Story Supportive
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jon Silberg
Traditional methods used to create the looks for this year’s Oscar nominees.
To achieve the stark, harsh look of There Will Be Blood, Cinematographer Robert Elswit shot in anamorphic format on slow filmstock—using vintage hand-cranked cameras and lenses on some portions. And because Director Paul Thomas Anderson didn’t want to use a DI, Elswit also built the look, color, and contrast on set by lighting through windows and cracks in the walls. Image: Francois Duhamel © 2007 by PARAMOUNT VANTAGE, a Division of PARAMOUNT PICTURES, and MIRAMAX FILMs. All Rights Reserved.
The four cinematographers nominated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Oscars this year — Robert Elswit for There Will Be Blood; Seamus McGarvey for Atonement; Janusz Kaminski for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; and Roger Deakins for both The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men — make a point of relying as little as possible on the latest digital technology. Each prefers instead to work with interesting lenses, filters, and lighting techniques to build sophisticated looks into the original film negative. Two of the films — There Will Be Blood and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly — were graded without going through a digital intermediate process. While the other three films were finished in DI suites, their cinematographers — Deakins and McGarvey — stress that they still relied essentially on what could be done in the photochemical world.
Elswit, who took the award home on Oscar night, has shot all of Director Paul Thomas Anderson's films (including Boogie Nights and Magnolia). During prep, those experiences foreshadowed for the cinematographer that all of Blood's look would be to support the dramatic narrative and Daniel Day-Lewis' character. Elswit recalls his first experience shooting for Anderson on the film Hard Eight. They were preparing to shoot in the hotel penthouse where the lead character lives. “There was this incredible wall of windows, and outside — about a mile away — were the Sierra Nevadas,” he says. “It was the most incredible image I've ever seen, and Paul goes over and shuts the drapes! He sees the look on my face and says, ‘We're never going to see those mountains, but we'll know they're there.’ He doesn't want beautiful, picturesque images, which is why it's always so interesting to work with him.
“[On Blood,] we wanted to make the landscape look stark and frightening — like the hardest place in the world you could possibly imagine living.”
Shot in anamorphic format on slow filmstocks, the film, the cinematographer says, started with the minimalist sets created by Production Designer Jack Fisk (Days of Heaven). Built on a sprawling Marfa, Texas, ranch, the small town Fisk created is where most of the action is set. “Only the railway track and water tower were really there,” Elswit says. “Jack built the town, the railway station, the church, the Sunday family's house, and the Plainview house. Having it feel like real location and community during production informed the look. It was like we went to a real place to make the film.”
“Another director would have wanted to do shots that show how clever we were to connect all these locations,” Elswit says, because it would have been physically possible to design shots that show off the proximity of all the key points of interest to one another. “Paul doesn't care about those things. He throws it all away. He is interested in pictorial style, but only in the service of the dramatic. We would show up any time of day, in any weather, and if it made sense for the story, we'd start shooting. We weren't interested in waiting for sunrise or sunset or anything like that. With Paul, everything is about finding the scene with the actors when we're all standing on set.”
Because Anderson dislikes the abundance of options a DI offers filmmakers to deviate from their original intent, there was no digital post on the film. Elswit built in the look, color, and contrast on set by lighting through windows and — for the church set — through cracks in the walls, and with instruments hidden in nooks and crannies Fisk provided. He shot portions with vintage hand-cranked cameras and lenses manufactured long before modern coatings were invented.
For Atonement, Cinematographer Seamus McGarvy employed what he calls a “Christian Dior filter”—a black stocking behind the lens—and a slight underexposure on the negative to achieve the soft, texturized look of the film.
Seamus McGarvey and Director Joe Wright wanted their adaptation of World War II-era novel Atonement to start off with a soft romantic glow as Keira Knightley and James McAvoy bask in the love affair that will eventually be destroyed, along with the pre-war world they know. To help achieve this look, McGarvey employed what he calls a “Christian Dior filter” — a black stocking behind the lens — and a slight underexposure on the negative to further soften and texturize the image after the negative was timed up.
In order to achieve the effect of blurring certain portions of the frame, he chose to go with Panavision Hylén System lens rather than using a post effect. “There are defocusing programs,” McGarvey says, “but it's more like a blur, and this is a physical effect on the original scene, so areas of light are actually sent out of focus. It's a very different effect that we really liked the look of.”
No discussion of Atonement's cinematography can omit the stunning Steadicam shot of the beach at Dunkirk, although McGarvey makes every effort to say that the amazing one-off wasn't done to stand out. “It came of expediency really,” he says. “We shot in a seaside town in the northeast of England, and we had so much we wanted to show in that scene that it would have taken a very long time to do traditional coverage. It was Joe's idea to do it in one. I didn't want it to be flagrant display of cinematic virtuosity.
“The whole town rallied behind the film and allowed the seafront to be colonized by the art department.” We had thousands of local extras who were the greatest extras I've ever worked with. Everybody hit their mark, and not a single look at the lens. Of course, I have to really give credit to Peter Robertson, the Steadicam operator. His job wasn't just about the herculean stamina required, but it also involved the intellectual skill of being able to maintain compositional integrity while hitting maybe 100 separate cues time and again. We got this beautiful, elusive light for take three, with the sun behind the clouds and a rainbow in the sky. It was like performance art getting this hugely elaborate and expensive shot in one take.”
