Catch Me If You Can Car Rigging

[David Szasz]

Hi Everyone,

Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this but I was rewatching Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can and noticed this textured pattern over the windscreen during a car scene. You can see it most clearly on the passenger's suit jacket and also on the reflection of the sky over the dashboard in the bottom right corner. 

I'm wondering what this is. Is it a net rigged overhead to reduce but not cut out reflections? Or something else?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thank you!

[David Mullen ASC]

I made a post on Instagram about this same thing… yes, it’s a scrim to reduce but not kill the reflections on the windshield. Ideally you’d have some sort of hard sheet of acrylic ND as a roof over the windshield except that you’d get reflections of the windshield on the ND creating odd double reflections. Of course you could try a polarizer and rotate it to leave some reflections but the effect is not even over the windshield. The only problem with the scrim is that often being above the windshield it is the same distance from the camera to the glass to the scrim as the driver is from the camera so it’s impossible to have it out of focus even at a wider f-stop, they both end up being the same distance. I had this issue with an LED screen above a car windshield on stage, the pixels were too coarse but the screen kept falling into the same plane of focus. I ended up putting a light frost diffusion gel on the screen to blur it.

[David Szasz]

On 2/22/2026 at 9:41 PM, David Mullen ASC said:

I made a post on Instagram about this same thing… yes, it’s a scrim to reduce but not kill the reflections on the windshield. Ideally you’d have some sort of hard sheet of acrylic ND as a roof over the windshield except that you’d get reflections of the windshield on the ND creating odd double reflections. Of course you could try a polarizer and rotate it to leave some reflections but the effect is not even over the windshield. The only problem with the scrim is that often being above the windshield it is the same distance from the camera to the glass to the scrim as the driver is from the camera so it’s impossible to have it out of focus even at a wider f-stop, they both end up being the same distance. I had this issue with an LED screen above a car windshield on stage, the pixels were too coarse but the screen kept falling into the same plane of focus. I ended up putting a light frost diffusion gel on the screen to blur it.

Thanks for your insights David, very much appreciate it! Out of interest do you have a preference for keeping reflections or do you prefer to cut them completely with a solid? 

[David Mullen ASC]

I usually try a polarizer if I’m just looking at one person but I’ve also tried what they call a “midnight” (I think) in NYC which is a black shelf over the front edge of the roof that cuts the reflections off the upper half of the windshield. It’s a trick I first noticed in Tony Scott movies.

[David Szasz]

That sounds like an interesting effect, I'll have to keep an eye out for it next time I watch a Tony Scott film. Thank you David!