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 J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0
A M E R I C A N C I N E M ATO G R A P H E R • J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 • T H E I R I S H M A N – 1 9 1 7 – T H E G O L D F I N C H – D A R K WAT E R S – S H A D O W – AC A RC H I V E : 1 9 2 0 • V O L . 1 0 1 N O . 1
 J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 0 V O L . 1 0 1 N O . 1
1920 — 2020

On Our Cover: Amid the chaos of World War I, British Army Lance Cpl. Schofield (George
MacKay) attempts to deliver a crucial battlefield order in 1917, shot by Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC.
(Photo by François Duhamel, SMPSP, courtesy of Universal Pictures.)

FEATURES
30 The Irishman — Wages of Sin

52
Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC traverses the decades with mobsters and union bosses

The Goldfinch and 1917 — Lives Under Siege

Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC captures the impact of tragedy at home and on

68
the battlefield

Dark Waters — Truth to Light

Edward Lachman, ASC and director Todd Haynes frame a story of courage

78
and perseverance
30
Shadow — Dual Nature

86
Zhao Xiaoding, ASC, CNSC creates beauty in combat and conflicting souls

AC Issue No. 1
A reintroduction of our inaugural issue that launched 100 years of reporting
(and counting!)

68
DEPARTMENTS
10
12
Editor’s Note

14
President’s Desk

24
Shot Craft: Color theory • Vintage views on color

92
Short Takes: ASC Student Heritage Awards

96
Filmmakers’ Forum: Shooting VR journey The 100%
78
98
New Products & Services

99
International Marketplace

100
Classified Ads

102
Ad Index

104
Clubhouse News
ASC Close-Up: Buddy Squires

— VISIT ASCMAG.COM —
 New AC Web Exclusives
We celebrate the new year with podcasts on creative camerawork and a
documentary series that pays tribute to the ASC Museum collection.

ASC Museum Minute Doc Series Launches

Hosted by Steve Gainer, ASC, ASK — the curator of the Society’s camera collection — each episode of this
new series showcases motion-picture technology and the cinematographers who used it in creative ways. Shot
at the ASC Clubhouse in Hollywood, these fast-paced, informative docs highlight not only well-known cam-
eras such as the Bell & Howell 2709 and Arri IIB, but also the Cunningham Combat Camera and Cinex — spe-
cially designed, unique models that offered users specific functionality with custom features. Museum Minute
also illustrates how these cameras were used in specific productions, such as William A. Fraker, ASC, BSC’s
brilliant use of the Arri IIB in the classic crime film Bullitt (1968).

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 J A N U A R Y 2 0 2 0 V O L . 1 0 1 , N O . 1

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF and PUBLISHER

Stephen Pizzello
————————————————————————————————————
WEB DIRECTOR and ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
David E. Williams

EDITORIAL
————————————————————————————————————

MANAGING EDITOR Jon D. Witmer

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Andrew Fish
TECHNICAL EDITOR Christopher Probst, ASC
SHOT CRAFT EDITOR Jay Holben
DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY and WEB PRODUCER Mat Newman
DIGITAL CONTENT CREATOR Samantha Dillard
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Benjamin B, Rachael K. Bosley, John Calhoun, Mark Dillon, Michael Goldman, Jim Hemphill,
David Heuring, Noah Kadner, Debra Kaufman, Michael Kogge, Iain Marcks,
Matt Mulcahey, Jean Oppenheimer, Lauretta Prevost, Phil Rhodes, Patricia Thomson
PODCASTS
Michael Goldman, Jim Hemphill, Iain Marcks
BLOGS
Benjamin B • John Bailey, ASC • David Heuring

ART & DESIGN

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SUBSCRIPTIONS, BOOKS & PRODUCTS

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ACCOUNTING Kim Pallares
————————————————————————————————————
American Cinematographer (ISSN 0002-7928), established 1920 and in its 100th year of publication, is published monthly in Hollywood by
ASC Holding Corp., 1782 N. Orange Dr., Hollywood, CA 90028, U.S.A.,
(800) 448-0145, (323) 969-4333, Fax (323) 876-4973, direct line for subscription inquiries (323) 969-4344.
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 American Society of Cinematographers
The ASC is not a labor union or a guild, but
an educational, cultural and professional
organization. Membership is by invitation
to those who are actively engaged as
directors of photography and have
demonstrated outstanding ability. ASC
membership has become one of the highest
honors that can be bestowed upon a
professional cinematographer — a mark
of prestige and excellence.

OFFICERS - 2019/2020
Kees van Oostrum
President
Stephen Lighthill
Vice President
Bill Bennett
Vice President
Paul Cameron
Vice President
Levie Isaacks
Treasurer
David Darby
Secretary
Curtis Clark
Sergeant-at-Arms

MEMBERS OF THE
BOARD
John Bailey
Bill Bennett
Stephen H. Burum
Paul Cameron
Dean Cundey
David Darby
George Spiro Dibie
Frederick Elmes
Lowell Peterson
Steven Poster
Rodney Taylor
John Toll
Kees van Oostrum
Amy Vincent
Mandy Walker

ALTERNATES
Charlie Lieberman
Christopher Chomyn
Steven Fierberg
Owen Roizman
Levie Isaacks

MUSEUM CURATOR
Steve Gainer
8
 THIS MONTH’S
CONTRIBUTORS
Rachael K. Bosley is a
freelance writer and a
former staff editor (“Lives
Under Siege,” p. 52).
Jim Hemphill is a filmmaker
and freelance writer (“Dual
Nature,” p. 78).
Jay Holben is a filmmaker
and an associate member
of the ASC (Shot Craft,
p. 14, “Immersive
Inspiration,” p. 92).
Debra Kaufman is a
freelance writer (Short
Takes, p. 24).
Fred Schruers is a
freelance writer (“Wages of
Sin,” p. 30; “Evoking The Irish-
man’s Eras,” p. 34; “Collabo-
rator Spotlight: Gaffer Bill
O’Leary,” p. 42; “Collabora-
tor Spotlight: 1st AD David
Webb,” p. 46).
Jon Silberg is a freelance
writer and publicist
(“Truth to Light,” p. 68;
“Designing a Film Look,”
p. 72).
10
EDITOR’S NOTE
This issue signals the start of the magazine’s 100th anniversary,
which we’ll be saluting throughout 2020. Our editorial plan
includes monthly installments of vintage content from various
decades of American Cinematographer, along with a special
emphasis on filmmaking aesthetics, creative collaborations, and
artistic philosophy.
The teamwork behind The Irishman is explored in cover-
age by veteran journalist Fred Schruers (“Wages of Sin,” page
30), who strove to spotlight not only the creative interactions
between director Martin Scorsese and cinematographer
Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC, but also the contributions from key
members of the project’s extensive team: gaffer Bill O’Leary and
1st AD David Webb, as well as Harbor Picture Co.’s Matt Tomlin-
son, Elodie Ichter and Yvan Lucas, who handled the show’s LUTs, dailies and color grading. The
result of their efforts is a compelling crime epic conveyed through memories steeped with
melancholy. “There are so many moments like that in the film, seeing what these men do and
not glorifying it at all,” says Prieto. “Marty is able to see them as human beings — human beings
with struggles and issues and vulnerability. They’re not just these killers who are all-powerful.”
Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC has been as busy as ever, with two features premiering over the
past several months: The Goldfinch, adapted from Donna Tartt’s bestselling novel, and 1917, a
World War I drama told in a single, unbroken shot. Rachael K. Bosley debriefed Deakins in a
detailed Q&A about both projects (“Lives Under Siege,” page 52) — an interview that yielded
comments from one of his closest collaborators: his wife, James Ellis Deakins, who served as
digital-workflow consultant on both projects.
Ed Lachman, ASC renewed his partnership with director Todd Haynes on Dark Waters,
which details the true story of a legal battle between the DuPont chemical company and crusad-
ing attorney Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), who pursued leads indicating that a community in West
Virginia had been endangered for decades by exposure to deadly chemicals. The narrative
follows Bilott’s journey through his procedural research, pulling the audience along as the
lawyer makes discoveries. “One step leads to the next,” Lachman tells Jon Silberg (“Truth to
Light,” page 68), “so we are putting the puzzle together even if we don’t know exactly where it’s
all leading.”
One of the Society’s newest international members, Zhao Xiaoding, ASC, CNSC, was
behind the camera on Shadow, his 10th pairing with director Zhang Yimou. As Jim Hemphill
suggests in his coverage (“Dual Nature,” page 78), “Shadow is perhaps the most stunning prod-
uct of their collaboration yet, a combination of sweeping action and intimate character study
that brings the visual language of Chinese ink-brush painting to cinematic life.”
***
I’m reluctantly compelled to report that the magazine’s longtime managing editor, Jon
Witmer, recently departed his post for a new job as Panavision’s “Director, Technical and
Creative Writing.”
Jon was with AC for 12 years, and he was a truly outstanding and invaluable member of
the staff. In addition to his award-winning writing and editing skills, Mr. Witmer provided the
office with a calm, steady, sensible hand on the tiller, and everyone here at the magazine and
the ASC felt privileged to work alongside him. We wish Jon all the best in his new position, and
sincerely hope that his role at Panavision will keep him in our immediate orbit.
Photo by Chris Pizzello.
Stephen Pizzello
Editor-in-Chief and Publisher
 PRESIDENT’S DESK
Film School Misery

Every year, some 60,000 students graduate from about 600 film schools worldwide. I estimate
that probably 20 percent choose to focus on cinematography — so, let’s assume 12,000 budding cine-
matographers graduate every year. These numbers represent the universities and one- to three-year
film schools. If you include the various master classes, summer courses and online classes that are
available, you would probably add considerably more students.
The teaching of cinematography has always been of interest to me. At one point, it motivated
me to start the ASC Master Class program because I found, in most instances, film school teaching was
not always reaching an acceptable level of education. Over the last 20 years, I have also occasionally
taught at film schools and universities — always in the form of a workshop. It surprised me that many
students lacked a basic technological background — really not so difficult to learn — and, more impor-
tantly, they lacked an understanding of the creative motivation that results in good cinematography.
I am a product of six years of film education — first, the Netherlands Film Academy for four
years and then two years at AFI. Looking back, I remember a few educational lapses at both schools, though they have excellent repu-
tations. Yes, I did enjoy my six years very much; the collaboration with my fellow students was phenomenal. Just how great is it to
have time to develop yourself in a protected environment? That aspect alone has formed an essential foundation for the rest of my
career. But, honestly, I cannot forget some of the marginal teachers I endured. Those burdened by alcoholism and favoritism, and
the idiosyncratic ones who did nothing constructive for students but instead glorified themselves through teaching. In my early film
school days, one suicidal instructor drowned himself in a bathtub after we did not show up to a screening of his thesis movie about
“being of an alcoholic soul.” Later, another teacher made us put paint on our heels and, after having us watch a scene from probable
camera angles, made us decide where to put the camera based on the density of the paint residue on the floor!
What this all brings to mind is the saying by educator William Arthur Ward: “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher
explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires!”
I realized over the years that some film-teaching professionals probably were not so successful in their careers and, through
teaching, found a stage for their insecurities. I’m done watching teachers tell their students how brilliant their own work is, and, in
the process, influence young and eager minds. I have been in educational staff meetings where these “prophets of mediocrity” say
things like, “We like to work with vacant minds and shape someone’s creativity.” That has sent me running for the door.
Although this all sounds maybe a bit hopeless, the reality is not so. Students today are producing great and innovative films.
The submissions to the annual ASC Student Heritage Awards competition are a testament to this.
And there are, of course, teachers who are genuinely our deserving heroes. I would classify them as those who don’t neces-
sarily have a lot of structure or preconceived ideas, but are just themselves — exposing their faults as well as accomplishments.
A lot of learning in cinematography is watching others do it — others who are, of course, talented and create images that
speak to you. In my early years, I observed and interned with cinematographers who included Witold Sobociński, PSC and Gerry
Fisher, BSC. They were doing a job — one cracking jokes all the time, and the other stern and intolerant of worldly distractions. At
the time, many things I observed were incomprehensible. Years later, it suddenly all started to make sense and made me forever
grateful to them.
The money being charged for film education these days is staggering; spending a whopping $250,000 to $350,000 to send
someone through to graduation is not uncommon. Then the hordes not admitted to a reputable institution fall prey to the commer-
cial film schools, with less oversight and accountability. A $50,000 bill for a year is the norm. Those schools, motivated by profit, often
paint a sorry picture of students recruited worldwide, recipients of veteran administration grants, and a hopeless group that wants
to work in the industry at any cost and take out high-interest loans in the effort to do so.
Photo by Jacek Laskus, ASC, PSC.

It’s time to do something about this situation. Maybe it’s time for students to revolt, and for parents to withhold tuition and
demand accountability.
That will be a wake-up call for the mediocrity, motivate a move to better education, and get us out of this film school misery.

Kees van Oostrum

ASC President

12 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 SHOT CRAFT
Colors of light work on the additive system. Each added color makes the light brighter,
and a mix of all colors yields white light.
Color Theory
A thorough discussion of this topic could fill volumes and years
of study, but we can certainly take a brief yet detailed look at
color theory and the practical implications for the cinematogra-
pher. To begin, we must discuss the nature of color vision —
how human beings see color. As Isaac Newton pointed out with
his experiments in the 1600s, natural daylight is the combina-
tion of all of the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, indigo and violet.
All of these colors can be reduced into three larger cate-
gories of red, green and blue. Each of these are a range of wave-
lengths of electromagnetic energy. The electromagnetic spec-
trum spans an extraordinary range of wavelengths, from the
infinitesimally small — with gamma rays that range from
Indigo has, in fact, been downgraded from the spectrum
(sort of in the way Pluto was downgraded as a planet), but it was
originally included as one of the seven colors in the visible spec-
trum as defined by Newton. Indigo is difficult to define, as its
wavelengths blend too closely to blue and violet to be differenti-
ated, so it’s not often included in the modern formal spectrum.
However, without it, we don’t get Roy G. Biv, a silly name that
makes it easy to remember the colors of the rainbow in order —
so I keep indigo in there.
14 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years
By Jay Holben
approximately one quadrillionth to one hundred billionth of a
meter in length — all the way out to 100 to 1,000 meters in
length with AM radio broadcast frequencies. Between this
massive range are X-rays, ultraviolet radiation, infrared radia-
tion, radar, television broadcast frequencies and FM radio
frequencies. And amid all these types of energy is a small range
of frequencies, from about 400 billionths of a meter to about
700 billionths (also known as nanometers), that our eyes can
detect and brains can interpret visually into what we call light.
The visual systems of other animals interpret wavelengths
beyond light, and even infrared radiation or ultraviolet radia-
tion — but humans cannot see those wavelengths, so we don’t
call them light.
As an aside, you’ll sometimes see the term “visible light,”
but that’s redundant, as humans have specifically defined light
as the wavelengths we can see — so all light is visible by defin-
ition (with the caveat presented below). Furthermore, what is
outside the range of light is sometimes called infrared light or
ultraviolet light — and technically speaking, those are incorrect
terms as well, because they’re forms of electromagnetic radia-
tion, not light. It’s notable that the only thing that sets apart the
“light” frequencies from all the others is the human interpreta-
tion of them.
Another fact that blows a lot of minds is that humans
cannot see light.
You read that correctly.
We can see a light source (the sun, a light bulb, fire) and
we can see light reflecting off of an object, but we cannot actu-
ally see light traveling through the air unless it’s reflecting off of
or refracting through something in the air, such as moisture
particulates (fog) or dust. That’s a good thing, because if we
saw light rays themselves, the whole world would just be an
overexposed white void!
What we primarily see is light reflecting off physical
objects. Wavelengths of electromagnetic energy are being
reflected off those surfaces and into the lenses of our eyes. The
reason we see the colors of objects is that certain wavelengths
of light are absorbed by an object and others are reflected. This
process of absorption and reflection is defined by the “pigmen-
tation” of the object. (“Pigment” is a substance that determines
the color of an object, whether that pigment be suspended in a
solution — such as paint or dye — or naturally occurring, as in
Images courtesy of Jay Holben.
the chlorophyll of plant leaves or the color of human skin.) The
wavelengths that are reflected by each object’s pigment are
what define the colors that we see. When you look at a beauti-
ful red strawberry, the reason you see red is that orange,
yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet are being absorbed more
than the red wavelengths, which are being reflected. Likewise,
when you look at a basketball, it’s the orange wavelengths that
 A relatively small range of wavelengths within the electromagnetic spectrum is visible to the human eye. This range has been defined as “light.”

are being reflected back, while red, colors of light. While many of us were colors. If you combine red, green and
yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet are taught in grade school that our primary blue together, you get white. Remember
being absorbed. colors are red, blue and yellow, I’m here that all the colors of the rainbow can be
The lining of the retina at the back to tell you that we were lied to, but I’ll simplified down to red, green and blue.
of the human eye contains rods and get back to that in a bit. Colors of light Because I love to take physics
cones — specialized photoreceptor cells work on an additive system, which theories and demonstrate them in the
that are sensitive to light. It’s the cones means that with each color of light that real world, page 14 presents a photo-
that interpret color, and some of them you add to a mix, you get a brighter graph of this color mixing happening.
are sensitive to red, others to green, and result. White light is the combination of Here I took three LED flashlights, one
still others to blue wavelengths of light. all the colors of the rainbow, and black- colored with a blue gel, one with a red,
The combination of the three different ness is the absence of light. The additive and one with a green, and you can see —
types of cones allows the brain to inter- primary colors are red, green and blue even with cheap consumer fixtures —
pret electromagnetic energy as color — just like the cones in your eyes. Red that the additive color-mixing theory
vision. The rods are responsible for low- and green combine to make yellow; blue works in real life. You can see the mix
light vision, and do not play a role in and green combine to make cyan; and creating cyan, yellow, magenta and
determining colors. blue and red combine to make magenta. white.
This then brings us to the primary Those three are the additive secondary When you’re painting something
with pigments, however, that works on a
subtractive color system. This means
Even if you’re not incorporating gels, if your light source does not contain the that each color that you add to the mix
proper wavelengths of light, your colors will never be rendered accurately. This is a results in a darker color. The subtractive
significant issue with solid-state lighting, as LEDs operate off of a very narrow band- primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow.
width of colored diodes that cannot necessarily create all of the wavelengths of They are not red, yellow and blue as we
natural light. And when you are adjusting RGB from a solid-state instrument, instead were taught. When you mix cyan and
of using gels, you’re reducing the narrow bandwidth even more than a gel might. We magenta, you get blue; when you mix
filmmakers need to be vigilant in this regard as LED developers and manufacturers cyan and yellow, you get green; when
continue to refine the technology. (See Shot Craft, AC Aug. ’17.) you mix yellow and magenta, you get
red. Are you with me on the synergy that

