Interviews

Haunted Mansion Cinematographer Jeffrey Waldron Reveals Insights on Authentic Sets, Supernatural Encounters, and Beyond

August 25, 2023

7 mins read

Haunted Mansion Cinematographer Jeffrey Waldron on Real Sets, Real Ghosts & More

Summary

Haunted Mansion is a fun and family-friendly adaptation of Disney’s classic theme park attraction, featuring a star-studded cast and a spooky yet engaging atmosphere. The film captures the essence of the Haunted Mansion ride while adding its own unique elements.
Cinematographer Jeffrey Waldron played a key role in establishing the look of the movie, drawing inspiration from the ride’s use of candlelight, moonlight, and other atmospheric elements. He aimed to strike a balance between spookiness and accessibility for all audiences.
The film’s sets were largely practical, with the house and various rooms fully built, allowing the actors to interact with real spaces. The collaborative and fun environment on set contributed to the film’s success, as the talented cast shared their own ideas and improvisations.

Haunted Mansion is a fun and family-friendly adaptation of Disney’s classic theme park attraction. The film arrived in theaters 20 years after the original Eddie Murphy The Haunted Mansion, and features a star-studded cast to compete with that of the first iteration. Haunted Mansion stars LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, and more, all of whom turn in delightfully engaging performances; the film was directed by Justin Simien and written by Katie Dippold.

Set in New Orleans, Haunted Mansion has an engaging yet appropriately spooky feel across scenes that take place both in- and outside of its titular spooky digs. A key contributor to this was cinematographer Jeffrey Waldron, who is also known for his work on shows like Little Fires Everywhere and Dear White People. Waldron helped ensure that Haunted Mansion was haunted enough without being too unsettling for a family audience and helped capture the liveliness of the mansion as well as its surrounding city.

Jeffry Waldron spoke with FilmmakerFocus about defining the look of Haunted Mansion, the atmosphere of the film’s star-studded set, and more. Note

This interview took place during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and it’s important to acknowledge that the movie being discussed here would not exist without the hard work of writers and actors in both unions.

Jeffrey Waldron Talks Haunted Mansion

FilmmakerFocus: How much did you pull the actual attraction when you were first getting the look of the movie together?

Jeffrey Waldron: I think that probably had the ultimate influence for us early on. Justin is a huge fan of the ride, [and] was a Disney Cast Member in a previous life. Certainly, Darren Gilford, the production designer, [was] pulling details down to all the woodwork. For cinematography, it’s interesting because it is a live ride–it’s a short ride–and there’s not a lot that would equate to modern cinematography there.

The things I could pull from [were] a lot of candlelight, [and] a lot of moonlight. Some of their moonlight colors would go on to [be used in our movie]; their green moonlight would become our ghost realm moonlight color. Any use of fog, any use of colors from the crystal ball… all these color references of light that worked live were kind of woven in. That said, a lot of the fabric of what this movie looked like had been created, hopefully, in celebration of the ride [and] based on these elements of the ride, but [also with its] own quality that can do what the ride does so miraculously, which is being a little bit scary and being a little bit light when it needs to.

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How do you find the balance of making it a little spooky and bringing that in while also making it accessible for everyone?

Jeffrey Waldron: That was the big overarching [question], like, “What is the look of this thing? Can it look like a horror movie? Can it still be funny if it is not a big bright movie like the last iteration of this movie was?” I decided that neither felt right, and that it might have a better time pivoting from spooky to funny if it had its own painterly look to it.

When I started seeing Darren Gilford’s sets–these big Southern Gothic aged, beautiful wooden doorways, and woodwork, and all that stuff–I was like, “Okay, yeah. This sort of formal, atmospheric and painterly vibe allows us to, at one point, turn the lights off. And we’re [in] moonlight, and it’s scary, [but] at the same time we have enough richness to light these larger-than-life characters so it doesn’t feel like ‘Why are they making jokes when it’s this serious [and] terrifying?’” It was definitely the hardest weave, but I think creating shape and mood, keeping things spooky, but not horrific was kind of the mood.

The [first Haunted Mansion]—was that something that you watched in preparation for this, to see what was going on there, see if there’s anything you wanted to pull from or not pull from, or did you not really think about it?

Jeffrey Waldron: I turned it on to see what was going on. There was just a pervasive attitude going into this that we were going to reference the ride and not any other super specific source. We didn’t talk about this movie very much. I watched some of it. I like Eddie Murphy. I had fun with what I saw. I knew it was very different from our script and very different from what our visual approach was going to be.

I noticed when I was watching this, especially in a lot of the early outdoor [scenes], that there’s a lot of shooting at night, a lot of stuff in the dark, and it all looks really good. Everything’s clear; it still looks dark, but it looks great. Is that a hard thing to achieve?

Jeffrey Waldron: It is. It’s something that takes a lot of thought and preparation. There are a lot of different ways to approach darkness. I knew [that] for Disney, and for kids, and for a modern viewer, that just letting things be super dark is not interesting. I did want it to feel like what it feels like to look in the dark. What we actually see in the dark isn’t just pitch blackness; it’s actually our rods and cones struggling to fill in all the shadows. Our ability to see color is sort of warped, and so it becomes this silvery world.

I was hoping that, subconsciously, when people see it this way, it feels like it’s actually really dark [but] you can rnrnTrying to actually see what’s hidden in the shadows can be quite a challenge. But we found a way to do it, using enormous softboxes positioned at a low level to fill in those shadows. We also had a bit of haze to lift the shadows just a touch, while our key lights and moon lights provided the piercing brightness. However, instead of piercing through complete darkness, they pierced through a subtle level of light. This was the secret to creating a dark and spooky moonlight atmosphere that still revealed all the details.

