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Reader SurveyFade to Black:
Bruno Delbonnel, Cinematographer
Dec 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
It was inevitable that A Very Long Engagement, the masterful World War I novel by Sébastien Japrisot, would be made into a movie, and who better to direct, shoot, and star than Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Bruno Delbonnel, and Audrey Tautou, hot off their success with Amélie. When making a World War I epic, there are obvious visual touchstones to reference, the foremost being Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. But cinematographer Delbonnel wasn't interested.
“The Stanley Kubrick movie is just amazing, but it's a black-and-white movie,” he says. “Black-and-white and color are opposites. It's a different way to work. Paths of Glory is absolutely amazing. But, in fact, we didn't watch it that much.” The films they did watch? The classic cinematography references The Godfather: Part II and Saving Private Ryan. But as Delbonnel says, after speaking in awe of Janusz Kaminsky's work on the latter film, “You have to find your own path. We just forgot about it afterwards. I was quite lucky because I have a very good director with me, and he knows exactly what he wants.”
The story concerns a handicapped young woman, Mathilda (Tautou), whose fiancé is reported dead in the war. Simultaneously, five soldiers accused of treason for self-mutilation are turned loose into the no man's land between the French and German trenches. Mathilda is convinced that her Manech is still alive, and the story is split between the bright airiness of Mathilda's world in Brittany and the darkness of trench warfare in the Somme. Visually, it all came down to the color brown. “We wanted to have this different color regarding the period of time. There was this sunny kind of look in all the sequences when Audrey was involved, which are bright and yellow/reddish — more brown than red. We wanted the trenches to be more bluish, but because of the soldiers' uniforms [called Horizon Blue], which are really specific to the French army during the First World War, it was too much. So we discovered that the mud in the trenches could have this kind of reddish look.”
Delbonnel shot Kodak Vision 5274 and 5218, 200 ASA and 500 ASA, respectively. For printing stock he used Kodak's Vision Premier 93. But it was in the digital intermediate that he made his success with the color. “We spent six weeks for the digital timing, so for me it's [something to look] forward to after the shooting — then I can work again on the image,” says Delbonnel. “That's the best tool we have on the market now. For a cinematographer it allows you to go further. The grading becomes part of the process of creation.”
The scenes in no man's land — brutal as they are — are astonishing for their peculiar, even color. For this, Delbonnel rigged a 459-square-foot scrim on a 131ft.-tall crane. The silk scrim was dyed gray/green and, when visible through the stormy French skies, the sun shone through. When the clouds blotted it out, six French-made 18K HMIs did the job.
Jeunet wanted the camera moving in almost every shot, and this proved to be a problem in the very opening. “The opening shot of the film, where we go from the Christ down in the trenches, you see all those people walking toward the camera,” says Delbonnel. “It's not a very complicated movement, but it was really difficult because it was such bad weather conditions. It was awful to do. … The real rain was too thin and they just dropped tons of water on us.”
The camera was on a Super Techno Crane, with the telescopic arm retracting as the camera moved into the trenches. “Everything failed,” he says. “The camera failed, the Techno Crane failed, all the electronic equipment on the set failed because there was so much humidity. Even the rain deflector failed. It was a hell of a day. We changed the camera three times. There was 95 percent humidity [and we had] a thermal shock. When we were out of the trenches, let's say it was [50 degrees] with 75 percent humidity, and down in the trenches it was [36 degrees] with 95 percent humidity.” They tried to cool the camera while shooting to avoid the temperature change, and they blew pressurized oxygen on the lens to avoid the moisture.
