The director was confident that the actor "could play the man behind that veneer, the man who also lost his soul," and when he gave him the script, he told him to think of Dean Martin while in the role. Hanson cast Basinger because he felt that she "was the character to me. What beauty today could project the glamor of Hollywood's golden age?" To give his cast and crew points and counterpoints to capture Los Angeles in the 1950s, Hanson held a "mini-film festival", showing one film a week: "The Bad and the Beautiful", because it epitomized the glamorous Hollywood look; "In a Lonely Place", because it revealed the ugly underbelly of Hollywood glamor; Don Siegel's "The Lineup" and "Private Hell 36", "for their lean and efficient style"; and "Kiss Me Deadly", because it was "so rooted in the futuristic '50s: the atomic age." Hanson and the film's cinematographer Dante Spinotti studied Robert Frank's 1958 photographic book "The Americans" and felt that the influence of his work was in every aspect of the film's visuals. Spinotti wanted to compose the shots of the film as if he was using a still camera and suggested to Hanson to shoot the film in the Super 35 widescreen format and in spherical lenses, which in Spinotti's opinion, conveyed the same feel of a still photo. Before filming took place, Hanson brought Crowe and Pearce to Los Angeles for two months to immerse them in the city and the time period. He also got them dialect coaches, showed them vintage police training films, and introduced them to real-life cops. Pearce found the contemporary police force had changed too much to be useful research material and disliked the police officer he rode along with because he was racist. The actor found the police films more valuable because "there was a real sort of stiffness, a woodenness about these people" that he felt Exley had as well. Crowe studied Sterling Hayden in Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing" "for that beefy manliness that came out of World War II". For six weeks, Crowe, Pearce, Hanson and Helgeland conducted rehearsals, which consisted of their discussing each scene in the script. As other actors were cast they would join in the rehearsals. Hanson did not want the film to be an exercise in nostalgia, and so had Spinotti shoot it like a contemporary film, and used more naturalistic lighting than in a classic film noir.