WHAT HAPPENED WAS...                                     (click here for THE WIFE)

I made the choice to not change the script at all from the stage version. I felt that opening up the story would take all the ‘steam' out of the drama which I felt was fueled by the claustrophobic, real-time feeling of the story. In fact, Dan Ouellette worried that the space we decided on was too open and spacious - that it would let the audience off the hook too easily and would not be believable as a legal secretary's apartment. I opted for the larger space anyway to allow the camera moves that Joe DeSalvo and I envisioned.

The color plan Dan, Joe, and I worked out was bluish green as a base color and blood red as a counter color. The apartment was painted in a dull bluish green. All the props and costumes were either in that family or neutral. The red counter color was in Jackie's dress. This contrast was also played up as the drama progressed by having three different versions of the dress - each a more vibrant red that would contrast more vividly with the blue-green as the story unfolded.

The only other place we used red was in Jackie's secret room where she reads her story. We wanted to make the color scheme of that room the pivot point in the drama just as the story itself is the pivot in the script.

Helping this ‘pivot' idea along we used a film processing technique that was suggested by Joe DeSalvo. We pull processed the film in everything shot before the reading of the story. Pull processing is accomplished by over exposing the negative and under exposing the print. This makes for finer grain and more muted colors. We had hoped that this would give a more distant, deadish feel to the early proceedings. After the reading of the story we shot normal exposure. This rendered the film after the story more grainy, more colorful, more present.

In addition we repainted much of the apartment after the story making the trim and pillars a purplish green color to make the room clash even more deeply with the red dress. We also replaced many of the props that were green (before Jackie's story) with pink and red props or we colored parts of the props pink and red, such as the eyes in the CATS poster - (this included even replacing the green fish in the fish tank with red gold fish. Many of these touches were not obviously noticeable but we hoped they would create a subliminal push to the story.

Another touch we tried (but I think it is also not noticeable) was having a mannikin in the apartment that seemingly turned on its own to ‘watch' the story as it unfolded. This was a nod to THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT but it could hardly match Fassbinder's use of this technique in his movie.

We shot in sequence except for the Jackie's story - that we shot on the last day. This was necessary since we had no room for staging the equipment except the secret red room so it had to wait till the end.

We shot for eleven and a half days - Dec. 12 to Dec. 23, 1992.

THE WIFE                             (click here for WHAT HAPPENED WAS...)

The first day of shooting was March 14. We shoot three 6 day weeks finishing on April 5. The snow was almost gone but we'd made it.   (I will put more detail here soon - I apologize for the delay on this section.  T.N.).

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