16 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 color that you can see. The human brain
is very flexible in interpreting colors in
our world, and color memory is a terri-
bly tricky thing. If someone shows you a
strawberry under light that does not
contain red, presenting it to your eye as
some other color, your brain may still
tell you “that is a red strawberry” and
you may believe you still see a red straw-
berry. But a camera doesn’t have this
flexibility. It will only show you what is
actually there.
On this page is a picture of a
p Examples of additive and subtractive color mixing. When the colors mix, they generate the primaries strawberry under white light, and then
of the opposite system. q A strawberry lit with white light (A) — and under that same light through a one of the same strawberry with a cyan
cyan filter (B), which eliminates the red wavelengths so they are not present to reflect off the filter on that light, eliminating the red
strawberry. Lack of required wavelengths makes the pigments appear black to the camera.
wavelengths, and therefore there is no
happens when we get the colors right? yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet are red to be reflected back. To the camera,
When you mix the respective additive absorbed by those pigments but red is the strawberry appears to be deep
primaries, you get the subtractive reflected. purple/black. But notice that the green
primaries, and when you mix the So, if you’re following, it stands to of the strawberry stem still has color,
subtractives, you get the additives. reason that in order to see the red paper, because there is green in the cyan light.
When you mix all three colors in the we must have light with red in it so that When you add a gel to a light, that
subtractive system, you get black. In those wavelengths can be reflected. If gel operates on a subtractive system,
pigments, black is the combination of all we take a cyan-colored light and shine it whereby it filters out, or absorbs, wave-
colors (and lack of reflection of light) on the red paper, it will appear black, as lengths of light in order to create a
and white is the absence of color (and there are no red wavelengths in the light chosen color. A tungsten bulb, for exam-
reflection of nearly all light). to be reflected, and all of the cyan wave- ple, emits full-spectrum light. When we
So when you look at a piece of lengths will be absorbed. In order to see put a red gel on a tungsten fixture, we
white paper, it has no color pigments in specific colors, those wavelengths must eliminate (absorb) green and blue wave-
it (absence of subtractive color), and the be in the light. If the light striking the lengths, and only allow red to be trans-
reason you see white is that all the paper is magenta (lacking green) then mitted. As a result, there is always a loss
colors of light are reflecting off of it and you’ll still see red, as there are plenty of of brightness/intensity when using gels,
reaching your eye. If we have a piece of red wavelengths in the magenta light as some of the light is absorbed and not
red paper, this has been created by (combination of red and blue) to be transmitted.
putting pigments into the paper pulp reflected. The photograph on page 20
and creating the red color — and the This means that the color of your depicts this subtractive color mixing
reason we see red is that orange, light is crucial to the interpretation of happening in the real world. I created a

Remember that green and red

lights combine to make yellow light,
as opposed to green and red
pigments that combine to make
brown pigment. This is a good exam-
ple of a fundamental difference
between the additive and subtrac-
tive color systems.

18 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 box with four chambers in it, and holes,
like little doorways, in each separation
between chambers. The base of the box
is lined with white paper. A white light,
which has equal amounts of red, green
and blue wavelengths, shines into the
first chamber, and the first separator has
a yellow gel in it. This turns the light
yellow by blocking out blue wavelengths
so only green and red pass through. The
next separator has a magenta filter,
which blocks out the green light, so now
what remains is only red wavelengths.
The final separator has a cyan filter,
which blocks out the red light, and in the
final chamber there is no light at all. Each
gel cuts out some wavelengths of light,
making each chamber darker than the
previous because light has been filtered
out — and in the end, we have complete
darkness.

The savvy reader will note that red, green and blue are a ubiquitous aspect of
our cinematographic world. Film contains three layers, which are sensitive to red,
green and blue light, respectively. Bayer-pattern color-filter arrays on digital cinema
cameras have red, green and blue filters. If you’re reading this on a computer screen,
then the red, green and blue pixels are forming the images you see. We are deeply
intertwined with the physics of additive color mixing. An intimate understanding of
how additive and subtractive colors work are a significant part of the cinematogra- Vintage Views on Color
pher’s job.
In discussing color theory, it’s only
appropriate that we look at the 1930s
and the evolution of color film. While
the use of color has been a part of
motion pictures since the very invention
of film — first achieved by painting or
tinting prints — the processes by which
color was achieved back then were in a
primordial state and were generally
inaccurate. Technicolor had the most
success, particularly with their three-
strip imbibition process, a complex
camera and print system widely intro-
duced in 1928 with The Viking (shot by
George Cave), the first feature filmed
and released with it.
I found it fascinating to read an AC
story from 1934 — a lightly edited
excerpt of which you can peruse on page
22 — in which discussions about color
film mirrored almost verbatim the
discussions I heard about high-definition
Magazine cover image from the AC archives.

video 20 years ago, or that I hear now

about high-dynamic-range imagery. Do
audiences really want it? Is it hard and
uncomfortable on the eyes?
There was caution in 1934 to not
overdo the use of color, and to employ it
strictly as a storytelling tool — again, the
same things we discuss today about high
resolution and HDR. It’s amazing to me
that we have the same arguments again
An example of subtractive color mixing through incremental filtering of white light. and again as technology advances. ➔
20 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

Color Control for Color Film
By Henri Coulon, B.A.
Excerpt
AC May 1934, page 11
In a previous article, the writer discussed
newly designed color-science equipment
and its application to black-and-white
films in looking toward improved tonal
balance. Regarding the production of
films in color, it seems certain that this
year will bring an entirely new concept
of color photography and on every hand
we now see producers acknowledging
color as the next logical step in the
evolution of the motion picture. […]
It is only a question of time until
the majority of pictures will be shown in
color — production of films in color has
been restricted in the past for several
reasons with two main indictments:
Theoretically, many producers
have held that audiences do not want
color, feeling that the accustomed black
22 January 2020
This article, as it appeared in the May 1934 issue of AC.
and gray rendition
affords greater scope
for each member of the
audience to interpret
the dramatic mood and
tonal effect according
to his or her individual
taste and reaction.
Secondly, it has been
found that color in films
has been more trying
and fatiguing to the
eyes than the shadow
grey — this was and is
perfectly true but only
because the colorings
of all motion pictures
which give this trying
effect are out of
balance.
When we consider
that to a large extent,
regardless of the artis-
tic merit of a picture, its
worth as a production
and a precedent is
measured almost
entirely by “box office,”
and when we look back over the major-
ity of colored films and see what the fan
received for his money — we cannot
altogether blame the producer for not
wanting to convert his productions into
color.
However, people do want films in
color and would welcome a production
using color in a pleasing manner —
where producers often fear of making a
picture too “arty” and devoid of much
appeal to that famous 12-year-old mind
to which we are told so many scenarios
are sealed, they should realize that
although action and plot must often-
times be held within limits to appeal to,
and be understood by the vast majority
of people — color has a universal appeal
and its vocabulary of expression is
understood by everyone. Along with
music, color holds fascination and inter-
est for everyone and each interprets
color according to his or her own psychic
reaction.
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
With colored films, there has
been a tendency to overdo with
splotches of irrelated [sic] colors in order
to make a visual flash — this is neither
art or good judgment and will not prevail
when the correct use of color is under-
stood.
There is no reason why chromatic
films may not be as effective and
artistically correct as the achromatic,
black and white picture — judicious use
of color intensities will enable producers
to avoid previous misconceptions of
color photographically and bring forth
pictures in which color will be the artisti-
cally valuable ally and not, as previously,
the handicap.
Of importance, technically, is the
knowledge that all colors and color
tones are produced by a separation of
light vibration forces or by handicapping
one light vibration force with another —
visual and photographic art in color
needs a recognized scale the same as
music.
Herein, the color picture has the
opportunity not only to attain improved
chromatic rendering but to point the
way for the most intelligent concept of
the use of color for other arts to follow.
By correctly relating color to
mood, action and plot, and by using less
color, vast improvements may be
accomplished. Color, in itself, has vast
potential advantages for the screen and
though its proper use can be as dynamic
and effective in conveying the message
of the picture as sound or music.
The situation calls for trained
color technicians with the ability to not
only understand the control and deter-
mination of color intensities but with
appreciation of all the important
psychological factors involving the
Image courtesy of the AC archives.
correct use of color.
(Ed. note: Sharp-eyed readers may
notice that the year on the cover of the
May 1934 issue, as seen on the previous
page, incorrectly appears as 1924.) u
 SHORT TAKES
Student Award Chair David Darby, ASC (second from left) with winners (from left) Łukasz Dziedzic, Oscar Ignacio Jiménez and Jazleana Jones.
Emerging Filmmakers
By Debra Kaufman
Established to inspire the next generation of cinematogra-
phers, the ASC Student Heritage Awards took place on Oct. 12 at
the Society’s Clubhouse in Hollywood, where honors were
presented to three emerging directors of photography. In the
Graduate category, the Richard H. Kline Student Heritage Award
was presented to Łukasz Dziedzic, of the American Film Institute,
for Animals. In the Undergraduate category, the Richard H. Kline
Student Heritage Award went to Oscar Ignacio Jiménez, of
Brigham Young University, for Gather. The Haskell Wexler
Student Documentary Award was given to Jazleana Jones, of
Florida State University, for King, Charles. The winners took time
with AC to discuss their work on these standout projects.
Animals
Cinematographer: Łukasz Dziedzic
Director: Chen-Wen Lo
In Animals, two child soldiers, a brother and sister, escape
their unit’s jungle outpost but are captured and confined in a
stable, where the sister must watch her brother suffer the ravages
of dengue fever. The movie is set in Myanmar in 2013, during a
domestic conflict between the government and separatists.
24 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years
Director Chen-Wen Lo, producer Miguel Lozano and
production designer Dara Zhao arranged a meeting with cine-
matographer Łukasz Dziedzic to talk about his participation.
“They told me the story, and I was immediately onboard,” he
says. “I felt this was a project I wanted to shoot.”
The logistics were challenging from the outset. The AFI
requires student projects to be shot within 30 miles of Los Ange-
les, so finding locations that could double for the jungles of
Myanmar was critical. Lo and Lozano began scouting for loca-
tions about a year before shooting began. The spectacular,
panoramic opening shot was captured at Malibu Creek State
Park. Other locations were Sanna Ranch in Santa Clarita, carefully 2019 Student Heritage Awards photo by Alex Lopez.
chosen sections of the Warner Bros. backlot, and AFI’s surround-
ing hillside, augmented by jungle plants. Success, says Dziedzic,
was about “finding the right angle to photograph and not show
everything.” He adds, “There was a lot of back-and-forth about
what would be an organic view and what isn’t in Asia. We
managed to fool everyone.”
Dziedzic shot with an Arri Amira and Cooke Speed
Panchro lenses from The Camera Division. “I like the aesthetic of
the lenses,” he says. “They’re soft and have a strong veiling glare
when wide open, an effect I used as a tool in our visual story-
telling.” He also used a Sony PMW-F55 CineAlta as a B camera for
a few shots. For his lighting package, he had two 9Ks and two 4Ks
from Illumination Dynamics and Cinelease, as well as the Light

p Jiménez and crew capture a scene.
Bridge CRLS (Cine Reflect Lighting
System), a system of bounce plates
designed by gaffer Jakob Ballinger.
In addition to the challenge of
locations, Dziedzic also had to design
shots featuring children — as well as
animals, specifically grasshoppers and a
rat. The children playing the main charac-
ters were both amateurs. “I had two light-
ing stand-ins, so that was a comfort,” says
the cinematographer. “For these kids, it
was important not to take them away
from their mental state. We also had a lot
of support to keep them from being too
tired. They were great.”
An animal wrangler kept the
grasshoppers in a cooler, which slowed
them down. “We had 10 to 15 seconds
before they went back to normal,” says
Dziedzic. The rat, he adds, was easier to
wrangle — it just did what rats do.
“I was very lucky that my best
friends from AFI had my back during this
exhausting shoot,” he says, citing camera
operator Michał Wroński, gaffer Carlo
Mendoza and key grips Yoni Shrira and
Shannon Connally.
Dziedzic and colorist Alexey Kurba-
tov performed the final grade using Black-
magic Design DaVinci Resolve.
Dziedzic says another big challenge
was lighting inside the stable without it
looking like the children could escape
through holes in the stable’s walls.
“For night scenes, we bounced
two 9Ks and two 4Ks off a 12-by-12 Ultra-
bounce frame hanging over the roof of
26 January 2020
t Dziedzic checks his monitor.
the building, and supplemented with
tungsten units shooting through the
cracks in the walls. Daylight was easier;
we had direct sunlight that we shaped
with diffusion and duvetyn.” He is proud-
est of the lighting design of the last shot,
when soldiers drag the siblings out of the
stable. “It was quite a spontaneous idea,”
Dziedzic says. “We were scouting the
location while the sun was setting, and
when we walked out of the stable, we
noticed that the sun was low in the direc-
tion of the door. We used lights to re-
create that on set. It was a happy acci-
dent.”
Gather
Cinematographer:
Oscar Ignacio Jiménez
Director: Howie Burbidge
In Gather, a father and daughter in
1800s rural America are on the verge of
starvation. When wolves steal their last
bit of meat, they turn to fishing, and both
drown in a tragic accident. We see them
in the afterlife as they make their way
home, where other deceased family
members welcome them to a table laden
with a feast.
The story’s dark nature was
inspired by director Howie Burbidge’s
diagnosis of Stage 4 lymphoma. Burbidge,
who also wrote the script, told Jimenez
that he saw death as reuniting with family
and leaving hardship behind. Cinematog-
rapher Oscar Ignacio Jiménez immedi-
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
ately gravitated to how the script, which
has little dialogue, relied heavily on visu-
als. Both filmmakers responded to the
“visual poetry” of directors Terrence
Malick and Alejandro González Iñárritu,
Jiménez notes. “I knew there would be a
lot on my plate,” he adds. “I knew collab-
oration was the only way to get it done,
and that energized me.”
For inspiration, Burbidge and
Jiménez turned to The Revenant for the
sense of nature vs. man, and to Babette’s
Feast — with its intimate and not clichéd
“bright light” heaven, the cinematogra-
pher notes — for the final scene. Jiménez
says he also rewatched one of this
favorite films, The Assassination of Jesse
James by the Coward Robert Ford, to
absorb how cinematographer Roger
Deakins, ASC, BSC created visual atmos-
phere. “At the beginning of our film, the
father and daughter are gathering food
but become prey to the wilderness,” he
says. “What I got from [our discussions]
was that it was more of a spiritual film; it
needed to feel like a prayer that transi-
tioned from want into gratitude.”
BYU supplied the Red Epic Dragon
camera and Canon CN-E Prime lenses. “I
popped in a couple of Black Pro-Mist ½
and 1 filters to give the image another
characteristic when I wasn’t getting the
look I wanted,” says Jiménez. “The lenses
are too sharp for my taste, but fast, so we
could get away with less light for night
scenes.” Lighting was minimal. “We had
to economize by choosing the best time
of day to shoot,” he says, noting that
Photos courtesy of the filmmakers. Dziedzic photo by Thierry Brouard.
most of the scenes were shot with avail-
able light. “If it rained or snowed, we had
to embrace the weather as part of the
story.”
The six-day shoot had eight loca-
tions, most of which were in rural areas of
Utah, and one big challenge was getting
to them. “Once we got there, we’d have
to carry all the equipment a quarter mile
in the snow to a cabin [built in] the early
1900s,” he says. “Luckily, we had an
incredible team. We’d catch snow in the
higher elevations, and in lower ones it
was sunnier, warmer.”
Jiménez’s favorite shot opens the
movie, when father and daughter fish by
a river. It’s a brief tease of one of the

t Jones shoots handheld for an exterior. p A still from
King, Charles depicting the silhouette technique Jones
more protracted scenes toward the end.
“When the camera comes out of the river
and the droplets start falling down in
front of the lens, it’s like the lens is crying,
which mirrors what the father is feeling,”
he says. “You see him struggle. The
camera is expressing what he was inter-
nalizing, and that felt like poetry.”
Jiménez researched underwater
photography, did tests, and procured a
splash bag from local vendor Mystery Box.
Despite all the planning, shooting the
scenes presented unforeseen challenges.
“We were ignorant and ambitious, and
then found out how hard it is to make this
kind of film,” he says. “Little things that I
didn’t think would make problems caused
the headaches, but with the help of my
gaffer, John Newton, and key grip, Chris-
tena Taylor, we problem-solved our way
out. Fellow student Ryan Romanovitch,
our colorist, nailed the bleached look of
the film when he graded it [in DaVinci
Resolve] at BYU’s post facility.
“This film was definitely a group
effort, and I am grateful for every single
one of my collaborators.”
King, Charles
Cinematographer: Jazleana Jones
Directors: William O’Neal II
and Skylar Theis
During her second semester in
FSU’s film program, cinematographer
Jazleana Jones was tasked with creating a
documentary. She was drawn to co-direc-
28 January 2020
developed for event reenactments.
tor William O’Neal II’s story of his distant
relative, Charles King, who died in combat
but had written letters from the battle-
field to his unborn son. Jones, O’Neal, co-
director Skylar Theis and sound mixer
Katelyn Lopez met to discuss the look.
“The main character wouldn’t appear in
the film, so we talked about creating
open frames, leaving space to show he’s
no longer there but that his presence is,”
Jones says. “We wanted to keep the
frames loose, giving more headroom than
you ordinarily would.”
The university provided a Pana-
sonic AU-EVA1, a Blackmagic Pocket
Cinema Camera for a B camera, and two
Canon EF lenses (24-70mm and 50mm).
Before the team could begin, they had to
figure out how to fit four people, luggage
and the equipment in the car. “It was the
biggest game of Tetris, especially with the
lighting gear,” recalls Jones. “We disas-
sembled C-stands and put them in nooks
and crannies.” Then they embarked on a
12-hour road trip to the first destination,
Cincinnati, Ohio, where King’s mother,
Gladys, and sister Gail lived. For Jones,
the challenge was being a camera depart-
ment of one. “I had to light everything, do
all the setups, and get the camera right,”
she says. “We were able to collaborate to
some extent, but I was the operator, key
grip and gaffer.”
When the interviews began, the
movie, which was going to focus on King’s
letters to his son, changed. “We learned
that Charles was an artist — he left art to
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
become a soldier — and we saw all of his
art in the home,” she says. “The story
blossomed, and the script was written in
the interviews.” The entire crew was
inspired by King’s artwork, which richly
decorated the house. “His art gave our
film that look,” Jones says. The next stop
was Cleveland, where King grew up. “We
went to the places and the streets
mentioned in the interviews to capture
some realism, and we visited his grave in
Bedford Heights,” says Jones.
The cinematographer notes the
picture was not finished with a formal
color grade. “After doing the edit,” she
says, “Skylar just used Lumetri Color in
[Adobe] Premiere Pro to make minor
adjustments.”
With an invisible subject, the film-
makers had to come up with a way to
make the documentary more than talking
heads. The directors wanted to somehow
re-enact stories told in the interviews, so
Jones suggested telling the stories with
silhouettes rather than just showing
photographs. “I had no idea how to do it,
but I convinced the directors I could and
then tried it out,” she says. This portion of
the movie was shot in Atlanta, Ga., in the
basement of O’Neal’s childhood home. “I
tried lighting a bedsheet, but it wasn’t
working out,” Jones recalls. “Then I
figured I could underexpose the image
because we had a lot of fill.” She soon
determined that the subjects needed to
be far enough away from the lights to
make it work. With a camera, two lights
and a bedsheet, she underexposed the
image but made sure the whites stayed
bright and the subjects were as blacked-
out as possible. “We shot at 96 fps, so the
camera had less light hitting the sensor,”
she says. “I monitored the histogram to
make sure we weren’t peaking.” Much to
her relief, it worked, and the silhouette
images are her favorite in the movie. “Our
greatest strength,“ she attests, “was how
Images courtesy of Jazleana Jones.
in-sync we all felt as we filmed it.” u
 Wages
of Sin

Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC frames — and indeed, it has been presented in a highly antici-

a hit man through the decades for

pated and well-attended limited theatrical run — yet the

Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman

feature will likely find the majority of its audience as a
streaming production on Netflix, in homes and on portable
devices of all sizes. And though forging into a marketplace

All images courtesy of Netflix US, LLC.

