JOHN FOSTER, DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY

What initially attracted you to "Tully?"

When I was growing up, my family lived six years in rural Illinois, so when I first read the script the thought of huge expanses of space in the great plains excited me. They offered the possibility for starkly beautiful horizon lines in the compositions, and the chance to really use natural light. Landscape has always been one of the big subjects for artists, and in "Tully" the landscape was like one of the characters. The simple elegance of the landscape complements the dignity and integrity of the farmers themselves. In fact, the farm where we shot was almost like a temple in Indonesia or Mexico in the way the buildings were arranged around a central yard, and the group was surrounded by fields. It sounds a little hokey, but the place really inspired awe and reverence. I felt like I wanted to be a visual spokesperson for farmers and their land without romanticizing it.

How does "Tully" fit in to some of your other work as a cinematographer?

In my lighting, I generally attempt to create a look that's as realistic as possible, and although most D.P.'s might say the same thing, I really shy away from anything that seems glitzy or hyper-real. One of the biggest challenges for me was a sequence at night when Tully is on his way out in his truck and Ella comes up on here bike. She's upset, so he takes her out to the cow pasture because he remembers how soothing it was for him when he was a kid. For a low-budget film, it was an enormous challenge to light a big cow pasture and drive a pick-up truck with a camera in it into the middle of the herd. Where's the light supposed to be coming from? People pretend it's coming from the moon, but the most important thing is that it just looks like night. Many people worked really hard to make those scenes happen. That was a wonderful experience.

How did you get creative on a limited budget?

One of the toughest things to deal with on a low-budget film is day exteriors. This might seem counter-intuitive, but too much light coming from overhead in the middle of the day is really ugly, unless of course you're going for a particularly harsh look. When you try to control that light, you can soften the light with silks, but that limits you to a 20' x 20' area, and then you have to conceal the shadows of the frame, so that usually didn't work for us. You can also try to fill in with electric lights, but even a 12,000 watt HMI doesn't do that much in midday light. The best solution I could come up with was scheduling. I tried to shoot scenes that would be helped by pretty light when the light was prettiest, that is, early or late in the day - and shoot scenes that had a harsh tone to them, like the marshall delivering an ominous letter from the bank, in the middle of the day. The trickiest example of this was the scene where Tully and Ella go for a swim at the riverbend. One shot required that we build two tiers of scaffolding in the water so we would have a stable camera platform and a lens position two inches above the water line. Not only did we have to allow a whole day to build the scaffolding on the bottom of the lake, but we had to time the operation so the sun would be backlighting the actors when we shot the scene. I think our line producer, Debi Zelko, stopped breathing for about three hours while we were waiting for the scaffolding to get stabilized.