On the set, we had a perfect balance between practical sets and green screen. The house itself was fully built, from the foyer to the stretching room, library, dining room, and main hallway. Everything was interconnected, allowing the actors to move freely in a real space. Director Justin made sure that the house felt authentic, with real wood, finishing, and marble. Even the exterior was meticulously crafted, with the first tier completed and aged. The pillars, walkway, stairs, and driveway leading to the gate were all practical elements.

Speaking of the gate, it connected to a location in New Orleans lined with Spanish moss trees. Another gate was built there for all the scenes involving that area. Ben’s house had a facade built in the French Quarter, while the interior was constructed on a stage. The only part that required more virtual effects was the finale graveyard, which was created on a large stage. Anything in the distant background was expertly completed by our talented friends at ILM.

So, while we did utilize some green screen and virtual effects, the majority of the set was tangible and real. This allowed us to immerse the actors and the audience in a truly authentic and atmospheric experience.ccr-REPEAT6″ class=”dynamically-injected-refresh-ad-zone”>

[Some of the] most talented actors around [were] in one place on this. What was the environment on set? Was it very collaborative, and were people jumping in with ideas and stuff or sticking with the script?

Jeffrey Waldron: Everybody was coming in with their own energy, for sure. When you get those people together, there are a lot of ideas, outbursts, fun improvs, different variations, [and] different kinds of takes that Justin’s getting out of them. I would say the vibe was always really fun.

I would be shooting a scene, and he’s not even in it for, like, an hour, and then at some point, he’d be like, “Hey, it looks good,” and I’d look over, and it’s Danny DeVito sitting on an apple box in our tent. I’m like, “How long has he been there?” People would hang out; it was a really fun vibe. And [they’re] some of the coolest actors around; to see them all together feels crazy and bizarre. [It was] a real dream come true, a one-of-a-kind experience.

Do you remember a specific scene that took the most work or changed the most as you were working on it?

Jeffrey Waldron: Oh my. Yeah. A lot of stuff did change as we went, or we would shoot it, and it would be rewritten and reworked. Fun sequences that come to mind that were challenges were the stretching room sequence or the ghost realm sequence—creating what that world was going to look like, [and] what cinematography tools could help tell that story. That was a fun one. My initial instinct was, like, “What if it’s sort of the film negative of our world, so where we have all these warm lights and silvery moonlight, now we’ve got this sort of green moonlight that feels very of the ride, and you’ve got these pinks and purples and heightened strange colors that look like the film negative version of our world.

There was also some custom lens work we did there, so that we’re actually using these older ‘60s lenses—sort of from the era of the ride–that have a lot of aberration and a different way of looking at the world. They also are a little bit more distorted in the wide, and we used a lot more of the wide end of the lenses. Those were really fun ones that I was like, “On the page, Ben goes into the ghost realm. There are ghosts everywhere, but what does that mean visually?” It was up to us to test things, try things, put them in front of Justin, and ultimately come up with something that feels interesting and fun.

I loved the effects in general, especially with the ghosts. They’re semi-translucent, you can see bones in there, and it’s super interesting. In terms of your work, especially when you’re working on a set, how [does] knowing that you’re going to have all these VFX considerations affect what you do?

Jeffrey Waldron: I try not to let it affect me too much just so that what we are shooting is still in my light and still interacting in a way that feels very present. That’s a really great effect from our VFX folk. [For] the duelists, we knew that any place that a little slash of hard light might hit them would be a place you’d see bone, so it would influence us in that way. That said, it was really nice to actually be shooting those people instead of just [shooting] a plate and knowing they’re going to put in somebody who’s on the blue screen later. We actually shot those guys; they had witness cameras so that they could create the transparency, [and] we often use motion control so we can get transparency and still do our camera moves. We tried to do as much in camera as we could—obviously [with] faces and things like Hatbox and Leota, those are VFX.

So, just to clarify, for all those ghosts and with Jamie Lee Curtis, were they all on set with you, or were they added?

Jeffrey Waldron: Hatbox was a fully mo-cap face. His body was shot–a lot of his body was photographed. His clothes, and the way the wind is working on them, and all that stuff [is photographed], which I think helps ground him. Jamie, I think, was fully mo-cap, except [in] her flashback she’s actually in her scenes. [With] other ghosts like the bride, the duelist ghosts, [and] a number of other ghosts, we just photographed them in special effects makeup and full wardrobe.

About Haunted Mansion

Based on the Disney theme park ride of the same name, Haunted Mansion is a supernatural comedy that shares no elements with the prior films. Rosario Dawson stars as Gabbie, a single mother with a son looking to start over and happens upon a mansion that seems too good to be true in New Orleans – and her hunch proves correct. To resolve her ghostly problem, Gabbie seeks the help of a priest and a widowed paranormal expert, a psychic, and a historian to hopefully rid her home of unwanted guests.

Check out our other Haunted Mansion interviews here:

Rosario Dawson & LaKeith Stanfield
Tiffany Haddish & Jamie Lee Curtis
Justin Simien
Owen Wilson

Haunted Mansion is in theaters now.

Source: FilmmakerFocus Plus

Violet Granger

Violet, a film enthusiast from New Orleans, draws inspiration from the city's vibrant and eclectic arts scene. Having studied English and Film at Tulane University, her articles often delve into the connections between literature and film, analyzing adaptations and the impact of storytelling techniques.