RING TONES

Principal photography on "The Ring Two" began in Los Angeles, where the newsroom of the former Los Angeles Herald Examiner building in downtown doubled for the offices of The Daily Astorian. The actual newspaper that serves the citizens of Astoria, Oregon, The Daily Astorian was generous in allowing the production to use its name and banner in the film.

Other southern California locations utilized in the early weeks of filming included St. Luke's Hospital in Pasadena; the Mary Andrews Clark Residence, a circa-1912 courtyard apartment complex located in the Mid-Wilshire district, which became a women's shelter; and the Terminal Annex building in downtown Los Angeles.

Following three weeks in and around Los Angeles, the production moved to the quaint, picturesque town of Astoria, Oregon, where the often gloomy weather helped lend an ominous tone to the proceedings. Built on a peninsula, Astoria's relationship with water was also very much in keeping with one of the story's major themes. Explaining water's significance to the film, Hideo Nakata offers, "I'm from Japan, which is an island country surrounded by water. Through natural disasters, water itself can be a symbol of death, so we have a natural fear of water that influences me. And, of course, in this movie, water becomes a sign of Samara's evil spirit, because she had been kept at the bottom of a well for a long, long time."

Ehren Kruger observes, "As a symbol, water is a life source, but it is also an environment in which we can't naturally live, so it's the perfect elemental metaphor for both life and death."

The water theme was also very influential in creating the film's color scheme. Production designer Jim Bissell states, "Water is very important to the film, and as a result, most of the colors are cool blues and greens. The gray overcast sky, which we see quite a lot in the Pacific Northwest, influenced the tone, too. It has a very monochromatic look, and in some ways it's a bit claustrophobic, which made it the perfect setting for our horror film. I'll elaborate by saying that things are scarier if you don't telegraph the fact that you're about to see something scary. You can take an atmosphere that appears perfectly natural, almost welcoming, and just shift the light level a little bit and it suddenly turns into something very foreboding."

To that end, Bissell collaborated closely with director of photography Gabriel Beristain to evoke the overall color palette. The cinematographer attests, "We needed to respect that there is a recurrent water element in the film, as well as the greens of the bucolic countryside, so we avoided heavy pastels and strong primary colors and went for the blue, green, gray and earthy tones."

Beristain also used the changing weather patterns of the region to his advantage. "Rachel is looking for normalcy, welcoming back a world that she wants to be tranquil, a world that doesn't give her any memories of the nightmare that she lived. We welcomed sunny days, because this is a new world, a new time, a new city. But the weather of Astoria is very volatile-it might be sunny, but five minutes earlier, it was pouring."

To match shots, the creative team decided to wet every shot, as Beristain says, "just in case. And it turned out to be beautiful-you know that look when the sun comes out after the rain, and everything glistens. We made virtue of whatever weather Astoria decided to give us. We couldn't wait for perfect weather so our perfect weather became the unpredictability of Astoria."

Reinforcing the ill-omened relationship between animals and the evil energy of Samara, Rachel and Aidan's disturbing confrontation with a herd of deer was filmed on the tree-lined roads of Fort Stevens State Park, located in Hammond, Oregon, about 10 miles outside of Astoria. For practical and humanitarian reasons, no actual deer were used in any part of the filming because they are notoriously difficult to train. Instead, the deer were all created with computer-generated imagery produced under the supervision of Rhythm & Hues visual effects supervisor Betsy Paterson and her team of CG animators.

The involvement of deer in the story was significant to Hideo Nakata, as in ancient Japan, deer were considered sacred-divine messengers that are still protected as national treasures today.