By Fred Schruers
The philosophies behind the production and presentation
of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman are steeped in contrasting
ideas. Made with great attention to the traditions of cinema
as captured on film stock, it also delivers its characters
with the use of complex digital technology. The story
unspools like a work made for the biggest of silver screens
Unit photography by Niko Tavernise.
increasingly depicted as having a short attention span, The
Irishman confidently runs three hours and 30 minutes, and
is built to be absorbed in one sitting.
For those with a deeper understanding of the moving
image, there’s an enticing choice within the production’s
creative DNA in Scorsese’s reteaming with cinematographer
Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC to bring forth the saga’s visuals
and emotions.
Prieto recalls a moment when he and Scorsese were

“Rodrigo is everything you could want in a collaborator,” director Martin Scorsese tells AC. “He’s adventurous, he’s inge-
nious, he’s tireless, and he always keeps up the pace and the energy on set. He thinks on his feet and is always ready with a solution
whenever a problem arises, and he knows his craft and his tools like he knows the lines on the back of his hand. Rodrigo is an
endlessly positive creative force.”
And as Scorsese told Time magazine in a 2017 piece about the duo’s work on Silence, “Very often, I’d have another shot
planned. And [Rodrigo] would look at me and say, ‘Look what we have here. The landscape took over.”

30 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 Wages of Sin
p Director Martin Scorsese (left) and Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC on the set of the gangster film The Irishman.
q (From left) Hit man Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) and mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) share a
moment with Frank’s daughter Peggy (Lucy Gallina).
“Marty wanted the camera to behave
like Sheeran when we are with him — method-
ical, devoid of flourishes,” Prieto notes.
“Sheeran approaches ‘painting houses’ with
cold efficiency, like clockwork. So instead of
filming a killing with many angles and camera
moves, we’d typically do it with a static camera
that would, at most, pan to follow Sheeran
approaching the victim on a wide shot, and
then just stay there. Simple and brutal. This is
not the case when we follow other characters,
where the camera moves more freely and with
a different energy.”
32 January 2020
wrapping up their work on Silence —
which, through mud and inclement
weather, was quite a challenge both
creatively and literally (AC Jan. ’17) —
and they paused to pose for a photo.
“As we’re posing,” Prieto says, “Marty
tells me, ‘I’ve been thinking about how
to stylistically approach The Irishman. I
think that maybe I’d like to try some-
thing that feels like a home movie, but
I don’t want it to be grainy and hand-
held.’ That was an interesting chal-
lenge for me. What I understood was
that he was trying to convey the
memory of what home movies look
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
like.” The need to present a story based
on memories was something they both
agreed upon for the long-gestating
project.
For a time, the movie bore the
tag I Heard You Paint Houses, the title of
the Charles Brandt non-fiction book
upon which the movie is based, about
World War II veteran Frank Sheeran,
who began as a Teamster union
member and transitioned by degrees,
from the 1950s through the ’70s, to
become muscle and then assassin for
the Philadelphia Mafia figures deeply
enmeshed in the union — the hierarchy
of which famously went all the way up
to the fiery and once all-powerful boss
Jimmy Hoffa.
With a cast that included Robert
De Niro as Sheeran and Al Pacino as
Hoffa — along with Joe Pesci, Ray
Romano, Harvey Keitel, Bobby
Cannavale and Anna Paquin — the
stakes rose higher for Prieto, who was
tasked with helping to establish a look
equal to the story and its players.
The cinematographer knew from
the script by esteemed screenwriter
Steven Zaillian that the story would
open with an aged Sheeran reminisc-
ing as he plays back sequences from his
often-violent past. What Prieto gleaned
from Scorsese’s take was, “It feels like
you’re remembering that era. So I
thought, ‘What if instead of emulating
the look of a home movie, we emulate
the color characteristics of amateur still
photography of the different eras? I
started researching still-photography
emulsions and the history of non-
professional photography in the
decades we would be representing,
and ended up creating look-up tables
that emulated Kodachrome for the ’50s
and Ektachrome for the ’60s.”
For the ’70s and beyond, Prieto
incorporated the look of the ENR
silver-retention process that was
invented at Technicolor Rome and first
used by Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC for
Warren Beatty’s 1981 feature Reds. In
that process, after the film has been
bleached but before the silver is fixed
out of the print, an added black-and-
 Wages of Sin
white development bath helps retain
silver, resulting in sharper contrast and
reduced color saturation.
“We did research into the charac-
teristics of this process and created a
LUT to use in two [of the film’s]
phases,” Prieto notes. “For the first part
of the ’70s, I used a ‘light ENR,’ making
for just a little bit of desaturation and a
little extra contrast. But then, right after
Hoffa’s murder in 1975, the LUT shifts
to a deeper version of ENR, so you’ll
notice [during] the end of the movie
that the color is further drained from
the image. For me, this was a way to
represent the loss of meaning in
Sheeran’s life in the years after his
friend’s death.”
Prepping these exacting hues
To provide, from the very beginning of
production, the subtle visual cues that
director Martin Scorsese desired for The
Irishman’s various historical periods,
Harbor Picture Co. and Rodrigo Prieto,
ASC, AMC undertook a much deeper
process than is typical for the creation of
LUTs and dailies — which yielded
imagery from the outset that was very
close to the movie’s final look. AC spoke
with Harbor’s Matt Tomlinson, a color
scientist and ASC associate, and colorists
Yvan Lucas and Elodie Ichter, who also
worked with Prieto on the final grade.
Matt Tomlinson: This kind of
attention to detail [in the LUT-creation
process], and the effort and time that
was put into it, is something that’s not all
that common. The Kodachrome and
Ektachrome LUTs we developed with
Rodrigo are part of the storytelling, and
Rodrigo made decisions as to their
specific time periods, and how these
time periods should be represented by
each look, by these color palettes.
There were multiple sessions
where we created LUTs using test
footage from Rodrigo. He came in with
images — books with photographic
references and distinct ideas of what he
34 January 2020
was no quick process. “We had to do
very complex color science,” the cine-
matographer says. “The early stages of
creating the LUTs was done by
Philippe Panzini from Codex in
London. He is a fanatic about film
emulsions; he has interviewed the
Kodak scientists who created
Kodachrome and Ektachrome, and
carefully researched how these emul-
sions reproduce the different colors.”
This information was then given
to color scientist and ASC associate
member Matthew Tomlinson at
Harbor Picture Co., where he worked
with colorists Yvan Lucas and Elodie
Ichter to perform the LUT-creation for
the movie, “reproducing [the looks] for
the digital and film [footage] and
Evoking The Irishman’s Eras
wanted certain aspects of the movie to
look like. He would point to elements of
specific images that he liked. For each
one, we would take the imagery that he
shot and introduce that look. Then
Rodrigo would say, ‘More of this, less of
that,’ and it was created on the fly [as a
collaboration between] us.
It was really a surgical creation,
where minor shifts were going on in
different areas of the gray scale on the
hue palette. The work was done very
specifically, based on Yvan, Elodie and
Rodrigo’s thought process in terms of
what this movie should look like.
There are actually about four LUTs
total. Philippe Panzini of Codex was part
of the creation process for the
Kodachrome and Ektachrome looks; the
ENR looks were based on work by
Harbor; and the final creation was a
combination of [all our efforts]. A
Kodachrome look was used for the ’50s,
Ektachrome for the ’60s, light ENR for
the early ’70s, and heavier ENR after
Hoffa’s death.
Yvan Lucas: Via the ENR process,
there’s more contrast and less satura-
tion. It’s a process we use in the lab. I
was a color timer for 20 years before I
moved to digital, and this is how we did
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
matching them,” Tomlinson says. (See
sidebar, below.) Lucas and Ichter also
worked with Prieto on the final color
grade, which was performed with
FilmLight’s Baselight system.
“I found that the digital camera
that best reproduced the color charac-
teristics of the LUTs on the film nega-
tive was the Red Helium,” Prieto says.
“We mapped the LUT colors to match
the film negative and the Red sensor.
Industrial Light & Magic took care of
matching the grain structure of the film
negatives I used on all the visual-effects
shots captured with the digital
cameras.”
Once Scorsese had given his
blessing to the looks, Prieto visited the
Harbor Picture facility in Santa Monica
it at that time for [films like] Seven and
Delicatessen. When you see the print,
the blacks look much deeper; you see
details in the blacks and the faces, and
the colors [in general] are desaturated.
Elodie Ichter: [Rodrigo] has a
history of doing this kind of thing with us.
There are a few DPs in the world who
really want the dailies to be very close to
the final look. [ASC members] Rodrigo,
Chivo [Lubezki] or [Roger] Deakins, for
example, really want to have the final
look in the dailies — so it’s really impor-
tant to work on that [for them].
Tomlinson: When we’re working
on a movie, it’s our movie, too. We
consider ourselves artists; we’re [crafts-
people, and we] embrace that. [We put]
our soul into it, and it really is about the
collaboration and creating something
that is unique. The Irishman is a great
example. The film-derived footage was
the hero for the show. After rigorous
testing that matched the pipeline of how
the film and digital material would be
handled during the shoot and beyond,
Harbor was able to create transforms so
the digital would match the film.
— Fred Schruers
 Wages of Sin
with reference images. “I separated the
decades through LUTs to help create
an emotional arc for the character,” the
cinematographer recalls, “starting
with the ‘memory’ of Kodachrome,
which is quite colorful, especially satu-
rating the red hues — and then of
Ektachrome, which is also colorful but
deflects colors in a very different way,
a little less saturated and more skewed
towards cyan green in the shadows.
And then, after Hoffa’s death, the color
is gone from Sheeran’s life; this was
achieved through the ENR LUT. I also
push-processed the negative for this
part of the story, adding additional
grain to the image.”
Ultimately, Prieto reports, “We
shot approximately 51 percent of the
movie in 3-perf Super 35mm on Kodak
38 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years
t & qt Scorsese and Prieto work
with actor Al Pacino (playing
Teamster-union boss Jimmy Hoffa)
to reenact one of the many public
hearings Hoffa was called to
attend. qqt P. Scott Sakamoto
operates Steadicam.
[Vision3 250D] 5207 and
[Vision3 500T] 5219, and the
rest on digital cameras for
the visual-effects work.”
The film material was shot
with Arricam ST and LT
cameras and Cooke
Panchro Classic lenses. The
negative was processed at
Kodak’s lab in New York
and scanned at Technicolor
in New York.
In order to depict De Niro-as-Sheeran
through the several decades of the
story, the production had to find a way
to “de-age” him and other key
members of the cast. The process — as
overseen by ILM visual-effects super-
visor Pablo Helman in close concert
with Scorsese — was a tech adventure
in its own right, but one thing the film-
makers knew from the outset was that
their assembly of deeply naturalistic
actors would not be game for the kind
of production environment that has
traditionally seen performers
helmeted or covered in markers, and
sometimes acting opposite props
rather than their fellow thespians. ILM
therefore worked closely with the film-
makers to develop a three-camera rig,
with a main camera and two witness
cameras, as well as a suite of software
geared to handle the inherent complex-
ities.
“The reason the VFX de-aging
shots had to be captured digitally was
that ILM needed three cameras with
perfectly synchronized shutters for
each angle,” Prieto explains. “This
would not be feasible on film cameras,
plus there were issues of size and
weight. The two witness cameras,
which were [Arri] Alexa Minis outfit-
ted with [Arri/Zeiss] Ultra Prime
 Wages of Sin
TECH SPECS
1.85:1

3-perf Super 35mm and Digital Capture

Arricam ST, LT; Red Helium;

Arri Alexa Mini

Cooke Panchro Classic;

Arri/Zeiss Ultra Prime;
Angénieux Optimo 24-290mm;
Zeiss 28-80mm and
70-200mm Compact Zoom

Kodak Vision3 250D 5207,

500T 5219

lenses, were tasked with capturing

every detail of the depth information of
p The production preps an exterior scene to be shot on film. q & qq For sequences in which actors
would be de-aged in post, the filmmakers employed a three-camera digital rig — aka the “three-headed the faces for the VFX de-aging work.
monster” — to capture the imagery as well as infrared and depth information. ILM needed the images from the
witness cameras to be flatly lit, without
any additional texture or loss of infor-
mation caused by dramatic lighting.
For that reason, these cameras were
fitted with filters that cut out all the
visible wavelengths while allowing
only infrared light into the sensor.
Around the lenses of these witness
cameras, we had infrared-light-emit-
ting LEDs that lit the actor’s faces with
frontal infrared lighting. The Red
Helium, which was usually outfitted
with a Cooke Panchro Classic lens,
could not ‘see’ this infrared light, so it
captured only the actual lighting I
created for the face.
“After each setup,” the cine-
matographer continues, “we photo-
graphed a mirror/18-percent-gray
sphere and then shot HDRI stills and a
lidar [3D laser scan]. ILM ran all that
data through a computer program that
analyzed the lighting captured by the
lidar, combined it with the light inten-
sity measured in the mirror sphere and
the 18-percent-gray sphere, and
spewed out a lighting setup that repli-
cated the intensity, shape and color
temperature of my lighting, as well as
any influence from the light reflected
from the set. This was then applied
onto the computer-generated ‘young’

