How ‘Cyrano’ Captured the Romantic Lighting of Sicily Set

For Joe Wright’s Cyrano, based on screenwriter Erica Schmidt’s stage musical, an adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey says he wanted to express at the onset a sort of “nascent romance and the innocence of that and the kind of yearning for love.”

He notes, “We went for a much warmer tone and soft lights on the actors’ faces,” explaining that this was guided by the look of the baroque-style city of Nato in Sicily, where the movie was lensed on location. “When we went there initially to scout locations, we suddenly realized this is how the movie should look, what the Sicilian light delivers naturally. When you walk into a palazzo, for instance Roxanne’s living quarters, through shutters, there’s a really hot beam of Sicilian light coming through, just bouncing off the white marble, and that created our lead source. So I lit everything pretty much from the outside with big overexposed sources. And that gives a lovely softness when it bounces off that marble on faces.” The DP says that he photographed the movie with an ARRI Alexa large-format camera with Leitz lenses, and used diffusion on the camera.

McGarvey, who was previously Oscar nominated for Wright’s Atonement and Anna Karenina, says he wanted to reflect the “dynamism [and] innocence of love” with more “chaotic or dynamic” camera moves at the film’s start before it “kind of tightens” and the imagery becomes more about “portraiture, and then about the interlinking of the looks between the three protagonists” — Cyrano (played by Peter Dinklage), Roxanne (Haley Bennett) and Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.).

“I really loved playing with close-ups. I don’t think I’ve done so many close-ups in a film ever,” he admits. “We really wanted to see their amazing faces. Peter Dinklage, you couldn’t hope for a better portrait than a face like his, and same with Kelvin and Haley. We knew we were going to be cutting between, or even superimposing within the same frame, these three heads. We knew that close-ups were going to be important in the telling of that part of the story.”

Later in the movie, the war scenes filmed on Mount Etna replace the warm look with what McGarvey describes as “lithographic sharpness. We wanted to express the veracity and the harshness of war.” The look shifts again when Cyrano, who has returned from battle, meets Roxanne in a convent. “When we went on a scout there, I took some photographs, and the first photograph I took was slightly overexposed. When we got back, Joe was like, ‘The overexposed one is beautiful. It feels so celestial and divine and heavenly.’ ” McGarvey adds with a chuckle, “So we basically overexposed it. We lit it with very hard sources through the windows, through the open doors, and overexposed it by about a stop and a half.”

This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.