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Making History

Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

Ed Zwick defies the forest.

           

Ed Zwick wanted to emphasize the location of the story of the Bielski partisans for his new period film Defiance—the forests of Belorussia (now Belarus), which shielded more than 1,200 Jewish refugees from the Nazis. He therefore shot almost the entire film in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio on an extremely grainy stock (Kodak Vision 5279 500T) inside a claustrophobic forest location in Lithuania, near where the actual events took place.

Director Ed Zwick says he gravitates toward period pieces (Glory, Legends of the Fall, and The Last Samurai, among others) simply because “historical moments are a particularly good place to find circumstances where the dramatic stakes are so high in compelling stories. That was certainly the case with Defiance.”

Zwick's newest film, based on a historical book by Nechama Tec, documents the true-life story of the Bielski partisans — a band of Jewish fighters, led by brothers Tuvia and Zus Bielski, who protected a community of more than 1,200 Jews from the Nazis in the forests of Belorussia (now Belarus) for a period of several years during World War II. Shot near Vilnius, Lithuania, just miles from where the Bielskis' real story took place, the production was particularly grueling on a demanding schedule and budget (about $30 million). But then, Zwick and his team — largely consisting of veterans of his last film, Blood Diamond — were used to that following their experience shooting Blood Diamond in Africa.

What was more challenging was figuring out how to capture on film the claustro-phobic nature of the community's life deep in the forest over the course of years, as seasons and fortunes changed dramatically, and how to do that with limited resources. Rather than documenting a typical, graphic Holocaust story, Zwick opted to make a survival story, and every decision he made flowed from that.

“This story is really about how you hold onto your humanity in the midst of such circumstances,” Zwick says. “Do you become a monster in order to fight monsters? We realized quickly it was important to have a sense of life continuously in the story, and still indicate their circumstances, so there is a wedding scene and more color than you might expect given the situation. Still, trapped in the forest, we really tried to keep the sun out of the images — you rarely see the sky, in fact. [DP] Eduardo Serra designed a set of very interesting silks that we could move and unfurl quickly to keep light at lower levels throughout while we were shooting in the forest, giving us that kind of consistency. We made a set of technically interesting choices to maintain that consistency.”

The forest

Serra, like much of the crew working with Zwick for the second straight film, says that shooting the majority of the movie in a dense forest posed great challenges in terms of evoking chaos, while still establishing that sense of consistency.

“If you have sun coming through trees, you have no continuity whatsoever [with light],” Serra says. “It would be extremely distracting. So, basically, we always killed the sun — we tried not to have any sun on the set. Dramatically, it would not be welcome for what we were trying to do with this story. So those silks were a big tool for us. We would put them in trees and move them to follow the sun. We had a set of 60'‗60' silks for the trees, and then smaller ones for various uses.”

To highlight the forest as almost a smothering character in the film, enveloping all the action, Serra opted to shoot in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, rather than widescreen. He also shot on an older, rather contrasty and grainy film stock — Kodak Vision 5279 550T. His thinking was to relate the stock to the type of imagery that emanated out of the period being documented in the film; this was based on extensive research of reams of reference still photos and film from that era. His mantra was to avoid glamour at all costs, given the nature of the story.

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