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MillimeterCollaborative Flash
Oct 8, 2008 10:00 AM, By Michael Goldman
Dante Spinotti gives producer-turned-director Marc Abraham a big assist.
Director Marc Abraham confers with stars Greg Kinnear and Lauren Graham on the set of Flash of Genius.
Marc Abraham had a lengthy track record as a movie producer (The Road to Wellville, Thirteen Days, and Children of Men, among others) long before he jumped into directing Flash of Genius, but he had no directing experience. Thus, no one was more surprised than Abraham when his veteran cinematographer, Dante Spinotti, essentially treated him “as though I were David Lean, even though it was my directorial debut.”
Abraham’s point: his close collaboration and friendship with the award-winning Spinotti played a fundamental role in his success transitioning from producer to director on the project, and not just in terms of image quality. The movie details the true-life story of an inventor, Bob Kearns, played by Greg Kinnear, who fought the Ford Motor Company for decades over his invention of—of all things—the intermittent windshield wiper.
“I had worked with Dante before as a producer, and I always felt he was among the world’s best cinematographers—one of the great artists of our time,” says Abraham. “But on top of that, he is one of the best people in the business, and I love his sense of humor, collaboration, work ethic, and leadership of his crew—he was a role model for me. I had talked to him over dinner about two or three years ago about doing this picture, if it happened, and he told he would love to do it. When it finally happened, thank God he was available.
“He completely understood the themes and look I was envisioning, and sympathized with them and the need to focus on the emotional aspect of those things. He obviously was primarily concerned with the look of the movie, but I was so impressed with his intelligence and instincts that I made him wear earphones and listen to dialogue, and asked his advice on other things. He joked that I made him work harder than other directors.”
The prime challenge was to craft the period piece subtly—it takes place throughout the 1970s—and Abraham was insistent that the nuances of the period look, costumes, sets, and colors not overwhelm the story of an underdog taking on titanic forces at great personal cost. Abraham says he was “super sensitive to the palette and aesthetic—it was really important to me,” and so he took up many weeks and many dinners simply discussing and refining that aesthetic with Spinotti.
“The first thing I said to Dante was that I knew this was a period piece, but I didn’t want it to feel like we had a fetish about that fact,” Abraham says. “I wanted it to be subtle and subdued—to have the feeling of some of the movies I really enjoyed watching during the 1970s, rather than movies later made about the 1970s.”
To that end, Abraham honed in on the look and style of Gordon Willis’ cinematography in Alan Pakula’s classic 1976 political thriller, All the President’s Men.
“That was something of a template, and I gave it to all the crew and asked them to watch it,” Abraham says. “When it was shot, it was not a period picture—it was contemporary at that time. I told everyone I wanted this movie to feel that way, rather than as a period picture. I wanted browns, blues, and grays, some grain, some shadows—it was all very tricky.”
Adding Genesis
Abraham and Spinotti also discussed realistic light and camera movement that sometimes emulates Annie Hall and other Woody Allen work, whereby the camera doesn’t always closely follow the character speaking as that character moves around, and other creative nuances along those lines. But even as he was absorbing Abraham’s visual agenda, Spinotti was formulating his own plan for how to achieve that agenda, and that plan included shooting all interiors with Panavision’s Genesis digital camera system, and all exteriors on film.
The Genesis suggestion surprised Abraham, who resisted the idea until he saw test material while prepping for production in Toronto. Spinotti had used Genesis in 2006 on a feature called Slipstream for actor/director Anthony Hopkins that, like Flash of Genius, had a limited shooting schedule and budget. More recently, he shot Michael Mann’s Public Enemies using Sony’s F23 CineAlta digital camera system (hear our podcast with Public Enemies co-producer Bryan Carroll here). He was convinced that combining digital and film acquisition would be the best approach given the creative and business parameters set up for Flash of Genius.
