Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/974985
Another character caught in the middle of Andrew's psychosis is David Madsen, the aspiring architect. His career path, which sent him to Minneapolis, reminded me of how determined architects and others who specialize in interiors can be about their living spaces. David's converted loft is grey, with poured concrete, with echoing voices and diffuse light bouncing around. But for the storytelling, pains were taken to design the space as a prison, with expert blocking and directing making sure that David has obstacles between him and any exit. There's a dog cage obstructing the back door and a long table near the front entrance. Inside the bedroom, David is confronted by Andrew, who again impedes his escape. A large mirror was situated for David to see himself—and to make his trap feel confined and eerily infinite. As meticulous as David's loft strives to be, there's a work-in-progress vibe too. A sheer piece of plastic, taped to the ceiling and hanging toward the floor, divides the kitchen from the central living space. Its purpose is not explained, but the cinematographer Nelson Cragg found its use. Shooting through the plastic, Andrew can be seen approaching the kitchen—a spectral menacing figure. That crumpled curtain-like scrap fits in with another surface that also became a lens of sorts: the emblematic 1980s glass bricks. Stacked in Florida's police stations, hospitals and AIDS clinics, they let light stream into interior enclosures, but also open up possibilities for shooting characters as they're coming into or going out of a scene. Through such obscure prisms, the action always feels both bright and eerie. A tropical menace pervaded the shoot, not just the gun violence in broad daylight, but the sexually transmitted plague that had long ravaged a community to which Andrew and many other characters uneasily belonged. Ryan's first discussion of the project emphasized that we would be depicting what it meant to be gay in the '90s. You can see it in the aspirations infused in David's space—an architectural career, after all, was then a pioneering option for gay men who were excluded from other professional D C B A