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“One Night in Miami”

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A single hotel room sets the tone for much of the movie. Photo by Patti Perret courtesy of Amazon Studios

Tami Reiker Captures the Drama’s Larger-than-Life Characters in Confined Spaces

Regina King’s powerful movie, One Night in Miami, is based on the award-winning play of the same name. It is centered around four Black icons — Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) and three friends — Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cook — who get together after Ali’s historic defeat of heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in 1964. The film takes place mainly in a small hotel room, though the epic boxing match starts the film.

It is a fictional account inspired by the historic night these four formidable figures spent together. It looks at the struggles these men faced and the vital role they each played in the civil rights movement and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. More than 55 years later, their conversations on racial injustice, religion, and personal responsibility still resonate.

The fight scenes were lit with Fresnel lights. Photo by Patti Perret courtesy of Amazon Studios

‡‡         From Stage to Screen

Heavy on dialogue, King handpicked cinematographer Tami Reiker to help the drama move from the live stage to a motion picture. Reiker, a working cinematographer for 30 years, started in NYC after graduating from NYU before moving to L.A. 15 years ago. Her many credits include High Art (1998), Pieces of April (2003), Beyond the Lights (2014), and, most recently, The Old Guard and One Night in Miami (2020). Reiker is the only woman to have won an American Society of Cinematographers Award for Outstanding Achievement (for HBO’s Carnivàle in 2003).

“I received the script from the producers of the show through my agent and absolutely loved it,” says Reiker. “I put together a ‘look book,’ met with Regina, and we really hit it off. Next thing I knew we were off to New Orleans!” (A “look book” is a visual presentation of how the cinematographer sees a film they are being interviewed for.)

In this case, Reiker selected images by photographers of the period the events occurred, notably Howard Bingham and Neil Leifer. Both were Mohamed Ali photographers. Bingham followed Ali his whole life. She also studied the street photographers of the time, in particular Saul Leiter and Garry Winogrand.

Because the film is set in Miami but was filmed near New Orleans, King and Reiker did intensive in-depth research to ensure they captured an authentic look for the real life locations. “Regina wanted to stay true to the actual locations depicted in the film,” says Reiker. Both she and King wanted to keep the film’s colors saturated and vibrant.

The cinematographer and crew, working inside the ring. Photo by Patti Perret courtesy of Amazon Studios

‡‡         Colors and Light

A combination of what Regina wanted to see and Tami’s visual presentation brought about a collaboration which soon included working with production designer Barry Robinson and costume designer Francine Jason. They created a color palette of vibrant blues, greens and glowing warm tones, which touched on every aspect in every frame, including the lighting, the lampshades in the corners of the room and the texture of the actor’s clothes.

“Barry found this really interesting hotel an hour outside of New Orleans that was a good match for the Hampton House in Miami. The hotel provided an outside hallway, including the diner space and the phone booth in the parking lot and a pool.” The production brought in all the lighting for this location because it was just a dark empty parking lot. “All the streetlights were the wrong color temperature for the time period,” adds Reiker. “So, we turned them off, then brought in 120-foot Condors to hang tungstens for backlight and plenty of our favorite blue gel to give that contrasting glow to the ceiling from the diner.”

The Hampton House hotel room itself was actually a set built on a soundstage, but true to form, a very small set. The director and cinematographer also had to overcome the restrictions of shooting in the limited space of the room at the hotel set. “We wanted to keep the camera moving in the Hampton House hotel room,” adds Reiker. “I decided to keep both cameras on jib arms. That allowed the operators to keep the cameras floating and to better follow the actors around the room.”

In designing the set, it was deemed necessary to have windows on both sides of the room to give it larger, less enclosed feel. While somewhat isolated in feel, the windows helped show a world going on outside, and the production team wanted film goers to always feel the life outside the windows. After all, the discussions by the men in the room center on that life. One window lets in lighting effects from the parking lot, with cars and headlight imagery passing by. Through the window on the other side of the room, the pool’s water effects could be seen.

For the pool lighting, there were many discussions. The old way of doing it was to have a baby pool with mirrors in it and the lights shooting at the mirrors. For color, Reiker chose a specific blue gel, Lee Cyan 30, but she never felt the blue she chose totally matched her gel choices available by just punching through the numbers into an intelligent fixture.