40 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 Wages of Sin
Bufalino and Sheeran spend some time poolside with their respective wives, Carrie (Kathrine Narducci)
and Irene (Stephanie Kurtzuba).
face of the actor to replace the face we
filmed.
“All three cameras had to move
in unison, so we created a rig that held
them together and was light enough to
be used on any camera head — Marty
couldn’t be limited in the way he shot,
Collaborator Spotlight: Gaffer Bill O’Leary
American Cinematographer:
When did you first become interested in
filmmaking, and, ultimately, lighting?
Bill O’Leary: In college I took a
still-photography class and a film-
production class as a lark, and I really
enjoyed them — so I ended up majoring
in film.
Is there an early experience of
learning the craft that can be related
directly to what you do now?
O’Leary: Early in my career, in
1985, I met and worked with Roger
Deakins [ASC, BSC] — who greatly influ-
enced me — on Sid and Nancy. We had
both worked in documentaries, so we
had a common working methodology,
and we both tend to be naturalists in
[terms of] our lighting style.
The Irishman is your fourth
project with Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC,
following Wall Street: Money Never
Sleeps, The Wolf of Wall Street and the
Vinyl pilot. Rodrigo thinks very highly of
42 January 2020
so we had to make sure the rig could go
anyplace he wanted and move in any
way he envisioned,” Prieto adds. “We
used carbon fiber for the plate, but the
choice of the lightest motors, rods and
accessories was important. Each lens
had to focus independently of the
your work, and says you’re a great part-
ner.
O’Leary: Kind words from
Rodrigo. We spoke years ago about
Brokeback Mountain, but it didn’t work
out.
Did the logistical challenges of
The Irishman — with its lengthy script,
running time and visual-effects arrange-
ments — make you hesitant to take the
gig?
O’Leary: I’ve done jobs of compa-
rable length, and certainly under ardu-
ous conditions, but these factors don’t
usually influence my decision.
There are a lot of dark laughs in
this film — a signature of Scorsese’s
work — and one that paid off well was
the tossing of Frank’s murder weapons
into the river.
O’Leary: I think the idea of the
gun-tossing was the repetition of it, and
then the underwater payoff of dozens of
guns. This ‘underwater’ shot was done
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
others, so each had its own focus
motors and all the cables to power
them.
“Another characteristic the rig
had to have was compactness,” he
continues. “Sometimes the main
camera had to be right next to a wall.
For such cases, we designed the plate so
we could remove the side support for
one of the witness cameras, and we’d
take the camera we removed from the
side and mount it atop the main
camera. The plate was designed so it
would click into the fluid head, and we
made special brackets that we’d mount
to the plate when we put it on the Libra
head for crane work.
“We called the rig ‘the three-
headed monster,’ and Trevor Loomis,
our incredible first AC, worked with
Arri and ILM to create it,” Prieto notes.
“Zoran Veselic was also involved in the
first phase of the design.”
Given Scorsese’s own active eye
— though the film’s narrative ethic was
sooner stately than busy — there were
on stage against a black backing, with
two Rosco X24 X-Effects Projectors
providing the rippling effect.
Rodrigo — a bit tongue-in-cheek
— compared you to Sheeran in the
sense that you prepare meticulously,
take on the various challenges, and
execute the tasks with a minimum of
fuss and bother. Has this always been
your working style?
O’Leary: I do believe in being well-
prepped — it allows a certain freedom
once one arrives on set. I also believe we
sometimes overcomplicate the task at
hand. There’s a James Wong Howe [ASC]
quote where he speaks about how, over
the years, he simplified his lighting. So
yes, a minimum of fuss and bother, like
Sheeran. Why use a .38 when a .22 will
do?
— F.S.
 Wages of Sin
Many exteriors throughout the film were shot onstage at an armory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
also Steadicam shots (captured by P.
Scott Sakamoto), and that system
couldn’t accommodate the three-
camera rig. “For Steadicam, we ended
up using a two-camera version of the
rig, and the third camera was posi-
tioned off the rig on a stand to capture
the information of the face that the two
cameras on the Steadicam were not
seeing,” Prieto explains. “ILM required
the triangulation of the three cameras
for all the face-replacement shots.”
Crucial to the creative collabora-
tion that brought The Irishman to
fruition was Prieto’s work with a
favorite colleague: gaffer Bill O’Leary.
“Every time I do something in New
York, I try to get Bill onboard,” the
cinematographer says. “He had his
work cut out for him because we had,
I’ll estimate, about 300 sets. Every day
we had company moves — or we’d be
in, say, a hotel room onstage and then
we’d move to Sheeran’s house — and a
lot of sets had to be prepared, pre-lit
and ready. Somehow, Bill makes it look
simple. He’s kind of similar to Sheeran
in the sense that he doesn’t talk much
about how he’s going to do things or
how it happens; he just executes a
44 January 2020
wildly complicated lighting scheme.
Sometimes I worry he’ll say, ‘That’s
impossible.’ But then it happens. He
was a great partner.
“The other great partner in terms
of lighting was our key grip, Tommy
Prate,” Prieto continues. “Tommy also
had his work cut out for him, especially
the studio work, most of which was
done in this huge, empty armory in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Tommy
created this giant grid with pipes,
trusses and lighting rigs based on the
floor plans of the sets. It was very time-
consuming in prep to figure all this out
and then to build the lighting rigs
before the sets were even constructed.
We had to pre-design our lighting from
plans and miniatures. I found that
thrilling — creating the light in the
studio to make it seamless with the real
locations.” (The story unfolds in
Philadelphia, Detroit, New York,
Miami and Washington, D.C., but the
production used locations in and
around New York City.)
All the hotel rooms were sets, plus
both of Sheeran’s houses, as well as a
room and restaurant in the Howard
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
Johnson’s. “The Villa Di Roma is one
of the main sets we built in a studio,”
Prieto recalls. “We also built the inte-
rior of the house in Detroit where
Hoffa is shot. The interior of
Umberto’s Clam House, where Joey
Gallo [Sebastian Maniscalco] is killed,
was a set, too. There’s one nighttime
establishing shot that starts on loca-
tion outside a replica of Umberto’s,
pushing in on a 50-foot Technocrane
into a bluescreen on the door, and then
transitioning into a continuation of the
move on a Steadicam in the studio.”
All car interiors were shot in a
studio. For the road journeys, the
production deployed wall-size LED
monitors that provided the cameras
and the actors with a believable pass-
ing land- or cityscape. Prieto explains,
“We worked with the OverDrive
system at PRG with the support of
[ASC associate] Dan Hammond. I had
three walls made out of LED panels
that measured about 10 feet high by 16
feet wide, plus two 6-by-6-foot panels.
We used one of the big LED walls for
the background of the shots — similar
to rear-screen projection but with an
LED wall instead — while the other
 Collaborator Spotlight: 1st AD David Webb
American Cinematographer: We
understand that the shot-listing process
on a Scorsese production is lengthier and
more intensive than on almost any other
show.
David Webb: A great part of the
collaboration, which seems to me is unique
to working with Marty, is that he, Rodrigo
[Prieto, ASC, AMC] and I sit for three weeks,
for four hours a day – we will start the
process again soon in Oklahoma for Killers
of the Flower Moon — and he goes through
every scene, every line of the script, every
word. Marty and Rodrigo come up with a
shot list for the whole shoot. We call that
the ‘annotated script.’ Marty basically
outlines his vision and gives us the blue-
print for how he wants to shoot the film.
We do it on all his films, and it is one of
Rodrigo’s and my favorite parts of the
process. It is efficient because we are then
able to transfer those ideas to all the
departmental keys. Furthermore, during
the shooting period, every night at wrap,
we meet in the trailer — Marty, Rodrigo,
[producer] Emma Koskoff and me. The four
of us get out the script and art-department
plans for the next day’s shoot and review
the preconceived plan. Marty says, ‘Here
are the shots. This is how we will start the
day.’ This allows Rodrigo and me to arrive
early in the morning and set up the shot.
Marty’s sure-handedness and clarity of
vision allow us to have a specific plan and
enable us to attack the day with precise
efficiency.
There’s a stateliness and a moodi-
ness to The Irishman that sets it apart, and
helps ensure that the technical accom-
plishments of de-aging remain a means to
an end, rather than a centerpiece.
If you look at all of Marty’s films,
each has its own mood. For a lot of
Irishman, the technical aspect is solved by
just living and breathing through the script,
through what the story is, defining what
the film looks like. He loves moving the
camera, but there are also moments when
he loves for the camera to just be kind of a
collector of emotion.
How did you approach the large
crowd scenes in The Irishman?
Webb: An AD’s job is to help
46 January 2020
execute the director’s vision, and that
means making sure everything is organized
and focused and that everyone is engaged,
including the background performers.
Marty has an incredible attention to detail
and is very exacting. It has to be just right,
and real, for him to be satisfied. For the
Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night, we had
a big crowd, including the dancers and the
band, and we spent a lot of time casting the
background and choreographing the vari-
ous elements so that the feel was just right.
I must say that the background cast-
ing in this film, the actual people [assem-
bled], was the best I’ve seen in my career.
The people [casting associate Jennifer]
Sabel provided for all the Hoffa rallies, and
especially the Tony Pro rally — it would’ve
been impossible for us to not execute that
scene with the people she provided —
helped create an energy that was amazing.
Marty was super-pleased that it all felt so
authentic. That is of utmost importance to
him: authenticity. Marty has an excellent
research department, run by Marianne
Bower, who I also worked with on Silence,
and we all put a lot of effort into all the
scenes. We also had a great team among
my AD staff — Jeremy Marks, Trevor
Tavares and Ryan Howard — and all the
PAs, hair, makeup and, of course, the
wardrobe department.
Marty’s crew is full of dedicated
filmmakers who love the process, and
Marty demands excellence. He brings out
the best in everybody because everyone is
passionate about not only the material, but
also his obviously important legacy. He
arms you to be great, even though you
literally go gray making his films. The
process is incredibly demanding, and not
just because of the demands he puts on
you, because he [does] everything with
positive energy, but because the crew
collectively does not want to ‘mess up the
master’s work!’ I will always be honored to
be a part of it; it really is the greatest thing.
Marty’s crew, after multiple films together,
is very tight, and we are able to do what we
do in a relaxed and efficient manner. Marty
wouldn’t have it any other way.
— F.S.
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
Wages of Sin
LED screens were used for interactive
lighting. The 2nd unit shot the plates
we used for the LED screens with a
system devised by Background Plates.
It uses nine cameras to capture every
angle around the car. On stage, we fed
those images to our screens, which lit
the actors in the car. That way we got
all the accurate reflections on the car,
on the faces and on the actors’
eyeglasses. I also used Source Four
Lekos to create hard-edged sunlight
effects.
“To light this film, we employed
every trick of the trade: Fresnel, open-
face and PAR tungsten, HMI, ellip-
soidals, LEDs of all kinds, and, every
once in a while, lighting balloons,”
Prieto adds. One example of the latter
is the scene at Philadelphia’s Schuylkill
River, where Frank throws a gun into
the water. “For that one, we used a
Sourcemaker 8-by-8 Cube with the
sides blacked out,” says O’Leary. “It
was loaded with metal-halide lamps,
the closest mercury-vapor equivalent.”
The underwater shot of the gun float-
ing down onto a pile of weapons was
shot dry on stage with smoke and lit
with two Rosco X24 X-Effects
Projectors simulating the streetlight
projecting water patterns on the
bottom of the river. The gun floating
down was created as a CGI element by
ILM. Prieto notes that most of the night
exteriors in The Irishman have a
mercury-vapor coloration because
yellow/orange-hued sodium-vapor
streetlights didn’t exist at the time.
For the lighting in general, Prieto
reports, “I emulated that mercury-
vapor color with tungsten 10K, 5K and
2K Fresnels. We gelled them with [Lee
728] Steel Green — I use that gel a lot.
It has a cyan color to it which looks to
me very much like mercury vapor.” He
notes that this technique was used for
such setups as “outside Umberto’s
Clam House, with many Fresnel units
on rooftops, fire escapes and condor
cranes. The exterior location was a
corner on the Lower East Side. The
interior was built in Astoria Studios
and lit with Source Four Lekos shining
 Wages of Sin
Scorsese wanted to shoot nearly all of
the dialogue scenes with at least two simul-
taneous angles, one on each actor, and
sometimes a third angle to capture a two-
shot at the same time as the close-ups.
Prieto accepted that these setups would be
“a big challenge lighting-wise,” he says. “I
had to develop a lighting strategy to main-
tain the mood and atmosphere of the scene
while the cameras were facing the actors in
opposite directions. It was complicated to
light, but to capture all their emotions I think
it was well worth it; in the end, this movie
lives on those incredible performances.
“When we were using the ‘three-
headed monster,’” the cinematographer
adds, “an additional challenge was that instead of three cameras for three angles, we
had nine cameras with the respective crew and gear! Each one of the three cameras
had to have a focus puller. [A-camera 1st AC] Trevor Loomis was head of the camera
assistants, and he managed the small army of ACs.”
through square holes in the ceiling,
creating hot spots of white light in the
restaurant.”
Perhaps no single setting offered
as many opportunities and challenges
as a banquet scene that found several of
the key characters assembled for a
signal event of October 1974, which
was billed as “Frank Sheeran
Appreciation Night” and celebrated at
a storied destination called the Latin
Scorsese at the helm for a scene with De Niro and Pesci.
48 January 2020
Casino, where Sinatra had done
shows. The production shot this in a
ballroom in Harlem.
Mindful of the significance of the
color red in previous Scorsese movies
— he particularly remembers a bloody
scene in a car trunk in the woods from
Goodfellas, as illuminated by brake
lights — Prieto sought to push the
metaphor by equipping the set with
red light sources. “Bob Shaw, our
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
production designer, was skeptical in
the beginning because he was afraid it
would not go well with the blue
curtains of his initial design,” the cine-
matographer says, “but I shot a test
with a lamp with a red shade and then
augmented with red lighting to match
that color, and Marty liked it. So Bob
changed the curtains to gold and red,
and we went in that direction. The
concept was inspired by a banquet
scene in the movie Network in which
Owen Roizman [ASC] used red lamp-
shades. To bathe the room in red light, I
used Arri SkyPanels with Chimeras.
“All around the perimeter we put
Birdies, miniature PAR cans, that we
actually see in frame,” he continues.
“This mix of golden highlights from the
Birdies and the red ambient light from
the lamps became the lighting strategy
for those scenes. I also used two spot-
lights to light the speakers onstage and
to roam around the dancers when the
music plays.”
Prieto points to a sequence in the
ballroom for which the spots were
particularly useful: when Frank’s
daughter Peggy (Paquin) dances with
Hoffa. Peggy has seen her father have
an intense conversation with quietly
sinister mob boss Russell Bufalino
(Pesci) and fully realizes what her dad’s
deadly trade has done to their relation-
ship, as well as to his (not-always-so-
innocent) victims.
“Peggy realizes that these guys
 Wages of Sin
are thinking of killing Hoffa,” Prieto
describes. “So I used the spotlight sort
of wandering romantically through the
dancers and the tables as an ‘excuse’ to
highlight certain moments. At one
point, while she dances with Hoffa, she
looks across the room and the spotlight
happens to pass right through her. The
camera is on a dolly, circling them, and
as she turns, it pans to find Bufalino
and other men who are upset with
Hoffa — just as the spotlight highlights
that moment on them.”
Regarding the character of
Peggy, Prieto notes, “From the subjec-
tive perspective of the way Marty
films, she actually reflects all of
Sheeran’s feelings and all that guilt he
hides every time he sees her looking at
him. It’s us seeing him actually judging
himself.”
The cinematographer finds
another telling moment in a scene with
Sheeran as the sole passenger on a
twin-engine small plane to be ferried to
a gruesome task. As instructed by
Bufalino, he has removed his
sunglasses, and we study the brooding
hit man from arm’s length as the plane
throttles up. “When we shot that close-
up inside the airplane,” Prieto recalls,
“there’s nothing going on, just him
sitting in a plane and the plane starts to
go. But I was operating, and I remem-
ber looking through the camera. De
Niro didn’t do anything. He didn’t
move. He didn’t do an expression. But
I remember immediately tearing up,
feeling and seeing the depth of sorrow
of this man as he realizes he is being
forced to kill his friend.
“The way De Niro did that is just
genius,” Prieto continues, “I have no
clue how he was able to project all that
without doing anything. It’s beautiful.
There are so many moments like that in
the film, seeing what these men do and
not glorifying it at all. Marty is able to
see them as human beings — human
beings with struggles and issues and
vulnerability. They’re not just these
killers who are all-powerful. They’re
ppp Rehearsing a scene, to be captured digitally with the three-camera rig, that will ultimately
feature Sheeran’s daughter Peggy (Anna Paquin) and Hoffa sharing a final dance. pp & p A sampling scared, too.” u
of digitally shot interiors.

50 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 Lives Under Siege
Taking on contemporary
drama and the depths of war,
Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC
shoots The Goldfinch
and 1917
By Rachael K. Bosley
No two projects are alike for any cinematographer, but this
year marked a particularly varied slate for Roger Deakins,
ASC, BSC, who shot John Crowley’s contemporary drama The
Goldfinch, released in September, and Sam Mendes’ period
combat film 1917, released Christmas Day.
Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch tells a story that spans two decades,
following a boy who loses his mother in a bombing in
Manhattan and contends with the effects as he evolves into
adulthood. 1917 simulates a single, unbroken shot to follow
two British soldiers taking an urgent message to the Western
Front. The Goldfinch was Deakins’ first collaboration with
Crowley, and 1917 was his fourth feature with Mendes,
following Jarhead (AC Nov. ’05), Revolutionary Road (AC Jan.
’09) and Skyfall (AC Dec. ’12).
The cinematographer recently met with AC in New
York to discuss both productions. His wife, James Ellis
Deakins, was the digital-workflow consultant on the projects
and provided additional details during the conversation.
52 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years
American Cinematographer: Let’s begin with your
approach to two scenes in The Goldfinch that bookend the
relationship between Theo and Pippa, his love interest. In
Entertainment and Amazon Content Services. 1917 unit photography by François
The Goldfinch unit photography by Macall Polay; images courtesy of Warner Bros.
the first, they’re children [played by Oakes Fegley and
Aimee Laurence], and he visits her in her room after the
bombing. In the second, they’re adults [played by Ansel
Elgort and Ashleigh Cummings] at a restaurant, and she
tells him she doesn’t plan to return to New York.
Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC: That scene in Pippa’s room
is a good example of how we approached location work in
New York in general: We were shooting in winter, so daylight
Duhamel, SMPSP, courtesy of Universal Pictures.
was short and inconsistent, and we basically had to take out
the natural light and re-create it so we could get a 12-hour
shooting day. That scene was shot on the second floor of a
small townhouse in Bedford-Stuyvesant. John and I wanted
this pastel light, motivated by the window blinds, and then to
have the sun come out at a key moment in the scene. I needed
to create a wide, soft source to mimic natural daylight whilst
at the same time bypass the density and color changes that
would occur as day went into night. [Gaffer] Steve Ramsey
and his crew suspended a 20-by-20-foot Ultrabounce from a
crane to cut out the natural daylight, and then we bounced an
Arri M90 off that same rag to create some soft ambience. There
 Lives Under Siege
was a second Ultrabounce, a 12-by-12,
and another HMI bouncing off that.
Another M90 was used to create a hard
pattern of sunlight, and it was fitted
with an electronic shutter so I could
have the sun come out on cue. The set
dresser and I chose some yellow blinds
specifically for the scene, and the
windows were covered with
Hampshire diffusion. The diffusion
allowed me to shoot at the windows
after dark without seeing my rig, and it
was so minimal it made little difference
to the shaft of ‘sunlight.’
Their dinner as adults was actu-
ally shot in a bar in Albuquerque, New
Mexico. We also filmed the scenes [set]
in Las Vegas, where Theo goes to live
with his father for a while, in
Albuquerque. We scouted many restau-
rants in New York, but it worked out
that we couldn’t shoot the scene there.
p Theo (Oakes Fegley) emerges from the Metropolitan Museum of Art following a deadly bombing in The Goldfinch. qt On location in Brooklyn, N.Y., Roger
Deakins, ASC, BSC and 1st AC Andy Harris capture Theo’s visit to Pippa (Aimee Laurence, left), another young survivor of the bombing. qu Mrs. Barbour (Nicole
54 January 2020
In a way, that didn’t matter; that scene is
all about character — it’s about the
faces. We had the blocking in our heads,
and we knew we just needed a bit of a
view out the window in the back-
ground. Outside the window at the
location, [production designer] K.K.
Barrett built a bit of a New York street,
including a few trees, and I spotted in
two 2K Fresnels that were gelled with
1⁄2 CTO and on dimmers to create the
feeling of street lighting. The restaurant
interior was lit by the practical candles,
with no supplemental lighting other
than background practicals.
How did you develop the recur-
ring image of Theo’s last memory of
his mother, where she takes her hand
from his shoulder and walks out of
focus?
Deakins: John and I talked about
our own memories of childhood, and
Kidman) takes Theo in after the tragedy.
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
we agreed that it would be details Theo
remembered, not a clear picture of the
whole event. The shot of Theo’s mother’s
hand as she leaves her son for the last
time was made on a 50mm [Arri/Zeiss
Master Prime] that was wide open. I felt
a longer lens gave too much fall-off and
seemed less connected to the subject,
whilst a wider lens gave too little fall-off.
The shot worked best with the 50mm
when [1st AC] Andy Harris pulled focus
in opposition to the receding figure. We
wanted to keep the backgrounds out to
emphasize the otherworldliness of the
moment. When Theo comes out of the
museum after the explosion, we continue
that idea by staying quite tight on him,
making all the people fleeing behind him
slightly out of focus. It’s quite effective, I
think.
When Theo and Boris [Aneurin
Barnard] reconnect as adults, there’s a
long dialogue in the car when Boris
makes a surprising confession. Was that
poor-man’s process?
Deakins: Yes. We actually shot that
scene out on the street first, but John
decided to reshoot it as an interior and
have Ansel jump out of the car at the end.
We shot plates in New York and actually
shot the actors in the car onstage in
Albuquerque. To suggest the passing
streetlights and shop windows, we
programmed a chasing-light pattern
with Color Force LED strips arranged in
60-foot rows on either side of the car. I’d
used that approach to suggest spaceship
 Lives Under Siege
travel in Blade Runner 2049 [AC Dec. ’17],
and I thought it would be perfect for this
car rig. In the car, we put an [Arri] Alexa
Mini on a small Scorpio head so I could
give it a little movement. I like that
because it has the slight feeling of hand-
held without being jarring; I like that
control. We considered projecting the
plates outside the car windows while we
filmed the scene, but decided that wasn’t
necessary. We shot without a bluescreen
or greenscreen and only with the white
Ultrabounce material that the LEDs were
bouncing off outside the windows. That
made the rotoscoping of the characters
and the car from the backing difficult,
but it allowed for a far more naturalistic
look, as the light was coming from
p Director John Crowley and Deakins at work on The Goldfinch. q The filmmakers prepare a scene in
the Met Museum gallery, a set built in a warehouse in Yonkers, N.Y. where it was supposed to be coming
from and wasn’t interrupted by a blue-
screen.
AC: In The Goldfinch, how did you create the surreal feel of the scene when We see the apartment home of
Theo regains consciousness after the explosion? the Barbours, the family that takes
Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC: It’s meant to reflect his memory of the event rather Theo in after his mother’s death, over a
than the reality of it. We wanted him to wake up in this kind of void, an otherworldly period of many years. How did you
landscape. We built the museum interior in a warehouse in Yonkers, shot the scenes approach those scenes and establish a
that preceded the bombing, and then basically decomposed the set and filled it with consistent feel?
smoke and dust. We created a series of oblong rigs, containing 50 or 60 Arri Deakins: The idea was to suggest
SkyPanels in total, recessed in the ceiling, so I could completely control both the fading wealth, a family that’s sort of
color and the light level. I dimmed the lights nearer to the camera down and made falling apart. I wanted a gray, soft light, a
the lights in the distance brighter so I could get more of a silhouette, a backlit feel, somber feel. We had about four weeks of
and the lights farther back would blow out the smoke a bit. The light has some shape work in that apartment, and after scout-
to it; it isn’t a flat gray. ing locations on Fifth and Park avenues,
How did you shoot Theo’s approach to, and dialogue with, the dying man in we decided to use them only for refer-
that scene? ence and to create the apartment interior
Deakins: Some of that was on a Technocrane with a remote head, and some in a house upstate in Rye. That gave us
was a Steadicam move circling Theo. There’s the faintest image in the background, complete control over the light and the
so you hardly know you’re moving. décor, which was a real advantage. It
was basically a standing set that we
could re-dress and decorate however we
wanted, and I could surround the house
with several 20-by-20 Ultrabounce
reflectors, creating a seamless surround
of soft bounce light whilst at the same
time taking out all interference from the
shifting natural daylight. The reflectors
were rigged at an angle to the windows
and therefore quite close in, so we used
an array of smaller lamps to light them
— Arri 4K PARs, 6K PARs and M90s —
rather than a few large units.
You’ve said that from project to
project, you seldom alter the LUT you
developed for the Alexa some years ago

