Anemone: Lighting the Landscape of the Face

When I first read the script for Anemone, I had an abstract idea of what the production's creative hurdles might be. Usually I’ll chronically underestimate these hurdles, but between the film's remote Welsh landscapes, unpredictable weather and ambitious set pieces, our challenges seemed quite obvious this time. The film follows Jem Stoker (Sean Bean) on a journey from his suburban home to the deep woods, where he seeks out his estranged brother, Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis), in a lonely stone hut. But as it turned out, what truly tested me wasn’t the mud or the rain — it was the quiet precision of lighting two faces in that cramped hut.

Finding the Film's Photographic Heart — Location Scouting and Influences

During an early scout out in the Pentraeth Forest in Anglesey, Wales, we discovered a crumbling, abandoned farmer’s shelter, and production designer Chris Oddy transformed it into a fully functioning set — one that felt genuinely inhabitable. This shelter served as our primary location for nearly half of the film, and was richly suggestive of Ray’s inner world. Much of the drama of Anemone is captured close on our actors’ faces, and compositions of Ray and Jem became the photographic heart of the film, with their shifting power dynamics and emotional energy shaping our entire shooting style. At times, a vast emotional gulf separates the two characters, and at other times, they are seemingly warm toward one another. That constant oscillation between warmth and unease became central to how we framed and lit each scene.

During prep, director Ronan Day-Lewis and I watched a few films together over one long night, discussing and drinking in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (shot by Alexander Knyazhinsky), Andrey Zvyagintsev's The Banishment (Mikhail Krichman) and Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata (Sven Nykvist, ASC). In Autumn Sonata, I love how tight the compositions are: With the entire frame full and without much breathing space, you feel a real sense of claustrophobia or pressure-cooker effect, with just two people engaging in discourse crammed so close. I loved the mid and wide shots in The Banishment; in that film, there's a constant sense of loss or distance, and this felt relevant for us when capturing moments in Anemone in which Ray and Jem’s energy felt alienated, or "off."

Lighting Ray's Hut — Practical Sources For an Off-the-Grid Aesthetic

Ray lives off the grid, with minimal electricity, and his hut has incredibly tiny windows, so lighting those interiors quickly became one of our biggest head-scratchers. I initially proposed an open fire, hoping to use firelight as a main source for our night interiors. But Ronan, Daniel and Chris, rightly, fell in love with the realism of a wood-burning stove with a tiny window, which better reflected Ray’s character. This stove is also important to the story, signifying an item Ray may have scavenged.

It was very important to Daniel to work in an environment that felt authentic to his character, and this included the lighting. With this in mind, gaffer Jonathan Yates and I first considered lighting with small soft boxes from above, or hanging practical lamps that Ray might have powered via a small generator. But this approach seemed all wrong, like we were drifting away from an off-the-grid look and slipping toward something that looked “lit.” In the end, we settled on using paraffin lamps, also known as Tilley lamps, as our primary practical source. We tested real ones, but they were too noisy and required constant refilling, so instead, we retrofitted several Tilley lamps with LED bulbs — some with Lowel Rifa LED systems and others with custom made RGB LED clustered units that were controllable from our lighting desk. Jonathan and our set decorator, Neil Floyd, implemented this solution on a very tight schedule.

The upside of the Tilley lamps was the flexibility they provided. We could move them around like practicals, integrating them into the scene, but they were blunt, harsh instruments for lighting, producing hard shadows and limited control. The hut was incredibly small, and hiding a traditional film light was rarely possible. In fact, most scenes were lit almost entirely with the Tilley lamps, and figuring out how best to do this consumed nearly half my prep time. A slightly incorrect lamp position could send a hard nose shadow in the wrong direction.

I also wanted to maintain a sense of menace and tension in our lighting, which felt relevant around the mystery of Ray’s past as he gradually reveals deeply painful events over the course of the film. We wanted our wide shots to intentionally fall off to shadows, and our close-ups to have a gothic realism-like quality — always with light and shadow, and rich, warm depth to the color temperature.

Accidental Eye Lights

Hitting the eyes, or eye, with precision was also important. An accidental benefit of our Tilley lamps were the incredible eye lights they produced; being such hard and small sources, tucked away in the corner, sometimes we would have multiple and very pleasant sharp eye lights. The combination of the huts' muddy-color walls and our characters' dark costumes made for a great palette that could soak up unwanted spill light, leaving us with faces and enhanced eye lights that really stood out.

Occasionally, we would further enhance these eye lights in the grade with our colorist, Gary Curran, at Outer Limits; Garry taught me that a touch of localized sharpening tracked to just the eye lights would enhance them beautifully. In the end, we were very happy with the results. Ed Riley, our lighting-desk operator, also added a beautifully realistic flicker to the lamps, mimicking the look of genuine paraffin flame.

Cool Skies and Moonlit Interiors

Ronan comes from a background in painting, and we aimed to connect the film's aesthetic closely to his work as painter, drawing inspiration from his motif use of cool, blue tones for our dusk, crepuscular skies and moonlit scenes. We mostly aimed to shoot these scenes at the critical time of day — or, with scenes that had a high page count, we would pray for an overcast day and lean the neutral light toward everyone’s favorite time of day in the grade.

Moonlit interiors were much easier to control. Chris built an identical duplicate of Ray’s hut in Aria Film Studios, which was conveniently located in Anglesey. Again, not so convenient were the small window size and thick walls of the hut. Jonathan and I opted to use a brute-force array of Nanlux Evoke 2400Bs and Creamsource Vortex8s, bounced into Ultra Bounce as a foundation, as well as some smaller Evoke 600C units, direct through diffusion gel frames for the areas to which we wanted bring attention. For the finer details, we also used some Dedolight DLH4 150W lights. Our lighting setup outside of the hut wasn’t pretty; lots of intricately placed flags of all different sizes and cine foil, cut to various sizes, helped Jonathan and I shape the light we were after.

Translating Emotional Truth to Screen

It was an enormous privilege to work on Anemone, and for me, the importance of photographing the close-up moments outweighed any other logistical challenges we faced. The landscape of the face and the truth of the emotion we translate to screen is something I will forever be wildly curious about.

Unit stills by Maria Lax. Images courtesy of Focus Features.