkerley adds, “One of the great pleasure of this film was trying to make the caves look the way they really look. So often in this business, we go into an ordinary location and try to make it look like the most visually arresting location on the planet. But here, we were going into these insanely spectacular mines and just trying to get that on the screen. Not only were they not four-walled spaces, but they also had a vertical element that you just don’t see in designed sets. They presented us with an incredible opportunity to explore.” The sloping nature of the underground spaces lent itself to unusual compositions that were reminiscent of methods Stern employed on Mystic River. “In that film, we often tried to work with vertical space and the notion of one character being higher in the frame or on a different plane than the other,” he notes. “Clint often took advantage of staging things on the steps in front of the row houses we found on location, positioning characters higher or lower on the steps and then composing to suggest the dynamic between them. It was very simple and effective, and we thought that approach could be useful in Letters, as the military is all about hierarchy. For example, after several soldiers commit suicide by blowing themselves up with grenades, Saigo tries to flee up out of a cave toward daylight and is chased by another soldier, who threatens to shoot him for desertion. We found a tunnel space that had the incline we wanted and positioned the actors accordingly, which added a three-dimensional feeling to the drama.” This strategy was also used for a scene in which a cruel junior officer is about to execute two lowly privates for insubordination. Stern explains, “In this case, the officer is towering over the two men with this samurai sword over his head when Kuribayashi suddenly appears on another plane, even higher above the men, and stops the execution. There’s a sort of stacking effect, with the camera down low and giving Ken Watanabe a fantastic power position that was perfect for his character.” With a chuckle, he adds, “The damn things weren’t level, anyway, so this was our shot at turning lemons into lemonade.” The caves were often too small to allow Campanelli to fully employ his MK-V Modular Sled Steadicam rig. “We didn’t have the space to maneuver, so we sometimes just used it as fluid tripod,” says Stern. “We certainly couldn’t use a dolly down there.” Although some tunnel sets were built onstage at Warner Bros., Eastwood’s penchant for treating sets and practical locations equally helped maintain a consistent look throughout the picture. “With Clint, I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve pulled a wall over the last five pictures — maybe two times,” Stern says. “And our only major stage set for Letters was the large cavern in which one of the commanders, Baron Nishi, gives his last orders.” In this scene, the wounded Nishi [Tsuyoshi Ihara] commands his remaining troops to abandon their post and regroup with Kuribayashi, then takes his own life. “We built that set on Stage 19,” says Stern. “If you have an art department, there’s always an urge to have them build something, so this was their big set, and they did a great job with it. Also, I think even Clint finally came to the conclusion that you can’t shoot an entire movie in an abandoned mine. We had this set ready just as we wrapped on location, and we didn’t treat it any differently than we did the real caves.” “When I saw the completed movie, I was very pleased with that particular set,” says Dunkerley. “The art department did a terrific job on it, which made it easier for us. I was worried, because after working in the real caves, I didn’t know how the art department was going to pull off something that beautiful, but they did. It helped that there was a fairly large opening to the surface with a dark, night-blue cyc outside and a few trees, which we lit very subtly. Just that little bit of depth created by the piece of sky, the trees and a little smoke really sold the set. By seeing that glimpse of the outside world, you feel it’s real.” Because this set was used for day and night sequences, the cave mouth was covered “with a bunch of space lights above outside, but inside we lit it just like we did our real caves, with lamps on stands,” says Dunkerley. “We didn’t use an overhead grid of any sort, because that would have immediately given it a different look. We couldn’t do that in the real caves, so we didn’t do it on set. That said, the set was mostly built out of foam, so if we needed a light in a particular place, we could just cut a hole and conceal the lamp by taking a foam rock and screwing it to the wall. Cheats like that were acceptable.”
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