It’s been 10 years since veteran Oakland, CA-based director of photography Barry Stone joined forces with Clement Virgo on the director’s breakthrough debut feature Rude. The film garnered eight Genie nominations, including achievement in cinematography for Stone, and made a splash at the Cannes International Film Festival.

Stone cites the success of Rude as the prime reason he was asked to return to Toronto to lens the sexual drama Lie with Me, produced by Damon D’Oliveira and Virgo through their company Conquering Lion Pictures, for release through ThinkFilm in 2005.

Based on a sexually explicit novel by Tamara Faith Berger (Virgo’s fiancee), Lie with Me follows the adventures in love and sex of two alluring young people as seen through the eyes of Leila, played by Vancouver’s Lauren Lee Smith (The ‘L’ Word). Eric Balfour (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) portrays David, Leila’s somewhat unsure yet upstanding love interest. Other cast members include Polly Shannon, Kate Lynch, Kristin Lehman and Don Francks.

‘Since Rude had done so well for Clement, he wanted me to shoot his next feature Love Come Down, which I was unable to do because of scheduling conflicts,’ explains Stone. (The film was shot by Dylan MacLeod.) ‘But I was happy when he approached me for Lie with Me, since we got to know each other so well during a three-month preproduction stint on Rude.’

Although the preproduction time on Lie with Me did not nearly equal that of Rude, Stone and Virgo combed through the entire script together and watched films that would inspire the picture’s ultimate look.

Key film references for Lie with Me were Kar Wai Wong’s In the Mood for Love, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Women of the Dunes.

‘The look is based on a combination of Women of the Dunes, where the actors emerge out of the background and seem to have their own light within themselves, and In the Mood for Love, which gives this hot ‘passage of time’ feel,’ says Stone. ‘Besieged came into play because it also had a strong sense of heat and contrast to it, which is what Clement wanted.’

The DOP says he did a variety of tests with lead actor Smith. ‘We picked colors that suited the movie and suited her, and came up with a cosmetic peach as well as a cyan and cyan-rose combination,’ Stone recalls.

The three-week, mostly on-location shooting schedule on the $2.2-million pic was divided between Toronto and Hamilton, ON. ‘We filmed at an old girl’s school called Loretto Abbey on Brunswick Avenue and Bloor Street in Toronto, and in houses and the Fever nightclub in Hamilton.’

Floating camera

Shot in Super 16 format, Stone says they approached the racy material in the novel and screenplay by ‘floating’ the camera, instead of ‘dwelling on genitals.’

‘Clement wanted it to look beautiful, thus it’s not shot like a steamy pornographic film [that is] focused on the act, but rather from the main character’s point of view, about her passage and what she’s thinking while this is going on,’ explains Stone.

Director and DOP used a three-method approach to cover Lie with Me with a mostly handheld camera. ‘Since we wanted to be inside the main character’s head, we had a Leila POV shot, a single on Leila and an over-the-shoulder shot as she tells the story about her life,’ recalls Stone. ‘For the scenes that she’s not in, we would go back to a more practical kind of coverage.’

Armed with an Aaton XTR prod camera and high-speed prime lenses, Stone says he enjoyed shooting handheld, especially with the French camera. ‘It’s wonderfully ergonomic and easy to shoot handheld because it’s been designed to fit on a human’s shoulder,’ he says. ‘I would put it on my shoulder and hardly notice it’s there during filming.’

For the love scenes, Stone also operated an Aaton A-Minima cam with a little monitor. ‘It is very small and allowed me to ‘float’ the camera around the actors as they were making love.’

Stone credits camera assistant Brian White with facilitating challenging sequences that involved going from outside to inside a house in the same shot without a lot of lighting.

‘There was a six-stop difference between the exterior and interior, and Brian helped me by not only focus pulling, but also changing the aperture as I go from outside to in,’ says Stone. ‘The transition from bright exterior to light interior had to look seamless and he did a remarkable job.’

Stone used medium-speed Kodak Vision 200T 7274 film stock because Virgo wanted the film to be as grainless as possible. ‘Clement wanted Lie with Me to look like it was shot on 35mm, so we did not use any of the high-speed stuff,’ he says.

As is not always the case, Stone will be included in the post-production phase, which includes processing at Deluxe Labs. ‘We’re doing a digital intermediate process [at Optix Digital Pictures], which I’m very familiar with since I’ve done it three times,’ he says.

‘I think it’s the way of the future to shoot original material on film, which has 1,000-to-one ratios, as opposed to video, which has at best 400-to-one. The analog transfer of the film from a negative has all the info, highlights and lows, so you’re not creating the look, you’re taking it with you,’ explains Stone. ‘We will be creating the final look of the film in high-definition digital mode and project that, and if we’re happy with it, it will be output to 35mm.’

Born in the U.K. in 1945 to actor parents, Stone came to Canada and began studying architecture at the University of Toronto, but chose a career in film after apprenticing with cameraman Dennis Miller. He later moved to Oakland, but says he likes to return to Toronto at least once a year to shoot a film. His credits range from features to MOWs and series, notable projects including Jerry Ciccoritti’s TV hockey movie Net Worth (1995) and Peter O’Brian’s feature Hollywood North (2003).

‘After Lie with Me is completed, I’m going back to California to do some carpentry and to begin prepping film projects in both Alberta and Los Angeles,’ says the DOP.

Lie with Me is scheduled to wrap production in Toronto on July 20.