Below the Line: Green Valleys, Golden Sunsets and ‘War Horse’

“War Horse,” Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's children’s novel (and a subsequent play based on it), will open in theaters Christmas Day. But it has the look of a movie that could have just as easily played on movie screens 50 years ago. The wide open spaces, the glowing skies, the rolling hills have the feel of John Ford films, which inspired Mr. Spielberg and his longtime cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski.

Mr. Kaminski spoke by phone about what he and Mr. Spielberg were seeking in the lighting and photography of this drama, which traces the life of a boy and his horse through World War I.

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“The movie deals with a family of farmers where the land in their life became extremely important,” Mr. Kaminski said. “Day to day, everything they needed to survive came from the ability to harvest the land. So I wanted to make the land be a character in the movie.”

The aim was to reflect the beauty and the harshness of that land in various ways: gorgeous imagery that, in the context of the war, he said, needed to have an edge.

The extremely visual location, in the Dartmoor area of Devon, England, certainly helped. But he also had to use a great deal of light.

Warner BrothersJohn Wayne in John Ford’s “Searchers,” a film that gave inspiration to the look of “War Horse.”

“Every time we had actors outside, doing the chores, plowing or training the horse,” he said, “I was using a tremendous amount of light on them because I wanted to retain the value of the sky. I didn’t want the sky to be burned out.”

Ford’s quintessential westerns were the inspiration “simply because he became such an iconic storyteller through landscape,” Mr. Kaminski said. “We weren’t necessarily tapping his work, but it’s such a blueprint of any movie that deals with land and a person within the land.”

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In a scene in which the British cavalry are moving in to ambush German troops, Mr. Kaminski photographed soldiers on horseback making their way through a wheat field, just visible above the stalks.

“I wanted to reflect a certain point of view that is associated with cavalry charges through the history of the literature and through the paintings,” he said. “There’s a certain innocence here with these these troops who feel so united with the horse, they feel so powerful. And the whole beauty of the beginning of the cavalry charge, which is mythical to some degree, ends with this disaster. It’s a statement on the war. We cherish the nobility of the war, but then that lyricism is stripped away.”

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The scene above reflects the darker aspects of battle. “Here, the horse is galloping through and spooked by the war,” Mr. Kaminski said. “It’s how we should feel; this raw, animalistic instinct that allows him to run away. Where humans, rather than doing that, follow through and they start killing each other. So I wanted this moment to be really full of energy.”

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For a scene near the end, the filmmakers used a silhouette and bathed the screen in a warm glow. “I was using red filters to capture the beauty of the sky,” Mr. Kaminski said. “We also staged the scene at a particular time of day, not necessarily at sunset, but just maybe an hour before sunset, and were able to achieve a kind of glorious, almost fake, fablelike scene. Because the movie is a fable, to some degree. So I wanted to be very optimistic and happy.”

Below the Line is a series that singles out behind-the-scenes players in the awards season race.