56 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 Lives Under Siege

A burning
church
illuminates the
remains of a
French village
in the feature
1917.

with EFilm. Was that true of this
movie as well?
Deakins: Yes. We always take a
look at it at the beginning of prep, and
we usually like what we see. We used
the same LUT on 1917.
Where did you do the final color
grade on The Goldfinch?
Deakins: At EFilm with my long-
time colorist, [ASC associate] Mitch
Paulson.
Turning to 1917, how did you
react to the concept of telling the whole
story in one shot?
Deakins: When I saw ‘This is
envisioned as a single shot’ written
across the top of the script, I was a bit
skeptical, I have to say. I thought it
might come across as a gimmick. But
then I read the script and realized what
Sam was intending by the one-shot
idea. He wanted the film to be immer-
sive, to make the audience feel the
urgency of the soldiers’ journey by stay-
ing with them every step of the way.
The film has a lot of day-exterior
work, so I knew that shooting under
cloud cover would be key to matching
all the footage. Also, because the camera
would often be doing 360-degree
moves, there was nowhere to place any
lights or lighting equipment. I was
really worried about getting the right
type of weather because just the year
before in the U.K., there wasn’t a cloud
match to the Somme battlefields, and
was exactly what we needed. Luckily, the
military embraced our project.
Sometimes they had shelling practice
while we were shooting, and we could
hear their explosions while we were stag-
ing our own, and we could sometimes
even see them exploding across the
valley. That was quite bizarre, really. We
also shot some scenes in Glasgow and
North Yorkshire.
We understand Arri provided
you with prototype Alexa Mini LF
cameras. What made you decide a large
format was the way to go?
Deakins: A slightly larger format
gives you an image with a little less focus,
a little less depth [for the same equivalent

TECH SPECS
in the sky for months. But it just
happened that during our shoot, which
was April 1 to mid-July, it was quite
The Goldfinch cloudy. We were very lucky. When the
Digital Capture sun came out, we’d rehearse and
1.85:1 rehearse, and as soon as we had cloud
Arri Alexa SXT, Mini cover, we would shoot.
Arri/Zeiss Master Primes Where did you shoot?
ArriRaw 3.4K Deakins: We were based at
Shepperton Studios and built one large
1917 set on the backlot there, but everything
Digital Capture else was location. We dug about a half-
2.39:1 mile of trenches at Bovingdon Airfield,
Arri Alexa Mini LF (prototype) and we shot a lot on Salisbury Plain, a
Arri Signature Primes huge military testing site that is mostly
ArriRaw Open Gate 4.5K untouched grassland. It had the upland-
chalk landscape [that was] very much a
angle of view compared to a Super
35mm-sized sensor], and I liked that idea
because stills from the First World War
have that quality. One photo I found of
English soldiers digging a trench was
particularly interesting. One of them is
looking at the camera, and I felt that the
look on that boy’s face said it all. The
actual framing and depth of field also
seemed to be where we wanted to be. I
had shot a lot of tests with the standard
LF camera and with [Arri] Signature
Primes, so as soon as I signed onto this
film, I started talking to [Arri managing
director and ASC associate] Franz Kraus,
who has always been very supportive. I
said, ‘Surely you’re going to make a Mini

58 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 Lives Under Siege
p Deakins stands by in the trenches. Arri provided the production with three prototype Arri Alexa Mini
LF cameras. “The size and weight of the Mini LF was the key to it all,” Deakins says of the filmmakers’
strategy. q Director Sam Mendes works with actors Dean-Charles Chapman (left) and George MacKay,
who play Lance Cpls. Blake and Schofield, respectively.
“Of course, the idea of making a film
in one continuous shot would not suit every
film, or even many films, but for 1917 it
seemed perfect — and also a wonderful
creative challenge. As with any film, the
choice of where to place the camera at any
particular point in the story is crucial to how
the audience will perceive that story. The
challenge for us was to do that, and
combine all those individual moments in a
way that seemed totally organic. It was
important that the viewer wasn’t left want-
ing a reaction shot or a wide shot, which are
so very easy to incorporate into a scene
when you can simply cut!”
— Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC
60 January 2020
LF at some point.’ His initial reaction
was, ‘Oh, dear.’ [Laughs.] But I kept
asking over the next few months, and
eventually he said, ‘When will you need
it?’ I said, ‘We start testing in February
[2019].’ He guaranteed we’d have it by
then, and sure enough, they delivered
the first prototype to us on February 18.
We received two more about a week
before we started shooting. Arri really
came through for us. We were testing
the cameras in pretty extreme condi-
tions, and they were almost flawless.
We couldn’t have shot the film without
them, at least not the way I wanted. Key
to it all was the size and weight of the
Mini LF. Working with the stabilized
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
systems we needed, and because we
were traveling over such long distances,
a lightweight camera was a necessity. I
mean, you could not have done anything
like this with any film camera.
How did you and Mendes
approach shot design?
Deakins: Preproduction was quite
complex because nothing could be
designed or built until we determined
what we should show the audience and
where the camera would be for each
scene. When a soldier is walking, are we
behind him or leading him? If we’re
behind him, how far ahead of him do we
see? If he’s approaching a town, what
will we see in the distance, where is it on
the set, and how long will it take him to
get there? We storyboarded the entire
script in a very rough way, and then we
started rehearsing with the actors at
Bovingdon, without a set, to figure out
the timing. For instance, we’d mark out a
trench line and have the actors [George
MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman]
walk it, play the action and run dialogue
with stand-ins, and then we’d figure out
how long the trench needed to be to facil-
itate that. Then we shot another rehearsal
with a little point-and-shoot camera that
mimicked the LF frame. Once we knew
precisely what the set had to be, [produc-
tion designer] Dennis Gassner and his
crew could get to work.
How did you approach shooting
in the trenches?
Deakins: We tested nearly every-
thing. We considered a wire-cam and a
remote-controlled rig on a rail for the
trench work, but they didn’t feel human
to me; they felt too disconnected from the
actor. We tested a stabilized backpack rig
that worked really well, but it limited us
to that one particular angle. Then Pete
Cavaciuti, my Steadicam operator,
suggested he could develop a rig using
the Stabileye that would achieve what
we wanted. He worked with the
company Optical Support and came up
with the Dragonfly, which is basically a
Steadicam-type arm with a post support-
ing the Stabileye. We found that was the
most stable way to get fast movements in
trenches; Pete could literally run down
 Lives Under Siege

pt The filmmakers run through a scene of British soldiers massing in preparation for an attack. pu A Technocrane on a tracking vehicle captures a piece of the
action. q Bright sun creates another opportunity to rehearse. Steadicam operator Pete Cavaciuti works at left as Mendes (holding monitor at right) and Deakins
(background right) check the shot.

the trench with the camera point- just a matter of figuring out how Charlie
“There are some very intricate takes that ing backwards, get to a corner could keep his footing and balance the
involve several [different] methods and multiple and then pan his body to put weight of the rig. We used the Trinity
handoffs, and each was an amazing ballet of grips. himself in exactly the right place. outside the trenches quite a bit as well.
Take lengths were up to 81⁄2 minutes. One particu- We actually did shots that were a What else did you use to accom-
larly challenging shot starts on a 50-foot lot longer than I thought we plish moves outside the trenches?
Technocrane with the camera on a Mini Libra could do because Pete was so Deakins: A lot of it, probably most
mounted to a bar that is hanging off the end of the good at it. We also shot some of it, was the Stabileye carried by [key
crane. The camera comes down into a trench, trench work with Arri’s Trinity, a grip] Gary Hymns and [A-camera grip]
booms up with the actor [MacKay] to a point at stabilized rig that can arm up and Malcolm McGilchrist. We also had a 50-
which two grips then take the bar off the Techno down about 6 feet. The operator, foot Technocrane and a tracking vehicle
and start walking backwards with the actor; then Charlie Rizek, had never worked with a 22-foot Techno and Libra head. We
the grips hook the bar onto a second 22-foot on a feature film before, and he did some Steadicam work, a couple of
Techno that’s rigged on a tracking vehicle on the was brilliant. I met him at Arri big shots with the Stabileye on a wire,
other side of the trench. The vehicle then takes off London when he demonstrated one short segment with a drone, and one
as the actor starts running at full speed through a the Trinity for us. After he did it a scene with a Libra head mounted on a
developing battle. Incidentally, the two grips are few times, I said, ‘Can you work motorbike. We used an electric tracking
dressed like British soldiers so they can cross on this movie?’ He nearly fell vehicle and built a ‘road’ to track a 22-
camera and look like part of the action. The tracking over. [Laughs.] He was great. The foot Techno on a camera car beside a
vehicle goes on for over a quarter of a mile, and at trenches were muddy, so it was slalom run in a water park. In prep, we
the end, the camera booms out with the actor
as he runs back down into the trench.
Meanwhile, explosions are going off, and
dozens of extras are running around. I was
operating remotely from a quarter of a mile
away, and Andy Harris was pulling focus in
another caravan, sweating. [Laughs] When we
got to the end of a take like that and everyone
had done their bit in sync, it was a real high. I
don’t think I’ve ever had such a high. What
added to the pressure was that often we’d only
get a short window of cloud, and we’d have to
judge whether it would last long enough for us
to finish a take. I felt like I was operating with
one eye and watching the sky with the other!”

— Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC

62 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 Lives Under Siege
shot rehearsals with some of the equip-
ment we were going to use, even to the
extent of testing a three-point wire rig to
track a character across a river. By the
first day of the shoot, we had a master
plan of every shot and every item of
equipment we’d use on that shot. I
think there was only one occasion when
we had to change tack, and that was
purely because the wind was too strong
on that day.
How was your operating setup
configured?
Deakins: I sat in a tent with [digi-
tal-imaging technician] Josh Gollish and
James. I was operating off Josh’s [24-
inch] screen, so I was looking at a cali-
brated image. Often I was using the
wheels and pulling stop because there
was a hell of a lot of stop-pulling. If we
64 January 2020
were operating on the Trinity, I would
do the tilt remotely, so sometimes I was
doing that and pulling stop. If it was
Pete on Steadicam, I was just pulling
stop. If it was the Stabileye, then Josh
would pull stop while I gave him direc-
tion, and James would direct the grips
over the radio while I looked at the
screen and gave cues.
James Ellis Deakins: Given the
distances involved and the complexity
of the work, connectivity was a real
concern. Preston [Cinema Systems] sent
Noodles [aka Greg Johnson of RF Film]
over to build custom radios to boost the
signal for our Preston FI+Z system.
How did you determine camera
position relative to the actor — for
example, whether to follow, lead or
track alongside at a given moment?
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
t Deakins frames up a shot as MacKay
stands by. q Arri Trinity operator Charlie Rizek
captures a shot of MacKay.
Roger Deakins: We always
wanted to feel connected to the charac-
ters. Obviously, we had no option to cut
to a reaction, so if we had to see a reac-
tion, we had to justify that move and find
the optimal place to start so we could
build the move into the choreography of
the action. In prep we looked at Son of
Saul [AC Jan. ’16], which does a lot of
long shots from behind the character, and
while that was inspirational, it also
taught us that we didn’t want to stay that
long on the actor’s back unless there was
something significant going on in front of
him. Sometimes there was. Of course,
how the individual shots were to be
combined was of great concern, and we
spent a lot of time considering how to
make our blends; much time was needed
on set to rehearse those moments.
Playback was used to aid us in the
matching of an actor’s position and the
speed of a camera move on the A to B
sides of the sequence.
The one-shot concept suggests
you used just one focal length.
Roger Deakins: Two, actually. I
used a 40mm Signature Prime for every-
thing but a couple of interiors. I went to a
35mm in the tunnels and bunkers
because I wanted to accentuate the claus-
trophobic feeling by going slightly wider
— I wanted that sense of the walls. But
you don’t really notice this in the transi-
tions because the camera moves inside at
those moments.
Did you do much image stabiliza-
tion in post?
Roger Deakins: Some, but it was
minimal and far less than I imagined
might be needed when we began prep.
We allowed a very small surround to our
image size to facilitate this.
How did you light the bunkers
and tunnels?
Roger Deakins: In the bunker
where Schofield [MacKay] and Blake
[Chapman] get their orders, we
dummied the period lamps with 500-
watt FEP bulbs dimmed down to about
23 percent, and the bulbs were also
 Lives Under Siege
programmed to slowly pulse to give
some feeling of a real flame. As the
camera moved through the set, the
bulbs were individually adjusted to
allow for the camera’s change of angle. I
had initially thought we might utilize a
wire rig, with the camera being handed
off and on twice, but Sam felt the
Technocrane would give us a little more
flexibility. So, we laid out a set plan
using cardboard boxes and came up
with a plan for the design of the set to
accommodate this. After rehearsing
with our cardboard set, we decided to
do the shot with the Stabileye mounted
on the 50-foot Techno and only one
handoff. The Techno was set to the left
side of the set, and the camera hung
down through a gap in the ceiling. The
set ceiling was constructed with a diag-
onal slit to accommodate the way the
camera tracked, and [a] flap fell back to
cover the slit once the camera had
passed through.
When Schofield and Blake go
66
into the tunnel, the flashlights clipped to
their waistcoats light the scene. We
dummied those with little LED units
created by our gaffer, Biggles [aka John
Higgins]. The LED was projected
through a small lens, and we sand-
blasted the edges of this lens to get the
desired beam effect. We wanted to see
just enough, not too much.
How did you light the night
exterior that’s illuminated by the burn-
ing church?
Roger Deakins: We built that set
on the back lot at Shepperton, and we
had to create an interactive-lighting rig
that would be replaced by a CG burning
church in post. This was a similar
approach to one I had used for scenes in
Jarhead and Skyfall, so Sam was quite
familiar with the idea. The flames from
the church are the only source apart
from a few military flares, and the rig
had to be 360 degrees to accommodate
camera moves all around the town
square. We built a six-tier rig that was
about 50 feet tall using Maxi-Brutes, 12-
lights, Nine-lights and Six-lights.
Everything was on a dimmer, and we
programmed a pattern that gave me
patches of brighter light in areas where I
needed more punch to focus on specific
pieces of action or reach into an interior.
[Dimmer-board operator] Steve Mathie
could play with light levels as the scene
developed; if I was looking at the rig,
he’d bring it down, and if I came around
and tracked with the actors, he’d bring it
up as the camera hooked around. We
needed quiet nights with very gentle
breezes to film that scene because we had
to add a lot of smoke, and much to my
surprise, that’s exactly what we got. The
weather was perfect.
What recording medium did the
prototype Mini LFs use, and how did
shooting with prototypes impact your
workflow?
James Ellis Deakins: We recorded
to Sony [SxS Pro Plus] cards. We were
shooting [ArriRaw 4.5K] Open Gate, and
we got about 28 minutes of recording
time per card. In prep I spent a lot of time
getting software updates for various
systems because they wouldn’t recognize
the camera. For instance, we needed an
update for the Colorfront OSD [On-Set
Dailies] software, and we had to change
our original choice for deBayering soft-
ware because Colorfront was able to
provide updated software first. But our
[HD] dailies workflow was smooth. I
recommended we use EFilm’s EVue
system as a secure way for editorial to
send their proposed blends to Sam, and
he could view them at a good resolution.
Roger and I had an EVue setup in our
home as well, and I also screened dailies
every morning at Company 3 in London.
We had an excellent dailies timer there,
James Slattery. The workflow of the
dailies was basically the same as on other
films except for the fact that we would
diligently check that the timing worked
across the shots with a continuity of look.
Roger Deakins: Because of the
one-shot concept, it was crucial that the
dailies be even.
James Ellis Deakins: And they
were. Roger was shooting what he
wanted to see, so [the grading] was
often just a slight density correction.
James, our dailies timer, really got that.
We tried to get a jump on the final grade
by timing the picture with hard cuts,
and now that all the blends are in place,
we’re on our way back to London to
finish up that work with [colorist] Greg
Fisher at Company 3 on a Resolve.
Basically, we have the dailies timing on
each separate shot, and in the final
grade we need to blend one shot with
another. There is some effects work
involved in this blending, but the work
has been done without baking in any
color, so we have the full breadth of the
raw file.
Roger Deakins: It’s gone
smoothly so far. It’s not a film with a
huge amount of timing because what
we see is basically what we shot, but it’s
the details that take the time.
Given that so much was
precisely planned, were there any
moments of spontaneity or happy acci-
dents?
Roger Deakins: While we were
on Salisbury Plain, there was one shot
where I wanted the sun to come out at
the end of a certain scene that involved
some lengthy dialogue. I was checking
all my weather apps, and one said a
front was coming in, but we waited for
hours, and we couldn’t see anything in
the sky down to the west, where the
weather was coming from. Then one
little, flat cloud appeared on the hori-
zon, and I said to the AD, ‘Let’s get
ready.’ We got it together; it was a really
complicated piece of acting, with
Charlie Rizek on the Trinity. We did the
scene, and at just the right point, the sun
came out. It was Take 1, and it’s in the
movie — maybe only because it’s the
best performance, but it was my luck
that it was! u
67
 Truth
to
Light
Edward Lachman, ASC and
director Todd Haynes lend a cool,
“contaminated” look to the thriller
Dark Waters
By Jon Silberg
Attorney Rob Bilott was on the way to a promising career
at Cincinnati law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, where he
was working for corporate clients. Living in his new
suburban house with his wife, Sarah, and his growing
family, he’d just been made partner and was planning his
future when the direction of his life changed forever.
A West Virginia farmer, Wilbur Tennant, who knew
the attorney’s grandmother, sought Bilott out in search of
legal help with his grievance against chemical giant
DuPont, which he believed was causing the deaths of his
livestock. This was the beginning of the real-life story of a
decades-long legal battle, which eventually became the
subject of a New York Times Magazine piece by Nathaniel
Rich, and is now the basis of the feature Dark Waters,
directed by Todd Haynes and shot by Edward Lachman,
ASC — whose frequent collaborations have included the
films Far From Heaven (AC Dec. ’02) and Carol (AC Dec.
’15), and the miniseries Mildred Pierce (AC April ’11). Mark
Ruffalo stars as Bilott in the production from Focus
Features, which also stars Anne Hathaway as Sarah, Bill
68 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years
Camp as Wilbur, and Tim Robbins as Taft senior partner
Unit photography by Mary Cybulski. All images courtesy of Focus Features.
Tom Terp, the latter of whom, sometimes reluctantly,
supported Billot throughout his long fight for justice and
the truth.
Unlike Haynes and Lachman’s previous films,
which are set in more distant periods and sometimes — as
with the ’50s-era melodrama Far From Heaven — captured
in a deliberately mannered and stylized fashion, for this
project the filmmakers chose to work in a more straightfor-
ward, realistic style. Although this was a departure for the
duo, the themes expressed in Dark Waters were quite famil-
iar to both filmmakers.
As Lachman notes, the Oscar-winning film Erin
Brockovich — which he shot for director Steven Soderbergh
— depicts the journey of the relentless title character
(played by Julia Roberts) as she battles the Pacific Gas and
Electric Company, “another corporation guilty of caustic
destruction of the environment and people’s lives.” And as
for Haynes, Lachman points out, the film that established
him as an up-and-coming director was Safe — a character
 tt Attorney Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) begins his case
against chemical company DuPont in the legal thriller Dark
Waters. Cinematographer Edward Lachman, ASC notes that
the glass partitions in the foreground allow the character to
be obscured and seen at the same time, suggesting his
emotional isolation. p & t Director Todd Haynes and
Lachman shoot a sequence with Rob and his grandmother.
The candelabra above the table renders some warmth
against the fading exterior light.