Her gaffer, Allen Parks, solved her dilemma. “The lights that we used for the ‘pool light’ water effect on our hotel stage set were Rosco X24 Effects with two rotating Rosco water effects gobos, with Lee Cyan 30 gel added. I found that the optimal effect was achieved with opposing rotation of the gobos, with a sharp focal bias to one of the gobos and only allowing a portion of the unfocused gobo to contribute a variable wash.

“Thus, the fixture focus was always off-center and on the edge of the two gobos’ projected convergence,” Parks continues. “It took me a little bit of fishing with the fixture focus to find what worked, and that’s the fun with this type of effect. Additionally, we were changing up speeds of the gobo rotation to match screen times — busier effects when people might have been in the pool, and slower in the afterhours. The X24 easily handled that, and we changed both lens and fixture focus to accommodate.

“I had tested these lights in the past for water effects, but they always came off as too hokey and theatrical for direct projection on a subject for a motion picture use,” Parks adds. “Projected as a backlighting effect on the sheers of our hotel room and given some time to find the practical settings and focus, the X 24’s provided a believable effect and practical solution.”

Original scoops were brought in to mimic the lighting in 1964. Photo by Patti Perret courtesy of Amazon Studios

‡‡         Small Room, Big Lens

Early on in the process King and Reiker decided they wanted to shoot large format, using the Alexa 65(6K). Reiker had used the Alexa 65 on her last film, The Old Guard, starring Charlize Theron. King used the Alexa 65 on If Beale Street Could Talk, for which she won an Academy Award for best supporting actress (2019). “We both felt that camera with the prime DNA lens was really going to give us the look and texture we sought, and the focus fall off is so beautiful with a large format,” says Reiker.

Both women were acutely aware that the budget for this film pretty much prohibited such an expensive camera, however. The single most expensive part in any video camera is usually the sensor, and there are very big differences in image quality when using different sensors, which come at very different price points.

The amount of media the Alexa 65 sensor is recording when shooting large format is quadrupled compared to smaller format cameras. Everything is quadrupled, particularly in the color grading, which is processed digitally through the sensor. Reiker approached Arri Rental (arrirental.com) in Los Angeles with the script and gave them an impassioned pitch, ultimately a simple plea for help. “They were fantastic and came through for us.”

The use of the jib arms came about from the daunting amount of wall-to-wall dialogue. There were 10- to 15-page scenes, and Reiker looked at how to break that down, cover the scenes and keep the camera moving — floating, not just static. “I presented her with the idea of using two jib arms, not on hotheads, but manually operated by the camera operator. Even though it was a small space, we had these giant 12-foot jib arms built on dollies so the operators could float the camera while following the actors.

“We shot 10-15 minute masters and then broke down the coverage from what we learned in the masters, as we went in for tighter coverage, we would float the camera between characters,” Reiker adds. To augment this approach, the camera department crew members were all on headsets so Reiker could be talking to them while they were shooting.

During the initial takes, as Reiker recalls, she and King looked at each other and questioned themselves, saying, “‘Are we really gonna do this?’ And then it just seemed like the only way to shoot these scenes. It gave the actors the freedom to move and met our goal of capturing a lot of beautiful movement in the room. Later in the film, when they bust out on the roof, we used handheld. We wanted to capture that moment of freedom. They need air, they need to get out of that room, so handheld cameras made that freedom felt.”

The actors portrayed outside of the hotel. They are, from left, Leslie Odom Jr., Eli Goree, Kingsley Ben-Adir and Aldis Hodge. Photo by Patti Perret courtesy of Amazon Studios

‡‡         Lighting the Boxing Ring

The lighting for the boxing scenes is exactly the lighting that was used for the real event. Reiker, King and gaffer Parks studied archival footage of the fight film. They discovered that a lot of the fixtures in the grid above the ring in the Miami Convention Center for the Clay/Liston fight were not used. “They were just up, there; never got turned on,” says Reiker. Regardless, to keep the authenticity of the scenes, King and Reiker agreed that the entire lighting grid should be recreated. In the process, gaffer Parks found period-correct 2K scoops to hang on the grid above the ring. They approached the Wembley fight in the same manner.

Reiker acknowledges the immense impact of having so many historic images to reference for this film to inform her work on it. The real impact she feels the film brings, though, is that “the conversation that takes place between these great men in this movie is as important now as it’s ever been.”