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Story Supportive

Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jon Silberg

Traditional methods used to create the looks for this year’s Oscar nominees.

Janusz Kaminski has spent recent years shooting blockbusters such as War of the Worlds and the latest Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull picture, but there was something special about working with Director Julian Schnabel on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly within the limitations of the modestly budgeted project (more on Schnabel). “It was like working on art film by a whole bunch of artists or film students,” Kaminski says. “Of course, it started with the wonderful script by Ronald Harwood that called for a kind of nontraditional filmmaking.”

Based on the true account of magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby's debilitating stroke, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly captures the surreal sense of a world as remembered by a man totally paralyzed except for the ability to blink with one eye. Bauby actually dictated the book in that condition, using a code based around his blinking. “The script,” Kaminski says, “was beautiful, and it left a lot of opportunity for visual interpretation. The script would say something like, ‘The images are unclear,’ which was enough for the story, and then we could interpret that to cinematic language.”

Kaminski attained the various saturation levels, color palette, and grain structures by mixing Fujifilm and Kodak stocks and using Coral and graduated filters. He used a Lensbabies to achieve a surreal, partly defocused look. “There was no CGI. We hand-cranked the camera, winding forward and backward to create the sense of how the character would perceive what was happening to him,” he says.

To exemplify the method he used on Butterfly, Kaminski references a beautiful-looking scene of two characters by ocean dunes. “I couldn't have seven 18Ks,” he says. “I had two 18Ks for the movie. If there had been more money, it would look different. If we could have done the whole movie as a DI, some things would have been better, but we couldn't — and I sometimes love to work within limitations. I think it's a very poetic scene, but we had 15 minutes to shoot, and I was behind the camera with a zoom lens and the light was disappearing. That kind of work can be really enjoyable. You seldom get a chance to do stuff like that on a big movie.”

Roger Deakins has created some bizarre imagery in previous collaborations with the sibling auteur team Joel and Ethan Coen — films such as The Big Lebowski and Barton Fink — but for No Country for Old Men, Deakins wanted a more straightforward, understated look. “We knew we wanted a bald, barefaced look with lots of colors,” he says. “So we would have very bright day exteriors and very dark nights. I wanted to play with the palette — but in naturalistic way. I didn't want anything to be pretty.”

Shooting on some Texas expanses, on a few locations, and in studios belonging to the College of Santa Fe's film department, Deakins used a relatively modest lighting package (with the exception of the setup described below), and he made extensive use of practicals — as is his general practice — to create a moody but not overpowering look.

The most elaborately lit sequence involves Josh Brolin's character discovering the bodies and bloody vehicles from a drug deal gone wrong. Set in the desert that is far from any city lights, the scene required bathing an enormous area in illumination that could only come from the moon. “We chose this really vast location, and when we looked at it, we knew it would be fantastic for the day shots,” Deakins says. “But then we talked about the night. They wanted a ghostly, moonlit feel, and if there's a full moon in the desert and it's clear, you can see for miles. So you try to recreate that in the most naturalistic way possible within the budget.”

He managed this with three Musco lights equipped with architectural PAR lights (used frequently for NASCAR races). He then created a false sense of dawn approaching from the other side by adding blue gel to 10 HMIs (he was shooting tungsten film, so with the gel, they read very blue) and lighting the dust and atmosphere behind the action. “We had a lot to do at the location,” he says, “so I wanted to stage the work so I could leave all the lights in place and then just do little things with silver reflectors on the ground for different camera setups.”

For his work on this film as well as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Deakins relied heavily on practical lights — often augmented with relatively low-wattage tungsten bulbs inside specially made housings — to build the look. For Jesse James, gaffer Martin Keough hid all manner of bulbs inside the train James' gang robs — in gas lamps, over contemporary-period electric light fixtures. Generally, Deakins wants to work with the sources before he brings in any film lights. Some scenes in Jesse James used none of the traditional instruments you'd expect to see on a set at all.

Although Deakins has experimented with photochemical techniques throughout his career, he has finished many of his recent films in EFilm's DI suite. This is generally to fine-tune or match rather than to build in a scene's look; he used the Jesse James DI to add a bit of red to the blacks in many scenes. It was a look that could have been created by pre-flashing the negative with a warm light — and Deakins did exactly that for the first act of A Beautiful Mind — but after extensive testing, he was confident the effect could be made to look as organic in post without pre-flashing.

“I always try to get the neg as close as possible to the look I want,” he says. “I used a skip-bleach process rather than trying to create something like that effect [in post].”

Deakins and the other Oscar-nominated cinematographers for this year all stress the importance of making imagery that supports and never overshadows the story. Although each of the nominees were required to select shots for Academy consideration, they were reluctant to point to particular images that stand out — all saying in one way or another the same thing as Deakins. “I try not to have a favorite scene,” he says. “The important thing is for everything to fit together as a whole. I think it should have a kind of seamless quality to it. If something stands out, I think it's kind of a failure really.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.