which, Lachman reports, worked

study of a woman (Julianne Moore)
whose life is laid waste by the debili-
tating symptoms of an unexplainable
environmental illness.
In seeking a compelling cine-
matic language for Dark Waters, and
for Bilott’s painfully protracted
struggle to expose the malfeasance of
an industry, Haynes found inspira-
tion in whistleblower-themed
movies, particularly the thrillers that
director Alan J. Pakula and Gordon
Willis, ASC filmed in the 1970s —
stories, whether true as in All the
President’s Men, or fictional as in The
Parallax View and Klute, that follow
their lead characters as they uncover
increasingly frightening levels of
corruption and modern-day horrors.
“All whistleblower films,” Haynes
says, “are very much about a process
of discovery, whether they’re about
journalists or lawyers — or, as in
Silkwood, about a woman who works
in a plutonium plant. It’s not so much
about what is discovered, as it is
about the process of discovery and the
effect of that on the characters.”
Dark Waters’ narrative follows
Billot’s journey through his proce-
dural research, and as the lawyer
makes discoveries, Lachman points
out, the audience shares in them.
“One step leads to the next,” he says,
“so we are putting the puzzle
together, even if we don’t know
exactly where it’s all leading.”
The Taft law offices feature promi-
nently throughout, and the produc-
tion was able to shoot in the
downtown Cincinnati skyscraper
where the firm is still located — some
scenes in the actual Taft offices, and
others in a space several floors above
that were undergoing renovation
perfectly for the production. A
nearby house was used for Rob and
Sarah’s home, and an abandoned
farm in Colerain, Ohio served as
Wilbur’s ill-fated West Virginia
homestead.
Haynes and Lachman had
initially wanted to shoot on film, as
they had done for all their previous
work (save for a couple of shots in
Wonderstruck, which were
photographed digitally for technical
reasons). “Todd is always interested
in the mechanisms that create the
world we’re shooting in,” Lachman
says. “This story is about contamina-
tion of chemicals and how they affect
our lives.” The cinematographer
relates this idea to the inherent chem-
ical aspects of a film-captured image,
which in turn leads to a discussion of
Lachman and Haynes’ shared
aesthetic appreciation for the way
film negative creates colors, as
opposed to the work of digital
sensors.
“The depth of film grain, which

www.ascmag.com January 2020 69

 Truth to Light

Rob visits the ranch of Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp)

and learns of the “unexplained” deaths of the
farmer’s cows. This sequence was shot in the
coolness of winter light, mirroring the emotions
of the scene.

is affected by the chemical process of

developing, and the cross-over conta-
mination of contrasting colors in the
negative’s silver halides, bring attrib-
utes to an image that I find extremely
difficult to create in digital capture,”
Lachman says. And the fact that the
story takes place over a time period
starting in the 1970s “was another
reason we wanted to shoot on film,
the way it would have been seen at
that time.”
Skeptical producers required
Lachman to shoot tests in multiple
film and digital formats to support
the filmmakers’ arguments that film
would neither add cost nor slow
down production. He shot the tests
on Super 16mm and 35mm film,
and in 2K large-format digital.

A sense of authenticity and an observational style was important to the filmmakers as they embarked on Dark Waters.
Much of the film was shot in and around Cincinnati locations, where the actual events occurred over the decades — from the
‘70s through to the present. Haynes and Lachman also found inspiration in a number of still photographs in which the photog-
raphers avoided the stereotypical view of Appalachia, and instead depicted the people’s experience of rural life, and explored
their subjects’ inner lives. Additionally, Lachman mentions photographers William Gedney, William Eggleston and Mitch
Epstein, along with Tennessee-based documentary photographer Mike Smith, “who imparted a poetic sense of the common-
place in everyday life. For me, all of these images of suburban and rural areas present an unexpected beauty in an imperfect
world, not just through a representational view but also a psychological one.”

70 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 "With the new
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it takes."

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 t (From left) A-camera operator Chris Haarhoff,
dolly grip Brendan Lowry, B operator Oliver Cary
and Lachman prepare for a scene (p) in which
Wilbur’s family tries to find acceptance at their
new church.

Cooke Speed Panchros, Canon K-35s,

and vintage zooms from Cooke and
Angénieux. “The older glass was
made with lead, and polished and
coated differently than the glass made
today,” the cinematographer says.
Adds Haynes, “We love film —
there’s no way around that — as a
starting point, regardless of the
subject matter and the material. Ed
and I have also been interested in
ways of degrading the hyper-sophis-
tication of lenses these days, even on
film. We used Super 16mm for Carol
and Mildred Pierce, and Ed is great at
Lachman notes that Haynes has become more open to shooting with
going against the technology and
two cameras than he was at the beginning of their collaboration — and on
introducing interference, so we don’t
Dark Waters, it made perfect sense to have a B camera extemporaneously
end up with some kind of ‘perfect’
capturing details, and the A camera devoted to the main action.
clean image that neither of us is inter-
ested in.”
“Unfortunately, word came down intended to accomplish on film. (See Once Lachman had committed
from the studio,” Lachman recalls, sidebar, page 72.) to shooting digitally, he embraced
“that we’d have to shoot digitally, Lachman shot in 2K with spher- many of the new tools that were avail-
even though they saw our point, visu- ical lenses, capturing in Log C to able to him, and he reports having a
ally, and I had proved that it wasn’t ArriRaw and framing for 2.39:1. great working relationship with DIT
more expensive or more difficult to “Todd trusted that I could do some- Maninder “Indy” Saini. “There are
shoot on film.” thing digitally that wouldn’t feel like things I used to do with film stock
Given the digital requirement, a negation of what we wanted to do that I implemented digitally,” the
he chose Arri’s Alexa Mini. Both film- on film,” Lachman recalls. To that cinematographer says. “I controlled
makers acknowledge that with some end, he endeavored to achieve some the [EI] rating on the camera and
help in post, they were ultimately of the image qualities they sought by dialed in different color temperatures
able to come very close to what they’d using older optics — in particular, to control the look. I knew we could

www.ascmag.com January 2020 71

 Truth to Light
Rob and his
boss, Tom Terp
(Tim Robbins),
have words
about the
former’s
continuing
involvement
with Wilbur
and his case.

do a lot in the DI to bring back the
highlights, but it also helped some-
times to shoot at a higher rating —
1,280 or 1,600 — rather than the
native 800, which let us better hold
highlight detail. Using the higher EI
also introduced some texture into the
image, while blocking up the curve
on the low end, which I feel helped to
provide more of a feeling of film.”
Production designer Hannah Beachler
— whose work on Black Panther
earned an Oscar, which she shared
with Jay Hart — set about bringing
character and a feeling of authenticity
to the locations. Lachman always
prefers to work closely with produc-
tion designers and art directors from
early on in the process. “I like to be
involved in the colors and textures
they use to paint and dress the sets,”
he notes, “so I can coordinate my
color temperatures and gels when
filming.”
In the approach to imagery,
Lachman notes, “I was looking for a
way to feel the images becoming
more ‘toxic’ and ‘contaminated,’ as it
is for the characters. There is also an
overall coolness in the film, literally
in the weather and the environment,
but also in the temperament and

Designing a Film Look

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Ed Lachman, ASC
and Todd Haynes on Wonderstruck and several re-mastering
projects. Dark Waters is a bit different from their previous films
because of its gritty fact-based story, though there is also a
definite, carefully thought-out look and color palette to the
images.
To start with, they shot with Arri Alexa Minis, but they’d
wanted to shoot film. So we designed a specific show-LUT in
preproduction with that in mind. We didn’t use Arri’s K1S1
color science; instead, we customized more of a film-print
emulation LUT that we tweaked to bring more of a cool blue
cyan bias into the shadows, and also rein in and bend some of
the blue hues. They could treat this as their “film stock” while
they were shooting, which I know was something they found to
be helpful.
When we started work on the final grade in [Blackmagic
Design DaVinci] Resolve, we stayed away from most of the bells
and whistles, using “printer light” and contrast controls to
affect the overall look and color temperature. If the blacks in a
scene got softer or milkier based on exposure, as would happen
with film negative, we didn’t fight that — we embraced it.
We further enhanced the filmic look with LiveGrain,
which I’ve found to be a very powerful tool. I’ve worked with a
lot of different methods of adding grain effects, and this just
feels more like it’s adding a three-dimensional organic texture.
You’re compositing three different grain elements into every
shot, with the grain response based on where the exposure of
a part of the frame sits. The idea wasn’t to draw attention to
the grain, but to add the kind of texture that would have been
present if they’d shot on film. You don’t have to see it. You feel
it.
After we got all the shots balanced, Ed and Todd gave me
a few days to go in and do a bit of a technical pass, and then
they came back and continued to take more of a fine touch to
parts — dodging and burning, maybe adding a grad to the sky
or pulling a key — always making sure to keep everything
within the feel of the photochemical world. We enhanced
some of the yellows and greens in the law offices, and for the
rural farm scenes we pushed the blueness pretty far to empha-
size the cold, stark, overcast environment.
It’s always inspiring working with Ed and Todd. They
both have such strong visual sensibilities and they are relent-
lessly passionate about the work.
— Joe Gawler, Senior Colorist,
Harbor Picture Company

72 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 The grip crew rigged two dozen 30" China balls
— each fitted with a 2K Mogul BWF bulb — off
of lightweight speed rail for a scene at the
Environmental Protection Agency.

wanted to show that there was some

‘invasion’ between the exterior and
the interior.” For example, he notes,
the yellow-greenish hue from the
practicals in the law offices “play
against the coolness coming from
outside the windows. Also, when Rob
visits his grandmother’s house, there
are little candelabra lights over her
table that provide a sense of warmth
emotions of the story. The overcast yellowish hue, motivated by practi- in the scene, which is surrounded by
mood of the daylight during the cals inside the law firm, hospitals and fading winter light.”
winter reinforces the psychology of various people’s homes, that would Independent of those psycho-
isolation in the story. offer a contrast to that overarching logical elements, Lachman explains,
“I used a warmer, tainted coldness,” he continues. “We [also] “I always try to use contrasting colors
within the frame because I feel the
viewer’s eye loses the ability to see
Lachman, who operated on a few sequences, has high praise for the the subtlety of just one color.”
show’s entire crew — crediting Chris Haarhoff, as “an incredible Steadicam The law offices, Haynes says,
operator who did wonderful work that didn’t look like it was Steadicam”; are “such an amazing location. We
Oliver Cary on B camera, “who’s really a brilliant A operator and did me a shot in both the real Taft law offices,
favor”; key grip Mitch Lillian, “whose reputation I’ve known of for many years, and also built our conference room
and who can solve any problem”; dolly grip Brendan Lowry, “who always kept and Rob’s office 10 floors above the
me in good spirits”; and 1st AC Eric Swanek, “always my first choice on real Taft offices in the same building.”
features.” Lachman also highlights the contributions of his longtime gaffer, All of this, Haynes adds, played
John DeBlau, whose creative approach to lighting and remarkable efficiency perfectly into the kind of cinematic
have contributed to the cinematographer’s work. storytelling that Pakula and Willis
“I’d also like to mention the dedication and proficiency of my Cincinnati achieved in those paranoid thrillers of
crew,” Lachman adds, “who I worked with on Carol as well, for always being the ’70s.
there for me and DeBlau — under the leadership of Russ Faust, a talented “The views that you saw out
gaffer himself.” the windows, with the Cincinnati
architecture, are partly blocked,

www.ascmag.com January 2020 73

 Truth to Light

The toplight in this scene — featuring the

deposition of DuPont’s CEO — was inspired by
the whistleblower thrillers of Alan J. Pakula and
Gordon Willis, ASC, and specifically Willis’ later
work in The Godfather. It was shot beneath a
foamcore-crafted box fitted with five BBA bulbs
under 1000H tracing paper.

the lighting in the offices involved

which limits the depth of your visibil-
ity and creates a sense of power and
curiosity about what is hiding behind
those windows,” Lachman notes. He
adds that the “frames in the Taft
offices — in the hallways and the
windows looking out, a repeating
theme within the architecture — form
a sort of minimalism that echo the
negative space used by the painters
we looked at for inspiration: Giorgio
De Chirico and Rene Magritte, who
used challenging juxtapositions of
objects and space, provoking a
hidden feeling of power.”
When the filmmakers first
scouted, the offices had older Cool
White fluorescent tubes that read
green-yellow — which, as noted,
appealed to Lachman — but before
shooting commenced, the building
had started the process of switching
to newer LED lighting units. Luckily,
the cinematographer was able to
convince the facility to keep the older
tubes until the shoot was over.
Gaffer John DeBlau, who has
controlling the windows — either by
gelling them with ND or using exist-
ing shades — and making use of the
fluorescent lighting in the offices, and
then building up the levels inside to
supplement. “Most of the offices were
a mix of daylight and the Cool White
fluorescents that have a bit of green in
them,” DeBlau says. “We’d bounce
HMIs inside during the day. At night
we’d switch to [tungsten] Source
Fours gelled with Half CTB and Plus
Green to enhance the quality of light
that was there.”
The production found many
uses for portable, battery-powered

TECH SPECS
worked with Lachman for decades Astera LED units. “You can make
(AC Nov. ’19), explains that much of them any color and just stick one on a

2.39:1
“When I first began working for the Maysles Brothers in cinéma vérité, Al,
Digital Capture who was the cinematographer, always used to say to me, ‘If you can find it
in life, why do you need to create it in fiction?’ He was like a mentor and
Arri Alexa Mini father to me when I was just starting out, and I never could admit to him
that I was shooting fictionalized stories. When I got my big break to shoot
Primes: Cooke Speed Panchro,
Canon K-35 Desperately Seeking Susan, I felt compelled to tell Al that it was a documen-
tary about Madonna!”
Zooms: Cooke, Angénieux — Edward Lachman, ASC

74 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 Truth to Light
ter,” DeBlau enthuses, referring to
Dark Waters’ opening, in which a
group of unsuspecting teenagers
take a swim in a highly polluted
river. “One of my guys was out there,
soaking wet with a couple of these
Astera lights that we wrapped in
plastic because they’re not water-
proof. But we sealed them tight
enough, stuck them under the water,
and they were fantastic!”
Bilott’s house, as seen through-
out, tells a subtle story on its own.
“So much of what you understand
about Rob and Sarah’s world is built
into the location,” says Lachman.
The Kigers, major plaintiffs in the case, watch a house burn under suspicious circumstances. Haynes adds, “They had basically
To achieve the effect, the front of a real house was rigged with a fireproof false front and invested in a new neighborhood at
actually set aflame.
the beginning of his becoming a part-
bookcase, bounce it off the ceiling, or lights. If I needed a little fill or an ner. They’d expected that they would
use it for more direct light,” DeBlau edge, we could just dial in what we probably grow out of it, as he moved
explains. “You put it where you need wanted it to feel like — if it’s more up the corporate ranks as a partner.
it and you’re good to go for hours!” daylight, fluorescent or tungsten.” That didn’t happen. He basically
Adds Lachman, “I really liked those “We even used them underwa- never had another corporate client

