As a result, the director had two cameras running which allows for accidents to happen and to be captured on film.

"You don't have to go back and say to the cast, 'you know that great thing that happened unexpectedly, could you do that again?' because that can kill a performance," Soderbergh says. "Also, there is a certain energy in filming in this manner because the actors know they had better be 'on' all the time."

"We tried to minimize the technical aspect of the filmmaking and deal more with the performance and the reality of the world these people lived in," continues Lachman. "There's a lot of mixed lighting. In the real world, you're never under one color temperature, you're under different color sources."

Soderbergh, who was familiar with Philip Messina's work from Out of Sight, on which he had served as the art director, hired him as the production designer on Erin Brockovich.

"Normally, when I interview with a director, I put together a book of images to start the initial conversation," Messina says. " It might not be anything specific, a piece of lighting or colors. On this film, Steven had already decided on some of the desert locations. Every time we would scout, he would take photos with his wide-luxe camera and that was worth a thousand words because you could see where his eye was going. It showed us what he was thinking about in terms of lighting and how he was going to shoot those locations"

Next, Messina plastered these images up all over the art department because by looking at them, he could get a real insight into what the director was seeing.

Messina continues, "I also had conversations with Ed Lachman about the light in the film because there is indoor light, outdoor light, cool light and warm light. Ed was planning on mixing them in a very atypical way so that it would look as though we had just walked into these locations."

Especially vital to the production were the Jensen home, because it is her house that triggers the story, as well as the Masry & Vititoe offices.

"Erin and Ed were a wonderful resource," Messina says. "They let us spend time in their office and they also met numerous times with our costume designer and our prop department. Erin showed us some of the actual transcripts and documents from the case and she also let us see the things she had on her walls-including a huge map that she uses as a dart board. Ed let us copy some of his framed degrees and other memorabilia from his long career so the office set is very personalized and authentic."

Jeffrey Kurland, who was nominated for an Academy Award* for his costumes on Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway, had worked with Julia Roberts twice before: on Allen's Everybody Says I Love You and P.J. Hogan's comedy, My Best Friend's Wedding. Although this was his first time collaborating with Steven Soderbergh, his work was familiar to Jersey Films, for whom he had designed the costumes on writer/director Richard LaGravenese's Living Out Loud and the Universal release Man on the Moon, directed by Milos Forman.