style="font-size:15px;"> ■ For day exterior mountain scenes, I used Eastman Kodak 50D, 5245, because I wanted those images to feel a little crisper and cleaner. I wanted the air to be more transparent.
(Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, American Cinematographer, January 2006, 62)
I talked to director Donald Petrie about when a cinematographer would bring their ideas to the director:
■ I expect it to come early on and continue throughout the production. I look at the script and try to figure out how to better tell the story visually. With Miss Congeniality there was a point where an actor, Sandy Bullock, is playing a woman who is hiding her femininity to do a man’s job. So László (Kovács) lit the first half of the film with flat fluorescent lighting, wide-angle lenses, and flat monochromatic color. But later in the film, as she finds her feminine side, the lenses get longer, the lighting gets more beautiful, and the color comes in, and backlight makes it look less flat. László and I did this so I could show a character’s transition visually.
(Donald Petrie, DGA, Frost interview, December 2006)
If you are a director who is also the writer of the material, the scenes have probably been playing in your head for a while. By now you can probably visualize how they look when you think about them, and it becomes your task to communicate what you see in your mind to the person who is going to make that happen for you on the screen — the cinematographer. The more articulate you are in conveying how you envision the film to the cinematographer and production designer, the more it will resemble what you imagined when you wrote it.
12. & 12a. Miss Congeniality (before and after the transformation). Directed by Donald Petrie; photographed by László Kovács, ASC
■ When I first worked with Anthony Minghella, a very intelligent writer who brilliantly adapted a convoluted book (The English Patient), I figured he probably had some firm ideas about the visuals, such as all the amazing transitions between the English patient in the contemporary situation and the past in Tunisia, which were very simple long lap dissolves — and then a lot of what I call lucky mistakes happened.
(John Seale, ASC, Frost interview, October 2007)
■ Once I understand the approach to what the director is trying to do, then I go to my photography books or visual references and try to come up with visual ideas that I can present to the director. Maybe a certain scene could have a certain type of framing or grain structure or color, and I present these ideas to the director so we can ping-pong ideas back and forth. For me that is very enjoyable, doing investigation, and then, of course, the production designer comes into play as well, so it’s a three-part collaboration, and I try to be involved in all of it. Hopefully, the director will orchestrate collaboration between all the departments (costume designer, production designer, and camera department). Of course all of the ideas are based on the director’s original intention, but we all try to come up with ideas that will work together, such as a color scheme that will work with developing methods I’m proposing, or lenses, and then we start testing. Prep is like going to film school again. I try to test things that I haven’t done before, not for the sake of doing something different, but to explore different avenues and to see what we can get. Then I present these ideas and tests to the director and from there we narrow it down to what will be the movie. The ideal situation is where all of this works — not necessarily that the director will buy all my ideas, but where he will like some of the things I’m doing, and then we’ll narrow it down to what we’ll be doing on set.
13. The English Patient (dissolve). (Photographed by John Seale, ASC)
(Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, Frost interview, July 2007)
Discussions regarding format will come up in preproduction. Sometimes format is dictated by the budget; other times it may be open to discussion. Cinematographers will have their preference for format and may make a case for it. For example, if the producers were considering shooting in digitally, the cinematographer may suggest shooting on film instead, because most cinematographers do prefer film and there are very valid reasons to stay with film as an originating medium.
Knowing where you are heading in the final product will affect what you begin with and your workflow from production to postproduction. (See Chapter 8 for more detail on formats.)
Preproduction is the time period that is crucial for ideas being tested and decisions being made in advance as to what will be executed on set. This is where the creative juices start to flow, and lots of conversation occurs between the director, the production designer, and cinematographer regarding the use of visual references and how the essence or heart of the movie can be dissected and reassembled onscreen.
Directors and cinematographers should visit locations together with the director’s viewfinder to talk about focal length for certain shots and discuss whether they see the film as moving or static or what colors come to mind and what kind of light is envisioned. Is it a genre piece where you want to stay in line with the conventions of the genre or turn it on its head? Is it a stylistic film or something more edgy and raw?
■ I usually write on the margins of the script, lots of notes, most of them questions, such as things I want to talk to the director about, how he or she sees a certain sequence. Specifically notes based on location scouting, unless it’s a film with a high design concept with a lot of sets that you are going to build with controlled lighting and things like that. For normal scripts with a tremendous number of location settings it’s all about finding the right places. So, the notes that I make are usually about the strong points and weaknesses of places we’ve seen, so that is kind of the working, scouting draft.
There have been a few films where I’ve done what I think Storaro does on almost every picture. I’ve written a kind of three- or four-page outline to the stylistic approach with maybe references to one or two scenes but nothing that is terribly site specific or scene specific.
(John Bailey, ASC, Frost interview)
14. Citizen Kane (Photographed by Gregg Toland, ASC)
Filmmaking is about showing the audience what is going on visually rather than just telling them through dialogue and exposition. By using the subtext of color and light, angles and lenses, thematic elements of a script can be enhanced. For example, the cinematographer may use a wide-angle lens shot from a slightly low angle to make a character seem large and menacing, rather than saying, “He is large and menacing.”
In the well-known Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles and photographed by Gregg Toland, the use of wide-angle lenses positioned at a slightly low angle (an influence of John Ford’s Stagecoach) visually reveals the power of Kane. Ceilings are visible in many of the shots, implying that his character, his ego, is so enormous that he barely fits into the rooms. The use of wide-angle lenses and deep focus photography reveals the empty space in the cavernous Xanadu, the castle Kane created for his second wife, Susan Alexander. The characters are tiny in this vast environment, and therefore cannot connect with each other emotionally. The way in which Welles and Toland chose to shoot the film echoes the loneliness of Kane’s life, despite his enormous wealth and power. This is an example of a thematic visual interpretation of the