&ORTHESEANDOTHER
!3#TH!NNIVERSARYITEMS
VISITOURWEBSITETHEASCCOM
76
for the rest of his career. This case
dominated everything in his life.”
Beachler, through the design,
and Lachman, primarily using
composition, demonstrate the
constriction of this dream as the
conflict with DuPont goes on, and
Rob’s children get older. Scenes
become more cramped; what seemed
spacious at first now feels claustro-
phobic. It’s the kind of detail Haynes
uses frequently — something the
viewer doesn’t need to register
Rob drives off amid the unrelenting conflict.
consciously, but which provides
resonance. directly into the house, and other the events took place. “Look at that
Since the feature was shot times bounced that light in with 8'x8' courtroom in Hamilton, with that
during winter, and much of it takes Ultrabounces — in either case result- mural of Daniel Boone!” he attests. “I
place in overcast conditions, ing in the illumination from the exte- mean, you couldn’t have imagined
Lachman approached lighting day rior becoming diffused and falling off that would really be there. To me,
interiors in the house to match what inside. that’s why I love shooting a film like
was outside. The cinematographer For Lachman, a great deal of the this, because the reality is the fiction,
and crew therefore sometimes power of Dark Waters’ visuals is ulti- as the fiction becomes the reality.” u
directed open-faced 4K Arri X HMI mately derived from shooting in
fixtures through Full Grid Cloth many of the actual locations where

77
 Dual
Nature

Zhao Xiaoding, ASC, CNSC helps The Chinese epic Shadow tells a spectacular yet historically

bring the visual language of

based tale of a great second-century general whose king-

Chinese ink-brush painting to the

dom’s future is imperiled when he is wounded and must

action and intimacy of Shadow

recuperate rather than fight. He employs a double to pose
as him in both public and private life, and goes into hiding
to plot his next move. The thematic implications of the
general’s story — centering on duality, contrasts and
By Jim Hemphill shadow selves — are brought to vivid life by cinematogra-
pher Zhao Xiaoding, ASC, CNSC and director Zhang
Yimou, who have been working together since Zhao was a
camera operator on Zhang’s film Hero (AC Sept. ’03). Zhao

78 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 t A confrontation between selves, shadow selves
and contrasting energies plays out amid military
intrigue and battle in the Chinese feature Shadow.
p Zhao Xiaoding, ASC, CNSC and director Zhang
Yimou confer on set. u Actors Deng Chao and Sun Li
lend their talents to help achieve the production’s
painterly look.
Unit photography by Xiaoyan Bai. All images courtesy of Perfect Village Entertainment.

was promoted to director of photog-

raphy on Zhang’s House of Flying
Daggers (AC Jan. ’05), and since then
they have teamed on visually sump-
tuous spectacles like Curse of the
Golden Flower and The Great Wall.
Zhao also recently directed his first
feature, 2017’s Once Upon a Time.
Shadow is perhaps the most
stunning product of their collabora-
tion yet, a combination of sweeping
action and intimate character study
that brings the visual language of
Chinese ink-brush painting to cine-
matic life. AC spoke with Zhao by
phone about the project, which
would screen just a few weeks later at
Camerimage.
American Cinematographer:
You and Zhang are frequent collab-
orators. How would you describe
your relationship?
Zhao Xiaoding, ASC, CNSC:
Our relationship has now spanned 10
movies, and we’re about to start our
11th. Zhang is more than a collabora-
tor; I think of him as a mentor. He
graduated from Beijing Film
Academy about seven years before
me and is 12 years older, and he
started as a cinematographer, so we
have a common language, although
we did have to learn each other’s
approach and had a lot of disagree-
ments early on. He started as my
teacher and then became a colleague
and ultimately a friend. I’ve watched
him evolve into a more accessible
filmmaker. Hero was a milestone not
only for the Chinese film industry but
also for Zhang, who had directed
only intimate social dramas before
that. Hero was important because it
showed that Chinese filmmakers
could make a big commercial movie
for a broad audience. Crouching Tiger,

www.ascmag.com January 2020 79

 Dual Nature
Hidden Dragon was popular, too, of
course, but it was not filmed in main-
land China by a mainland Chinese
director. When we came together,
Zhang really needed to change his
game and become more commercial,
with a greater emphasis on action,
and I wanted to go in that direction as
well.
Has your relationship with
him — and with directors in general
— changed now that you’ve directed
a feature?
Zhao: The experience of direct-
ing really changed my thought
process and made me better under-
stand the ways in which the director
needs the cinematography to tell the
story. I think it has made me more
helpful because I’m not only focused
on how to get the best angle, the best
lighting and the best camera move;
I’m also focused on how the tech-
nique helps inform the overall needs
of the story and actors.
What did you and Zhang
discuss in your initial conversations
about Shadow?
Zhao: When he first
approached me, there was an existing
script based on a Chinese historical
event, but it quickly became clear
that this was not going to be a
conventional historical film. In adapt-
ing the material, Zhang said he
wanted to create a motion-picture
Zhao helps coordinate a sequence depicting the wielding of umbrella-like weapons. version of a Chinese ink-brush paint-

AC: The action sequences in Shadow are complicated but clear and elegant. What was the philosophy behind those
set pieces and the camera moves?
Zhao Xiaoding, ASC, CNSC: We took a relatively restrained approach. In fact, at one point we talked about using a
completely static camera, but the producer convinced us that we would end up with too esoteric an art film if we went that
far. The intention was to make the camera moves we used majestic and Shakespearean. We were going for a kind of gravitas
in the story and performances, and limited, intentional camera movement enabled that. As far as the action goes, there’s a
great Chinese action director named Huen Chiu Ku — we call him Dee Dee — whom Zhang called upon to help create a new
style of action for this movie. We wanted something different from the typical wuxia film, where people are floating in the
air and running on rooftops. That’s great, but people have seen it over and over again. While there are a few action elements
in Shadow that might seem a little bit impossible, for the most part our thinking was to make the action as convincing and
direct as possible: sword on sword and flesh on flesh. We didn’t think of it as a fantasy movie. With the weapons, Zhang made
choices that reflected the theme of the movie, which in a way is about ‘the soft’ conquering ‘the hard,’ yin, the feminine, over-
coming yang, the masculine, and water being more powerful than anything else.

80 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

ing; he had always wanted to get that
feeling into a movie but hadn’t yet
done it. We had a lot of creative free-
dom, partly because we were liber-
ated from historical accuracy —
ultimately, the names of the charac-
ters and the underlying events were
all changed. Zhang wanted to make
the film very Chinese in tone and
color. After trying a lot of different
things with color palettes in prepro-
duction, we finally broke through
and arrived at a much more extreme
expression of Chinese classical
aesthetics than I initially expected.
Chinese traditional landscape paint-
ing was our most important refer-
ence. As you may know, it uses a
form of perspective that is very
different from European painting —
it’s not a feeling of close and far so
much as large and small. People
appear very small based on the vast-
ness of the landscape, and the moun-
“The intention was to make the camera moves we used majestic and Shakespearean,” Zhao says. “We were going for a kind of gravitas in the story and
performances, and limited, intentional camera movement enabled that.”
tains wash away into nothingness as
they go farther and farther back.
That’s what we were trying to get at.
Were there other visual refer-
ences?
Zhao: There was a great Hong
Kong director named King Hu who
did classic wuxia, and we were defi-
nitely thinking of him. And, of
course, Kurosawa. The overall feeling
of Shadow does reflect Zhang’s love
for Kurosawa’s work. Also, before we
started shooting, Zhang was in L.A.
and saw a special screening of Mad
Max: Fury Road [AC June ‘15], which
had not played in China. Something
about the way George Miller created
a completely unique and stylized
world inspired Zhang; he was
thrilled that a director of Miller’s age
could do something so unlike
anything he or anyone else had done
before, and he responded strongly to
the unified, organic vision of the
www.ascmag.com
movie — the way the cinematogra-
phy, production design, costumes,
editing and performances all worked
together. He said, ‘If we could accom-
plish that on Shadow, I would be very
happy.’ It’s actually very unusual
when working on a Chinese movie to
be so clear about everything you aim
to achieve in every discipline, but
that’s what we wanted.
How did the choice of camera
and lenses help you achieve your
goals?
Zhao: We were shooting 5K
with the Red Weapon Helium 8K and
Arri/Zeiss Master Primes, lenses that
gave me the sharp contrast I wanted.
One reason we chose the Red
Weapon is because it’s relatively
lightweight, and we were shooting a
lot of action where we needed some-
thing we could rig together quickly
and move easily. We shot 5K instead
of 8K because it better facilitated the
January 2020 81
 Dual Nature
slow-motion work we wanted to do,
and it was easier on the DIT depart-
ment in terms of storage. We were
often shooting with three cameras,
which was challenging but necessary;
it not only gave us the most material,
but also maintained consistency in
TECH SPECS
2.39:1
Digital Capture
Red Weapon Helium 8K
Arri/Zeiss Master Prime
82 January 2020
the performances once Zhang got to
the editing room. The emotional
through-lines and continuity of the
performances were essential to main-
tain, especially in the fast-paced and
complicated action scenes. We used
up to four cameras for some of those
sequences, which had to be very care-
fully thought out in terms of which
lenses were most effective for each
individual moment. Sometimes wide
lenses were best, and sometimes we’d
want to ‘compress’ things with a long
lens to give the shot maximum
impact. All of this was discussed with
both Zhang and Dee Dee [action
director Huen Chiu Ku] for each
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
p Deng portrays both Commander Ziyu and his
double, Jingzhou. t The filmmakers plan out a
piece of battle action.
action scene.
Another challenge was that
lead actor Deng Chao played two
roles. How did you deal with that?
Zhao: That’s a good question
because it wasn’t handled the way it
has been in similar projects. For
example, Legend [AC Nov. ‘15] and
Gemini Man [AC Nov. ‘19] rely very
heavily on CGI, but in our film — and
this affected the very DNA of the
production — we shot everything
twice, with the actor giving a full-
body, full-facial performance as each
of the two characters he played. We
used very little CGI on his perfor-
mance and no face replacement. We
first shot him in his stronger, health-
ier version, as the [general’s] double
— and in scenes where he’s in the
room with the ailing general, we had
a body double for the general so the
actor had someone to react to. Then
the actor left the shoot for five weeks,
lost 40 pounds, and came back [to
play] the ailing general, and we shot
all the scenes again.
So we were shooting the same
movie twice, the same scene on the
same set, but they were separated by
 “I’d never worked on a
movie with such a fully integrated
vision in terms of tone and style
across all departments right from
the beginning. Zhang could see the
movie in his mind before we
started rolling the camera. In prep,
he laid out the color palette, and it
applied to everything. The
costume design was black, white
and gray, and the sets also had
that feeling of black ink on silk that
came from Chinese painting, but
we didn’t want to shoot in color
and then change it to black-and-
white. We wanted to preserve the
colors of human flesh and blood,
and contrast the living, breathing
aspects of these people with the
starker, more abstract qualities of
Chinese landscape painting.”
— Zhao Xiaoding, ASC, CNSC

three months, and I had to get the
lighting to match what it was the first
time we shot it. And the set might
have changed a little in that time —
fabrics might have faded a bit, or
maybe there was more dust in the air
— so replicating the details of the
original footage was a huge chal-
lenge. But we did that because Zhang
wanted full performances from the
actor in both roles and didn’t want to
take any shortcuts, so I had to coordi-
nate with our visual-effects supervi-
sor, Samson Wong, to figure out how
to do what we needed both on set
and for the final compositing.
We essentially invented a tech-
nology to map what we were filming

www.ascmag.com January 2020 83

 Dual Nature
in the monitor and create sensor
points that were visible on set for
moments when the characters would
make contact to ensure the action
would match. Getting that right was
the result of a very close collabora-
tion between me, Zhang, Samson
84 January 2020
Wong and the actors. But you would
be surprised to know how little
visual-effects work there is in the
film; it’s mostly fine-tuning to make
things match as closely as possible.
What was your goal with the
final color grading, and where did
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
you do that work?
Zhao: We did it in Beijing with
[colorist] Qu Siyi [employing
Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve].
The idea was to maintain consistency
in terms of the overall color palette
and to make sure every color was
commensurate with the artistic
vision dictated by the model of
Chinese painting, but also ensure
that it was not a black-and-white
movie. We wanted human color in it,
even though in terms of skin tones,
we wanted everyone a little pale, not
robust. The color is very subtle even
in outdoor scenes; in scenes where
there is green in the landscape, it’s a
greenish-gray. At the end of the day,
it was all about finding and main-
taining the level of reality Zhang
wanted from the very beginning. u
t An intimate moment. q Zhao inspects the
diffusion and shadow.
 100Years of Coverage
American Cinematographer celebrates its first century of documenting a
collaborative art form’s tools, techniques and creativity
By David E. Williams
On November 1, 1920, a four-page, semi-monthly paper
devoted to the interests of cinematographers made its
initial appearance in Hollywood. Priced at just 15 cents per
copy, The American Cinematographer had its roots in two
newsletters — Static Flashes and The Cinema News —
produced by The Static Club and the Cinema Camera
Club, the cinematographer organizations that would later
merge and, in 1919, evolve into the American Society of
Cinematographers. The publication’s goal was a reflection
of the ASC itself: to help educate all motion-picture profes-
sionals, and to distinguish the cinematographer’s role in a
very collaborative art form.
Ten years later, in 1930, ASC President Hal Mohr
described the initial issue of The American Cinematographer
as “nothing pretentious, just four pages, 9 by 14 inches,
telling the latest developments in cinematography. At the
time there was no thought in the minds of those who
started it that this paper someday was to become the
outstanding magazine devoted to cinematography, profes-
sional and amateur, and to practically examine all other
technical matters pertaining to the making of pictures.”
In November 1940, upon AC’s 20th anniversary, the
ASC’s Board of Governors stated that those first four
pages from 1920 have “a news value far beyond that
visioned by the men who wrote it. But that is the way with
a newspaper or news publication. It is sent to press with an
unceremonious ‘Out of my sight,’ with no thought that in
a day or two anything contained therein will have interest
for a living soul. Then an anniversary gradually
approaches. The first number is found, in this case down
in a cellar, in a frame the glass of which is broken. It is
subjected to examination.”
AC will be conducting just such an examination
every month this year, presenting representative stories
from each decade, culled from more than 1,200 issues. For
the sake of the historical record, these curated articles from
AC’s past will be republished as they initially were —
complete with their original insights and anachronisms —
and should be considered as products of their time.
We begin here, where the story began, with those
first four pages. u

Images courtesy of the AC archives.

A selection of covers from the magazine‘s first decade.

86 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

www.ascmag.com January 2020 87
 100 Years of Coverage

88 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

www.ascmag.com January 2020 89
 100 Years of Coverage

90 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 FILMMAKERS’ FORUM
Ballet dancer Maggie Kudirka enacts a theatrical performance of her battle with cancer in the virtual-reality production The 100%., shot by Andrew Shulkind.
Immersive Inspiration
By Jay Holben
The 100% is a virtual-reality production that tells the true
story of Maggie Kudirka, a ballet dancer and rising star who was
diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer at the age of
23. The 12-minute VR experience puts the viewer onstage with
the dancer during a theatrical performance of her life story.
Designed as a fundraiser for Stand Up to Cancer, the
piece is experienced in a headset, with a dozen volumetric
performances that are seen in real time. The experience was
developed on workstations provided by HP and built for its new
Reverb VR headset. Positional tracking of the viewer allows free
movement between 3D performers on a virtual stage. The
presentation is a combination of photo-real, 3D-captured
performers and environments, volumetric video, lidar and
photogrammetry.
The 100% was produced by Steven-Charles Jaffe, Bran-
don Zamel and Andrew Cochrane, directed by Hernan
Barangan, and photographed by Andrew Shulkind. AC recently
sat in on a discussion between Jaffe and Shulkind about their
experience creating the piece.
Steven-Charles Jaffe: I had produced Ghost , Star Trek VI
and a number of Kathryn Bigelow’s movies, including Near Dark
and Strange Days. A little over 20 years ago, my teenage daugh-
ter was diagnosed with an inoperable tumor from non-
Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Fortunately, Dr. Stuart Siegel, who at the
time was head of pediatric oncology at Children’s Hospital Los
92 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years
Angeles, saved her life. I wondered, ‘How do you pay back a
doctor for saving your child’s life?’ Dr. Siegel said they needed
to raise $50 million for the pediatric oncology center. That
sounded like a lot of money, but I told him, ‘I know how to
make movies. I’ll make a short fundraising film. Miraculously, it
helped raise over $120 million for the hospital. While making
another fundraising film with my Springbok Entertainment
partner, Brandon Zamel, I met Hernan Barangan, who is himself
a cancer survivor. Hernan made a powerful documentary called
Cancer Rebellion about young adults with cancer. His documen-
tary impressed us so much that we started a dialogue about
using immersive technology to show extraordinary cancer
survivors who did not let cancer stifle their dreams or define
their lives. Hernan knew Maggie Kudirka and suggested her as
one of the first subjects of The 100%.
Springbok had a close relationship with Andrew
Cochrane, a leading figure in immersive-content creation and
technical execution, so he came on to partner and produce
with us, and he brought along Andrew Shulkind. With the team
Images courtesy of Springbok Entertainment.
in place, we began discussing the best capture solution for the
project. Volumetric video capture was a promising option; it
was after Cochrane and Shulkind met with Metastage that it
proved to be the right path. Metastage’s capture facility uses
Microsoft’s volumetric capture and processing pipeline. Spring-
bok Entertainment was the first company to shoot at
Metastage.
Andrew Shulkind: I’ve always been interested in the
new territory on the frontier of cinematography. With any of
these cutting-edge technologies, I think it’s crucial that we
cinematographers find a way to put our
fingerprints on it. If we don’t, we risk
ending up in a perilous place where
we’ve lost all creative authorship. With a
VR experience, so much is taken out of
the hands of the filmmaker because
viewers decide how they experience the
story. We can’t take a hands-off
approach, or it feels aimless and disen-
gaging; we’ve got to redefine creative
artistry for this new form. In modern
production, so many choices that used to
belong to the cinematographer have
been pushed downstream — color, light-
ing and, in particular, framing — and
cinematographers are losing their say in
these decisions. In the immersive space
especially, the prevailing approach is to
push all these decisions downstream
because it’s easier to work that way for
timing, optimization and stabilization, so
I think it’s vital for cinematographers to
take a stand and impose our art onto the
technology. It’s no coincidence that the
role of the cinematographer sits squarely
at the crossover between technology and
storytelling, and the cinematographer is
also the one who takes responsibility for
pp On the volumetric-capture stage, Shulkind gets a light reading on Kudirka. p A wireframe and
the image. For The 100%, we looked at final real-time render of a scene featuring Kudirka playing herself at age 18.
applying a range of different technolo-
gies to [determine] what was needed, ronments is that they’re often toplit with general, the experimental nature of VR
including motion capture. Microsoft had super-soft Kino Flos. That’s good for some and immersive-capture tools hasn’t
the best options for us. applications, but not for what we wanted made it easy for daring filmmakers to do
Jaffe: Andrew is a very talented to do. Even when you de-light what was much with lighting. And, of course, this
cinematographer, and he’s also very captured and re-light in post, you can’t was sort of the first paid job for the
knowledgeable and confident in using get the dynamic results you can achieve if Metastage, so [Microsoft] said, ‘Well,
new technology to capture perfor- you light your subjects properly to begin maybe next time. Let’s be safe on this
mances. He brought his creative eye and with. Microsoft had these toplight rules one.’ So we snuck in a handful of Arri
cinematography experience to the and no-outside-light rules because no SkyPanels. We had a couple of Arri S360
project. Microsoft had their ideas about traditional cinematographer had ever SkyPanels and a bunch of S60s that we
how the lighting should be done, which been in there and tried things. No one had someone slip in the back door and
included no movie lights. Andrew knew had said, ‘Well, what if we try to light it?’ just set off to the side. At the very end of
that was a recipe for disaster. He said, Jaffe: The concept was to make the day, once we’d tested, we put them
‘It’s going to look flat and horrible.’ In the this a theatrical performance, so it had to up on stands and wired them up through
end, the more they said, ‘You can’t,’ the be lit like one. It wouldn’t work if the look Luminaire to see what they looked like —
more Andrew said, ‘We can, we will and were flat and dimensionless. and it worked. I lit it the way I’d light
you will see the difference.’ Fortunately, Shulkind: It’s not like shooting with anything else, with a ton of dimming
we prevailed, and everyone benefited. the Alexa or Red. With these machine- control, and you could feel the direction-
Shulkind: The Metastage is a volu- vision cameras, you don’t have the same ality of the light on the subject. Microsoft
metric-capture stage that features 106 dynamic range to work with. You can’t said it was the best-looking stuff they’d
cameras — 53 RGB cameras and 53 read detail in the shadows or highlights as ever seen on the stage. So, in the end, we
infrared cameras — in a cylinder with an much as you might want to, [which is lit this like a traditional film within the
inner dimension of capture of about 8 another reason we needed to bring] in volume-capture environment.
feet for performance. What’s common in additional lighting — you can get closer to At one point, we turned off all our
these kinds of volumetric-capture envi- a more dramatic feel of contrast. In lights except for one. That looked really

