Anything but Blade Runner

Admir Jukanovic explores the crucial role that lighting design has played on the silver screen, from Nosferatu to Pan’s Labyrinth. And he only mentions Blade Runner once

“If you asked most lighting designers to pick a movie that inspires them, the popular answer would be Blade Runner,” says Admir Jukanovic, a German-born lighting designer at London company Mindseye, which specialises in architectural lighting. “It’s a very powerful movie in terms of visuals and lighting. But I’m going to spare readers the Blade Runner thing because there are a lot of movies, both before and after the Second World War, that can give us a broader view.”

An early masterpiece that he keeps in mind is the Dracula adaptation Nosferatu, shot in 1921 by German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. “There is a really great sequence in which Nosferatu goes up some stairs to a lady’s room to try to suck her blood. But the story is told through his shadow, which one sees ascending the stairs and opening the door.

“There is just a single powerful light source that casts the shadow and this creates an exaggeration of scale, so you see a huge Nosferatu with über-long claws about to open the door. It’s almost a comic light, as if drawn by hand. The sequence is metaphorical, because the actor is not actually present in front of the camera. The stark contrast of the silhouette resembles a woodcut, like the German Expressionist art of the time, and heralds the beginning of film noir.”

Low key city

Jukanovic compares this use of shadow with another landmark German film from that decade, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, released in 1927. “There are images of factory workers who are essentially slaves. They work in these catacombs and they are illuminated from above by large light-wells.

What is interesting is that this is very uniform lighting: there are no highlights and the subjects are lit without any stark contrast. Everything is in grey, completely different from the Nosferatu sequence. The light is very monotonous – in this way the light tells the story of the workers’ lives.”

“Then there is the depiction of the mad scientist in Metropolis, probably the first evil or mad scientist in the movies. He has been copied throughout movie history in his expression, his crazy hairstyle, but also the way in which he is lit. The light often comes from underneath him, as if you had put a torch under his chin; you get light under his eyebrows and eyes, and he has a dark forehead. From this point on in cinema, anyone who really wants to illuminate someone to look evil illuminates them from beneath. Even Mother Teresa would look very, very bad lit from underneath. It’s a genius trick that Lang uses which has become standard.”

‘You can’t fight in here…’

The mad scientist pops up again in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove of 1964, in the form of the eponymous nuclear expert played by Peter Sellers. Jukanovic praises the work of Ken Adam, who designed the film’s iconic War Room in which much of the action takes place. “Adam created a circular pendant above the round table in the War Room. The circular nature of the table gives a sense that everyone who is sitting there takes the same status, and the illumination follows this, with the pendant illuminating the table and everyone around it evenly. The pendant consists of a battery of fluorescent panel lights that can be angled as necessary. The ambient light for the whole room comes from huge panel screens in the background, which are backlit to make sure they are evenly illuminated. Adam also adds a few active lights into the screens, some blinking to represent missiles and planes moving on the maps.

“The amazing thing about Adam’s approach here is that he doesn’t use any other light sources to light the film, just these sources that we see on screen. What you see here is what you get. It’s an honest approach. This is characteristic of the work of my company Mindseye. One puts the light where it needs to be, double-checks that it gives the lux level the room needs, and if that’s the case, job done. There’s no need to do any fancy extra lighting.”

Jukanovic also admires the attention to materials that Adam demonstrates in Kubrick’s black comedy. “He insisted the table was covered in the same green baize cloth used for billiard and pool tables, even though you wouldn’t see the colour because the film was shot in black and white. It was important because of the texture, the way it takes the light.

Also the floor is a black, Fred Astaire-style dance floor with a gloss finish. It’s so shiny that it reflects the light from the huge screen panels and makes the floor appear bigger than it actually is. It does the opposite of what you’d think a black floor would do, turning it almost into a mirror.

“This is one of the first questions any lighting designer will ask: what kind of texture is the material? We always take into consideration how the light will fall on the material.” Adam’s pen and pencil sketches for his set designs are another inspiration for Jukanovic, in the way they capture light and shade. When time permits, Mindseye will sketch in detail how light will fall in any proposed scheme. “It’s probably the best way to show a client how a space will look when lit. We can do it in Photoshop, hand-drawing in the light with a pencil tool.”

Into space

Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey looked to the future, and Jukanovic explains that, in terms of lighting, it guessed right. “When the National Council of Astronautics meets at the Clavius moonbase, the only light  comes from three opaque panels on the three walls. What’s interesting is that panel lights actually broke through into the mainstream about the year 2000, when they were suddenly everywhere, including museums like Tate Modern.

A few months before the Tate opened, Mindseye used light panels in its design for gallery White Cube. We also copied the council room very directly for our design for the bar Tequila in Soho, London, although we introduced coloured lights behind the panels to make the ambience a bit more funky.”

Inverting space

One image from 2001 stuck in his mind from the first time he saw it on screen. “It is the shot of the strange room where the astronaut finds himself – a room full of his memories. The really bizarre thing about the room is that it’s completely lit from the ground upwards from floor panels.

Reality is turned upside down, so to speak. “A more contemporary example is Pan’s Labyrinth from 2006, directed by Guillermo del Toro. The little girl who is the film’s main character escapes into a surreal dream-world of her own. There is a shot of the labyrinth where you have  the rhythm of columns repeating down the corridor, and light and shadow cast on the floor, as if there are some openings next to the columns. But actually there aren’t any openings – the light comes from nowhere. It is added by CGI.

And that’s the most interesting thing you can do with light within the movies: you can twist reality.”

● Admir Jukanovic was talking to Sam Phillip

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