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MillimeterFade to Black:
Hans Canosa, Director
Aug 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
“I wasn't allowed to watch movies when I was growing up,” says Hans Canosa. “My parents are fundamentalist Christian, so the first time I saw a movie in a movie theater was the day I came up with the idea for a splitscreen film.”
In Canosa's directorial debut, Conversations with Other Women, two cameras follow two characters interacting on a split screen for the entire film — until they come together at the end, at least figuratively. If this sounds exhausting to watch, it's not. Conversations is deeply fascinating, visually and emotionally.
“It was so impactful,” Canosa says of his first time in a movie theater, “that that night I went home and went to sleep and had a nightmare that I was back in the movie theater, and whenever the characters were cut away from onscreen they would die. I could feel that they could only live when they were up on the screen…In that same dream, I realized that too much light was coming from the back of the theater. I turned around, and there was a whole other screen there, and suddenly there were two screen spaces the characters could live on. [The characters] could pass between them.”
Canosa pitched his film to his producers as a dual-screen project, with a clause that he would deliver a single-frame edit just in case. “As a filmmaker, I want to talk to audiences. I want to tell stories to audiences. I don't want to do things just to indulge myself.”
Format was also an issue. Canosa had only shot 16mm as a student filmmaker and had to work within a meager budget. “Ultimately, on a cost level, I don't think your capture medium matters,” Canosa says. “You're going to be doing different things to get to the same result with whatever you do. With almost any film, at this point, you're going to be ending up in a DI (digital intermediate) room.”
That is, Canosa would end up in a DI room if the producers liked his first cut. He went with HD and started testing cameras. “I did tests with the Panasonic VariCam, which I liked. I almost found the colors to be softer,” he says. It had one drawback, however. “I think, in today's world, so much goes on at the DI, in terms of what you're going to do for color, that the capture format — as long as you are capturing as much as possible — that should be the driving force. The Sony [HDW-F900] had more resolution than the Panasonic. I ultimately went in that direction.”
Canosa's dual-screen is not just a shoot-from-the-hip random exercise of run-and-gun. The entire film was storyboarded, covering 82 pages of dialogue centered on the two characters, played by Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart. Canosa explains, “I wanted to make sure that every shot had visual development; that I never had a focal length on the lens or even a camera height that was like the other. … It is not wacky coverage. Part of that is because the splitscreen itself is already such a distinctive visual experiment; I wanted the material inside of that splitscreen to be classic coverage. Inside that classic coverage, though — I could show you the camera reports — there isn't a single setup that is like any other. All of them are designed to bring you closer to the characters in the moment you should be, farther away when you should be.”
DP Steve Yedlin shot with the Sony cameras, which were modified with Panavision optics, including Panavision Primo 8-72 zoom lenses, for flexibility while on stage or location. His lighting had to accommodate two cameras and two booms. While editing the film in Apple Final Cut Pro 4.5 on a Power Mac G5, Canosa says that through 65 hours of coverage, he only saw a boom twice.
In the last scene, the lovers leave each other in separate taxi cabs, lost in thoughts of each other on the streets of New York. Then, their cab rides on splitscreen seamlessly move into one. The timing had to be precise, and it has a breathtaking effect when the two characters are left sitting side by side. Canosa had clearly earned his DI.
