Twilight (1998-2002)
Birth of a Production Team
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON, in the middle of a thunderstorm; summer of 1998. Rick, Dan, [Richard Sands, Daniel Karp] and I were seated around the kitchen table of my family’s cabin in Becket, MA. This is more or less how Twilight began.
That conversation now seems fateful and monumental to me, but at the time, it was really just a casual meeting. I didn’t have any kind of grand plan. Twilight, as a title, did not exist yet. I had just finished Hover, and wanted to go back to shooting in color. I also wanted to move toward using light in a more cinematic, intentional, and narrative way. But back then, I really only thought one picture to the next. So in this case, I had a specific issue I needed help solving: I wanted to put a light in an outhouse.
I had been working with Dan for a couple years at that point, and had described the next picture I had in mind to him:
The camera would be looking down from an elevated position. Close to us, there would be a row of outhouses, a mound of dirt, and a trench. Beside that, there would be a septic truck, and behind it, the edge of a neighborhood with people going about their daily lives. The central element of the story would be a figure investigating a mysterious, maybe slightly supernatural situation involving light and smoke happening in one of the outhouses.
Dan suggested I talk to Rick.
Dan had been working with Rick as part of the large network of people involved with the late great Douglas Trumbull in the Berkshires. They both worked on Trumbull’s effects team for the 1995 film Judge Dredd — Trumbull, the innovative genius visual effects supervisor behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and many others) had left Hollywood and set up shop in the Berkshires, bringing countless talented people with him to work on his team. Many stayed — and Rick was one of them.
The “Yankee Septic” picture and then the next couple pictures, including “Beer Dream,” (below) were a time of finding my footing on Twilight. In those early pictures, it was more or less just me, Rick, Dan, and Bill Markham (a tree surgeon I’d been working with for a while also.) Rick was carrying and setting up all his own lights. Dan was often operating the camera, but in the case of the below picture, he was up in the lift operating a Xenon light. I was on the ground with the 8 x 10 camera, and Bill was making the fog.
After that, more and more people starting coming on to help, and evolved into a real team maybe by midway through the series. We got better at organization and planning too. We were able to do more and more elaborate pictures, build interior sets on sound stages, and use lighting and effects in focused, purposeful and more heightened ways. We were refining, fine tuning, and learning from mistakes until ultimately, we had really developed a system and way of working together.
As Dan recalls, the conversation that occurred in the cabin in 1998 between myself and Rick, to the background of thunder and rain, was like listening to two people talk about the same thing but with completely different vocabularies. Rick thinks abstractly, and is able to see a technical plan in his head from the first moment. He knows which lights he’ll need and where they’ll be positioned. He talks about color valuations, the way light reflects, and so many other things that are foreign to me. I more or less see the picture in my mind and can describe the way I want it lit, in much less technical terms. Somehow Rick and I always understand each other, and the way we work together is exactly right. He has been my Director of Photography for over 25 years.
Twilight was definitely a turning point, and influenced every picture we’ve made since.
This piece is part of a multi-part series commemorating the opening of Gregory Crewdson: Retrospektive, at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria. The exhibition runs May 29-Sept. 8, 2024. You can find more information here.
Editorial note: This piece was written by Juliane Hiam, based on conversations with the artist, and with Daniel Karp.
I love reading and seeing this history.
i have salvaged a copy of Twilight from a thrift store and it was one of the best purchases in my life. i could spend days just going through it and finding new things and feelings.