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Kenneth Branagh’s evocative semi-autobiographical coming of age story set in 1969 is shot “to feel like a LIFE magazine spread” according to cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos BSC GSC.
https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/making-kenneth-branaghs-beautiful-black-and-white-belfast/
Belfast is Branagh’s lived experience of Northern Ireland as expressed through nine-year old Buddy (Jude Hill). He lives with his Ma (Caitriona Balfe) and Pa (Jamie Dornan) and near his Granny (Judi Dench) and Pop (Ciarán Hinds). It’s a poem to his immediate family and to the city which is depicted as a close knit community on the verge of being shattered by three decades of violence and sectarian division.
“This film is about the human condition and the landscape of the human condition is the human face,” says Zambarloukos, who has worked with Branagh since Sleuth on projects including Cinderella and Death on the Nile. “The methodology here was how do we create great portraits. I think black and white has a very transcendental quality. It can be two things at the same time. It can illustrate the within and the without simultaneously and seems to talk to both the present and the past very easily and more so than colour.”
Up until the 1970s, action-adventure films were given the Technicolor treatment while smaller scale drama were predominantly shot black and white. “In that sense we’re doing anything different to how BW has been used in the past,” he says.
Mixing color and BW
“There is something really lucid and clear and at the same time ethereal and mysterious inherent in B/W photography. I feel color is often better at being descriptive - you can see it’s autumn because of the red leaves in shot. But since filmmaking tends to be about narrowing the focus for the audience, about how and where they see things, BW is a fantastic way of capturing emotion.”
The film opens in color and also flashes into color for scenes showing the love for cinema that Branagh/Buddy has a child. Raquel Welch in a fur-skinned bikini in One Million Years B.C. and the flying car of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang leave strong visual and emotional imprints.
It’s not the first time Branagh has combined BW with color. His directorial debut feature Dead Again (1991) contained flashbacks to 1940s Hollywood in black and white. The opening scene of Death on the Nile which finally gets its cinema release in the New Year, is BW, shot in color.
Shooting BW in color was the DPs preferred option for Belfast. “One thing I like about always seeing things in color is that I have far more control over skies,” he explains. “If I lose the color in the sensor, in the DI or in the capture then if it’s film neg I can’t then give those colors a more precise grey tone.
“In the DI, especially with BW, I like to be able to assign where in the grey scale something is whether that’s a sky, clothing, a face. By having color you can key it, matte, it and be more precise.”
That is a technique inspired by master photographer Ansel Adams. In his books ‘The Camera’, ‘The Negative’ and ‘The Print’ [published 1948-50] he talked about assigning tones of grey in a zone system “and seeing a picture before you take it.”
Zambarloukos says, “Those seminal books were for analogue black and white stills of the time but you can take those principals and apply them to modern photography and a DI. In essence, as long as you see it, you can control it.”
His DIT and dailies team was led by Jo Barker at UK facility Digital Orchard. Goldcrest colorist Rob Pizzey on the DI. “Our dailies are more contrasty than the final film. A lot of our tests were about capturing texture and weave. I don’t think we manipulated things to an extreme in the end but it was nice to have the control to bring things down or up if we needed.”
Magnum composition
Zambarloukos says he often find tonal and compositional cues from the work of Magnum photographers. For Belfast he found the work of Welsh photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths illustrative of the era.
“In his images he showed a juxtaposition of family and military life. There’s a really famous one of a woman mowing her lawn with a solider in the foreground https://www.pinterest.co.uk/
This idea informed their use of camera and composition. The riot scene was shot handheld with two cameras handheld and included an elaborate set up on a circular track around Buddy for the Molotov cocktail explosion at the film’s beginning. Mostly the film is shot single camera with Zambarloukos feeling that he should be quite still in his composition “and leave space to allow the film to breathe.”
This parred down approach relies on the director’s ability to block the mis-en-scene. “Ken is such a master of knowing where to place actors and how he wants them to interact. In this case, less is more. There’s a stillness to the action and I think that slightly wider framing helps in that way.
“I try to give [editor Una Ní Dhonghaíle] really direct eyelines so that when you do let a scene play like that then the character’s face, their eyeline, is as much as possible not facing away from camera or too much in profile. There is a directness. We try and choregraph with the camera to close the eyeline as much as we can and by doing so we are hopefully being engaging, inviting and immersive.”
Shooting digital
Branagh and Zambarloukos typically shoot on film yet this is the first picture they’ve made together on digital. There were a number of reasons for this, among them that production was among the first in the UK to shoot under Covid, in August 2020.
Anything the production could do to minimise personal contact in the space was put into effect. Changing film magazines being one casualty. Zambarloukos also operated for this reason too (with Andrei Austin on Steadicam).
It wasn’t just a Covid-enforced decision, though. Branagh wanted the freedom to shoot longer takes. Most importantly, digital suited the creative aesthetic.
“We wanted to shoot available light using either practicals or with a set designed so that the windows faced sunlight. We blocked so our actors would sit near windows. Rather than a documentary film we went for a photo reportage look so it felt natural to use the high ASA rating of the Alexa LF. The LF Mini is a game changing camera. It has a nice soft palette yet is crystal sharp and clear. With that medium format digital we found a sweet spot.”
He retained the Large Format 65mm lenses used on Nile and Murder on the Orient Express a mix of older Spheros from the David Lean era and System 65 glass made for the format's resurgence in the early nineties on film’s like Ron Howard's Far and Away (1992) and Branagh’s Hamlet (1996).
“I found that combination worked really well especially in 1.85:1. It’s the first time we’ve shot in that aspect ratio instead of 2.39:1.”
Production economy
The crisp image is a deliberate choice. “I didn’t use diffusion or add grain or denoise it. It is pretty much what you see out of that sensor and those lenses.”
Branagh’s regular production designer Jim Clay designed in accordance with Covid-safe rules and the intended aesthetic. For example, there were discussions about keeping set windows open for ventilation.
The sets were built in south east London near Longcross Studios where Branagh and his keys were polishing Death on the Nile. A disused school site was used to build the film’s school, hospital and church. The fields around it – including a basketball court – are also featured. The interior sets of the houses were built here too, without back or front and covered by canvas as weather protection. At nearby Farnborough airfield they built the façade of the terrace house fronts and redressed that street to film scenes for Ma and Pa’s street or Granny and Pop’s street or a third street occasionally seen. The riot was filmed there too.
“The cinema and theatre were chairs, a small screen, black drapes and a projector in one of the airfield hangers,” says Zambarloukos. “That hanger was also where we placed our bus to film rear projection in camera for the bus journey from the theatre. There’s a real economy to this but I think we built to the scale required.”
The themes of the film resonated with many of the cast and crew who could relate personally to the humanity of everyday people and the political forces of division. Zambarloukos for example, is a Greek Cypriot and recalls the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974.
“I was four years old and my father had to seek work abroad [Branagh’s family also emigrated]. Belfast could easily be a Cypriot story. It’s clearly a universal story. Ken is writing about finding joy in the sorrows of life. If such circumstances happen to you, you have a choice how to live your life and the choice’s Ken’s family made are some of the best you can take.”
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