British Cinematographer
Cinematographer Danny Cohen BSC exhibits versatility in
crafting stories for different directors, and those skills were brought to task
when shooting three films slated for release this year. Two were period pieces
– Victoria and Abdul and Final Portrait – and one contemporary – Disobedience.
All three films were shot with Red cameras, but the look and
feel of each couldn’t be further apart. “I guess you get comfortable working
with a certain camera,” says Cohen. “The more you do, the more you can push
things. You know its quirks, you understand the sensitivity to light, and
recognise when you might lose detail in the highlights. There are always
reasons to select the camera for a specific story and for these three films the
Red just slotted-in and worked.”
Victoria And Abdul sees Cohen reunited with director
Stephen Frears after their acclaimed work on Florence Foster Jenkins. The
enlightening and unlikely friendship between the Commonwealth’s daunting Monarch
and an Indian clerk is set around the late 1800s. This time around, Cohen
selected a Red Dragon combined with ARRI Master Primes for the bulk of
principal photography.
“That combination gave a good strong image – and a bit of
bite,” he says. “Since the image you shoot on-set can be manipulated in so many
ways, you need to begin with quite a strong image. And I definitely wanted that
slightly punchier image to resonate with the story.”
As luck would have it, Cohen’s pre-production coincided with
an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum about early colour
photography. “People were beginning to experiment with various formats.
Naturally, there’s some colour deterioration from prints over 150 years old,
but you definitely get a flavour of how things looked through a lens at that
time,” he notes.
Cohen also shot a smaller, more intimate film. Directed by
Stanley Tucci, Final Portrait is about American art critic James
Lord’s relationship with artist Alberto Giacometti. It mostly plays out in the
artist’s studio in Paris in 1964, and was shot at Twickenham Studios.
“We only had 20 days to film and so each day we had to
achieve a lot,” Cohen recalls. “I couldn’t really hang about orchestrating
lights for each set-up. We used a lighting rig with a number of set-ups
pre-programmed – day, night, hard sun, soft sun, flat, overcast – so we could
swap the look at the push of a button.”
Cohen, who was Academy Award-nominated for The King’s
Speech in 2011 and who shot the 2016 Best Picture Oscar contender Room,
is gaining a reputation for being able to conjure fresh angles for telling a
story within confined spaces.
“What I tried to do on Final Portrait was to have
very few lights on the floor so I could give Stanley and the actors (Geoffrey
Rush, Armie Hammer) the freedom to go anywhere, and not be held back by
lighting stands and clutter. In my experience, actors give a better performance
when they are not having to worry about tripping over equipment.”
That’s also why he felt the Red camera was perfect. “During
prep, Stanley said that he wasn’t interested in using a dolly at all. He wanted
the whole film handheld. We sent the dolly back so we weren’t even tempted to
use it. Being handheld gave the film energy. Some moves were slick, others were
messy, but because the Red is quite small, we shot two cameras (second camera
was Iain Struthers) both of us with a camera on our shoulder for the length of
the day. If we’d tried to do that with Alexa we’d have been a collective
wreck.”
A major factor swaying Cohen’s decision on all three
pictures was the light weight of the Red camera lump. “I’d say half of Victoria
And Albert, nearly all of Final Portrait and about two thirds
of Disobedience were handheld. It really helps that the Red is small
and user-friendly.”
The look of Final Portrait was inspired by archive
footage of Giacometti in his Paris studio. “It was fascinating and informative
to have that replicated by the superb production design of James Merifield,” he
says. “I responded to seeing Giacometti in the original space, how he moved
around and how it was lit at different times of day to get a sense of what the
place must have been like.”
Cohen paired the Red Dragon with Zeiss Master Primes
for Final Portrait and used the same arrangement for Disobedience –
a film with a completely different aesthetic.
Shot last spring on location in North London, Disobedience is
directed by Sebastián Lelio and stars Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. It’s the
adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel concerning a romance between members of an
Orthodox Jewish family.
Disobedience
“It’s a very intimate story,” Cohen elaborates. “I was
trying to use natural light and then manipulate it to make sense of the story.
It’s a desaturated look, quite stylised and very different from Victoria
And Abdul, which is lush and rich. I enjoy stylistically jumping around so long
as it’s appropriate to the script.”
The trio of films were shot at 6K to maximise dynamic range
with Victoria And Abdul and Final Portrait down-rezzed to
2K for cinema. Disobedience was treated with a 4K finish.
Cohen is currently back working with Frears on the TV
drama A Very British Scandal, about politician Jeremy Thorpe who was tried
for conspiracy to murder in the 1970s. It’s Cohen’s second project with the Red
Weapon 8K S35 with the Helium sensor, following Night In Hatton Garden for
director James Marsh and his retelling of the headline grabbing jewel robbery
starring Michael Caine. Stay tuned for those visuals in 2018.
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