www.ascmag.com January 2020 93


p A cancer survivor himself, director Hernan Barangan (right) confers with producer Steven-Charles Jaffe.
q Producers Brandon Zamel and Andrew Cochrane make plans with Shulkind.
good to the eye, but it basically broke
the system. They said, ‘That’s just too
far.’ You have to have light, but you also
have to have IR information because half
the cameras are IR cameras; if there isn’t
that information, there isn’t enough to
capture. So, yeah, we went too far [with
that experiment], but that’s what you
have to do to find out where the limits
are.
The Metastage capture-array
system is a beautiful thing. The system is
a cylinder, so the cameras are always
seeing other cameras in the shot, but
94 January 2020
because of the way the cameras under-
stand depth information and layer that
information with imaging, they ‘ignore’
the other cameras and the background
beyond them. So, the fact that the
cameras are in the shot doesn’t matter.
Imagine a cylinder, and the asset you’re
capturing is in the middle, with all the
story-appropriate, dynamic lighting
outside the volume. There’s no back-
ground captured on the day; it’s much
closer to scanning or motion capture
that way. The background is a separate
consideration that can be a
American Cinematographer — 100 Years
photographed background or full CGI.
Jaffe: There was an 8-foot circle in
which Maggie had to perform. I thought
that was kind of restrictive, but fortu-
nately, Maggie is a total pro and easily
worked within the spatial restriction. We
brought in a traditional theater-stage
designer to create the virtual set assets,
including the virtual mirrors that are in
front of Maggie.
Shulkind: The mirrors were
incredibly complex to render in real
time. Depending on where the viewer is
standing, there’s a different angle of
view on each mirror, so the reflections
had to be rendered in each mirror in real
time. There are 12 mirrors in the piece,
and each is rendered out by a game
engine in stereo 3D, so that’s 24 virtual
‘cameras’ that are used to make up
these reflections. There are also reflec-
tions in the floor, which is totally virtual,
and each of those reflections is also
created by a virtual camera — and each
mirror casts reflections on the floor.
That’s 48 virtual cameras that are
rendered for one ‘shot.’ It’s important to
note that once the initial capture is done
and a 3D model is rendered from all that
information, the 106 individual, real-
world cameras are no longer relevant.
You just have a 3D model generated
from that volumetric capture.
Jaffe: The 100% was one of the
most challenging and collaborative
projects to produce. Working at the
confluence of performance, cinema and
technology, our team pushed the tech to
tell Maggie’s story. We hope that what
we’ve created encourages people who
are battling cancer and their caregivers
to understand that you can survive. We
are also eager for The 100% to raise
funds to fight this terrible disease. u
 NEW PRODUCTS & SERVICES
• SUBMISSION INFORMATION - Please email New Products/Services releases to newproducts@ascmag.com and include full contact information and product images.
Photos must be TIFF or JPEG files of at least 300dpi.
Zeiss Releases Radiance
Zeiss has unveiled the Zeiss Supreme Prime Radiance
lenses, a set of seven high-end cinematography lenses ranging
from 21mm to 100mm and offering a maximum aperture of
T1.5. Based on the high-speed Zeiss Supreme Prime lens family,
the lenses feature the new T* blue coating, which offers a
distinctive look and consistent flares.
“Our Supreme Prime Radiance lenses deliver stunning,
consistent flares across all focal lengths that cinematographers
can create at will,” says Christophe Casenave, product manager
for cinema products at Zeiss. “When we spoke to filmmakers
and industry experts, we took a close look at the appeal of flares
and their unique impact on the atmosphere of a movie. We
didn’t just want to reproduce the effects, but to create tools that
would allow this effect to be achieved at any time and in a
controlled manner, and so, the T* blue coating was born.”
In addition to their flare behavior, the new lenses offer all
the benefits of Zeiss Supreme Primes. With their image-circle
diameter of 46.3mm, they cover the current large-format cine-
matography sensors and are therefore compatible with the
latest camera models, including the Sony Venice, the Arri Alexa
LF and Mini LF, and the Red Monstro. Moreover, they feature a
front diameter of 95mm with consistently positioned focus and
aperture rings.
The lenses are equipped with the Zeiss Extended Data
metadata technology launched in 2017, providing frame-by-
frame data on lens vignetting and distortion in addition to the
standard metadata provided using the Cooke /i technology
protocol.
Zeiss Supreme Prime Radiance lenses can be ordered
through March 31, 2020, and are available from Zeiss dealers
exclusively as a set: 21mm, 25mm, 29mm, 35mm, 50mm, 85mm
and 100mm. The lenses will ship in April.
Tiffen Launches LED, Steadicam, Diopter Solutions
The Lowel Tota LED Production Kit takes Lowel lighting on
the road, combining three Tota LED lighting fixtures with combi-
nation V-Mount/AC power supplies, three stands, a silver-reflec-
tive Tota-brella and a white-silk Tota-brella in a soft case. The
Tota LED is a powerful daylight source with a CRI of 96.3. The
ability to power the lights via AC power or V-Mount batteries
96 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years
makes them a flexible solution for location work. Their low
power draw means hours of light off of common professional
batteries. The Tota LED is well suited for use outdoors for stand-
ups, for increasing the ambient illumination of a space, or for
creating a three-light setup for interviews. The Tota-brellas can
quickly modify the LED’s clean, clear light by reflecting or diffus-
ing it.
The Tota LED floodlight is designed with rugged, all-metal
construction to withstand the rigors of daily location shooting.
Its daylight-balanced LEDs (5600K) output the equivalent of a
750-watt tungsten fixture with flicker-free dimming from 100-0
percent. The custom case securely stores the fixtures and all
accessories with internal dividers, and features an additional
zippered compartment and a padded shoulder strap.
The Steadicam Air
Spreader is a foldable, screw-in,
three-leg base option for the
Steadicam Air 15 or Air 25 gas-
powered monopods. The Air
Spreader increases the overall
stability of the monopod while
offering the potential for more
comfortable operation, depend-
ing on the application.
Available as an accessory to the Steadicam Air 15 and Air
25 monopods, the Air Spreader can be installed in under a
minute by simply unscrewing the post that connects the rubber
foot at the bottom of the monopod and screwing the Air
Spreader into its place. Once attached, the Air Spreader’s legs
can fold up to be packed in the standard Steadicam Air carrying
case without removal. An adjustable-friction ball head at the
top of the Air Spreader allows the angle of the monopod to be
adjusted dynamically and locked into place for creative applica-
tions.
In response to filmmakers’ requests, Tiffen has expanded
its family of close-up optics with +1⁄8 and +1⁄4 138mm-diameter
diopters. The lower-powered diopters subtly extend the focus
capabilities of lenses — especially for anamorphic and older
spherical lenses — without distortion. They also create a shal-
lower depth of field to isolate subjects and remove unwanted
background elements.
The diopters’ 138mm diameter allows them to work with
standard accessories such as matte boxes and diopter holders.
They match the existing Tiffen family of diopters that includes
+1⁄2, +1, +2 and +3.
For additional information, visit tiffen.com.
For more New Products & Services coverage, visit
ascmag.com/articles/new-product. u
 “I’m passionate
about putting
nothing but the
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clients’ hands. This
is a great camera
and it is fantastic
as a modern
director’s finder."

— Kavon Elhami
President
CamTec Motion Picture
Camera Systems

LEICA M 10-P “ASC 100 EDITION”

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The Leica M 10-P “ASC 100 Edition” continues
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a fitting tribute to the world of cinema on the occasion
of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the
American Society of Cinematographers.

The M 10-P “ASC 100 Edition” is an exclusive professional

tool for aiding cinematographers and filmmakers in their
search for the truly exceptional visual experience.

Please contact the ASC to order this unique Leica M10-P "ASC 100 Edition"
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 INTERNATIONAL MARKETPLACE

98 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years

 CLASSIFIEDS
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All classifications are $4.50 per word. Words set in Technicolor 35mm 3 Strip Camera 4X5 85 Glass Filters, Diffusion,
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 ADVERTISERS’
INDEX
Alan Gordon Enterprises Fiilex/Dicon Lighting 77 Samy’s DV & Edit 45, 47, 49
98 Filmtools 85 Sawyer Studios 23
Amazon Studios 17, 19, 21 Focus Features 39 Selected Tables 100
Arri 51, 65 Fox Searchlight 9, 13 Slamdance Film Festival 101
ASC/Leica Camera 97 Fujifilm/Fujinon 61 Sony Pictures 5, 11
ASC Master Class 99 Kino Flo 67 Sundance Film Festival 95
B&H Photo-Video-Pro Audio Koerner Camera 8 Teradek, LLC C2-1
91 Mole-Richardson 98 Tilta C3
Backstage Equipment 8 Walt Disney Studios 29, 31, 35
Blackmagic Design, Inc. 41 NBC/Universal 57
NBC/Universal Pictures Warner Bros. 27, 33
Camerimage 103 7, 36-37 www.ascmag.com 98, 99
Carl Zeiss 75 Netflix 3, 15, C4 www.theasc.com 76, 98
Cavision Enterprises 98
Chapman/Leonard Panavision, Inc. 55
Studio Equip. 63 Paramount Pictures 25
Cinematography Pille Filmgeraeteverleih
Electronics 8 Gmbh 98
CMB Film Services, Inc. 66 Pro8mm 98
Cooke Optics 43 Really Right Stuff/RST 53
Rip Tie Company 98
Rotolight Group Ltd. 59

100
 CLUBHOUSE
NEWS
p Richard Crudo, ASC accepts the Emmy
alongside Society members (from left) Lowell
Peterson, Gary Baum, Stephen Lighthill and Julio
Macat. t (From top) New members Lorenzo
Senatore, Alexis Zabé and Ben Richardson.
ASC Honored With Emmy
During the 71st Engineering
Emmy Awards ceremony, held on the
evening of Wednesday, October 23, at
the JW Marriott Hotel in downtown Los
Angeles, the American Society of Cine-
matographers was recognized for the
organization’s 100 years of commitment
to excellence in motion-picture image
making. The ASC was presented with The
Philo T. Farnsworth Corporate Achieve-
ment Award, which honors an agency,
company or institution whose contribu-
tions over time have substantially
impacted television technology and engi-
neering. Accepting the Emmy onstage
was past ASC President Richard P. Crudo,
following a taped acceptance speech by
current Society President Kees van Oost-
rum (who was away on business in
China). Also joining Crudo for the festivi-
ties were ASC members Gary Baum,
Stephen Lighthill, Julio Macat, Don
McCuaig and Lowell Peterson.
Society Welcomes Senatore,
Zabé, Richardson
New member Lorenzo Senatore,
ASC, AIC studied cinematography in
Rome, and started his career as a camera
assistant. After becoming one of the
youngest professional camera and
102 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years
Steadicam operators in Italy, he decided
to focus on pursuing work on American
productions in Eastern Europe. Senatore
served as director of photography on
Hellboy, as well as on such features as
Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn, Megan
Leavey and Risen. He has also
photographed 2nd unit on features
including London Has Fallen, Beauty and
the Beast, Wonder Woman and The
Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. His upcom-
ing credits include Ghosts of War and The
Outpost.
Born in Mexico City, new member
Alexis Zabé, ASC, AMC, pursued work in
music videos and commercials, as well as
“a stint in an animation studio doing
stop-motion/time-lapse cinematography
and motion control.” Since moving to Los
Angeles, he has received multiple nomi-
nations and awards for his cinematogra-
phy work on commercials and music
videos. His music-video credits include
Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” and “Marilyn
Monroe,” as well as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’
“Sacrilege.” He has photographed the
features The Florida Project, Tyrel and A
Photo of Clubhouse by Isidore Mankofsky, ASC; lighting by Donald M. Morgan, ASC.
Fistful of Dirt. His upcoming projects
include the drama Zhai.
New member Ben Richardson,
ASC studied media arts at Royal
Holloway, University of London. His first
feature, the Oscar-nominated drama
Beasts of the Southern Wild, earned him
Best Cinematography awards at the Inde-
pendent Spirit Awards and Sundance
Film Festival, as well as Camerimage
Golden Frog and Satellite Award nomina-
tions. His other feature credits include
Wind River, The Fault in Our Stars, Drink-
ing Buddies, Table 19, Sand Castle and
1922. Richardson received an ASC Award
nomination in 2019 for his work on the
television series Yellowstone, on which
he also served as co-producer — as well
as director on two episodes. His upcom-
ing credits include the thriller Those Who
Wish Me Dead. u
 CLOSE-UP
Buddy Squires, ASC
When you were a child, what film made
the strongest impression on you?
Early in my college days, I saw Costa-
Gavras’ film Z, a powerful evocation of
Greek political drama in the 1960s. I
distinctly remember walking out of the
screening and feeling that if a film could
have that kind of effect, I wanted to make
films.
Which cinematographers, past or present, do you most
admire?
Haskell Wexler [ASC], Nestor Almendros [ASC], Ricky Leacock,
Vittorio Storaro [ASC, AIC], Conrad Hall [ASC].
What sparked your interest in photography?
I started making documentaries in high school. Photography
leads to direct, experiential engagement with the world, which
I love. The burning Cuyahoga River and teen angst were among
early topics.
Where did you train and/or study?
I studied film and photography at Hampshire College, then a
newly formed experimental school in Amherst, Massachusetts.
It was a wonderfully exciting time and introduced me to an
aesthetic realm that I barely knew existed.
Who were your early teachers or mentors?
My most important teacher was photographer Jerome Liebling,
who became a lifelong friend and mentor. Jerry introduced me
to a broad range of documentary and fine-art photographers,
along with experimental, foreign and documentary filmmakers.
We screened and debated everything from Buñuel’s Un Chien
Andalou and Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon to Truf-
faut’s The 400 Blows and Kurosawa’s Rashomon.
What are some of your key artistic influences?
The photographs of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Henri
Cartier-Bresson. The films of Leacock, Pennebaker, the Maysles
and Godard. The paintings of Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Bier-
stadt.
How did you get your first break in the business?
Ken Burns and Roger Sherman asked me to join Florentine
Films, their new production company, before I graduated from
college. Our first film, Brooklyn Bridge, was nominated for an
Academy Award. Ken and I then received an Oscar nomination
for our second project, The Statue of Liberty.
104 January 2020 American Cinematographer — 100 Years
What has been your most satisfying
moment on a project?
Working intimately with the Dalai Lama
and Jane Goodall, and bringing their
stories to people who will never be fortu-
nate enough to meet them. I am nearing
completion of a decades-long portrait of
war photographer Yannis Behrakis. We
first met shortly after he survived a fatal
ambush in Sierra Leone. I followed his career from that low
point through his Pulitzer Prize-winning work with migrants
crossing the Mediterranean. Documenting the lives of passion-
ate people is endlessly inspiring.
Have you made any memorable blunders?
Conveniently, none that I recall.
What is the best professional advice you’ve ever received?
Be prepared.
What recent books, films or artworks have inspired you?
James Nachtwey’s Inferno, Joan Jonas’ Moving Off the Land.
Do you have any favorite genres, or genres you would like to
try?
I love working in cinéma vérité, witnessing history as it unfolds.
The challenge lies in creating strong images quickly and regard-
less of external circumstances. I was recently in Afghanistan
filming trauma care for victims of war. A battle broke out
nearby. Within minutes the hospital filled with dozens of
wounded, tear gas came over the walls, and the ER was over-
whelmed with angry men carrying guns. The determination and
resolve in the faces of the medical workers amidst chaos and
danger speaks volumes. The drama is real and profound. There
are no second takes.
If you weren’t a cinematographer, what might you be doing
instead?
Journalism, human-rights work, or a life in the mountains.
Which ASC cinematographers recommended you for
membership?
John Bailey, Ellen Kuras, Steven Fierberg, and Steve Poster.
How has ASC membership impacted your life and career?
ASC membership has given me a highly respected platform to
Photo by Jared Ames.
promote the central role of cinematography in today’s docu-
mentaries. Indelible images of reality can have tremendous
impact. u