Hughes'/Leo's eyes often changed colour between being blue and green throughout the movie.
Anyone know what that might symbolise? I think I noticed them being green when he was acting kinda crazy and blue when he was more normal, but I wasn't looking out for it for the whole movie.
Maybe something to do with the time period and the movie films being used at the time? The reason I mention this is because on the commentary track of the DVD I have they mention something about their use of matching the colors.
shareIt could have something to do with simulating the early two-strip Technicolor process. Most images utilizing this process appear tinted either orange or green, hence the blue eyes would appear green. As the movie progresses it moves into three strip Technicolor and all of the images appear in their proper color. If You want to see good examples of two-strip Technicolor on DVD, see either 'Doctor X' or 'The Mystery Of The Wax Museum'.
shareMy guess is that they must have used some sort of filters over the scenes. But I don't mind Leo with green eyes 😍
shareLeo's eyes change color (greenish/blueish) throughout the film because of the cinematography, which was deliberately designed to mimic the cinematography color aspects of each era of filmmaking Hughes was involved with. And greens and blues were among the colors most affected by that process.
This is why Leo's eyes look a different color in the beginning -- same reason why the peas on the plate (when he's at dinner with Hepburn) look more bluish than green. The color processing in those scenes is meant to echo what was possible in color filmmaking/cinematography at the time. Which is why even the WB logo as the movie starts, looks weirdly washed-out and aqua-colored.
So Leo's eyes never look their actual color until the very end of the film, when color cinematography was much more advanced.
Hope this helps.
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I keep thinking I'm a grownup, but I'm not.
Whatever Scorsese was trying to accomplish, he failed from a historical standpoint. The two-color process that is decidedly being aped at the beginning of the picture is Cinecolor, as the two colors for that process were red and blue. Two-color Technicolor was red and green. Ditto Multicolor, the two-color process Hughes sunk (and lost) a fortune into and the process he used to film the color ball sequence in "Hell's Angels." (Technicolor did the lab work on it. Cinecolor did nothing on it, as Hughes never had anything to do with Cinecolor.) Anyone who has seen "Hell's Angels" and isn't color blind knows full well the only blue in it is in the "black and white" scenes. If you are seeing a two-color Technicolor picture from the late '20s or early '30s that looks "bluish" and "aqua colored", the print was either severely faded or the telecine work on it was severely botched. Because that's not how it should look. Never mind that whatever two-color scheme we're talking about here, it was well past its expiration date by the chronological point in the story where Scorsese switches to three-color. Technicolor refused to even have anything more to do with their two-color process by the late '30s.
And as another poster mentioned, Hughes' eyes were dark brown. Being a stickler for details and accuracy, I can't imagine he would have been impressed with any of this were he alive to see it.
Excellent post.
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