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When is the last time you watched a western and felt how dangerous and hard it is to actually ride a horse? Perhaps never, which is something director Jeymes Samuel and DP Mihai Malaimare set out to rectify on new genre movie The Harder They Fall.
“Our main approach was to place the camera as close as
possible among horses galloping at full speed,” Malaimare tells NAB Amplify.
“We used a Russian arm but drove it on a buggy since it was more capable of
handling the soft terrain. We also mounted the camera (Red Monstro) on rifles
carried by stunt guys riding horses, much like a selfie stick.”
That was just one technique the duo employed to lift the
Netflix action-adventure out of the wagon rut.
“We both love westerns and talked about all the films we
love including The Wild Bunch and Once Upon a Time in the West.
We wanted to create something that pays tribute to classic westerns but with a
totally different approach.”
The pairing is perhaps unusual. Samuel is a British
singer-songwriter and music producer making his feature directorial debut.
Malaimare has crafted films for Francis Coppola and won plaudits for PT
Anderson’s The Master, The Hate U Give and Jojo Rabbit.
“What struck me, even in the script, was how much music it
had. It wasn’t necessarily music that we would use but Jeymes had all these
ideas for how he imagined music would play in different scenes. It’s
fascinating to me because to be a good director you need to know editing and to
be a good editor you need to know rhythm. Jeymes knew a lot about rhythm and
how to express what he wanted. That was amazingly helpful.”
The template for some of the characters and look of The
Harder They Fall is 50-minute short They Die By Dawn directed by
Samuel in 2013. Starring Rosario Dawson as one four outlaws with a
bounty on their heads, the film was unusual (for 2013) in having a cast led by
people of color.
Even in 2021 the all POC cast of The Harder They Fall
is still notable. Idris Elba, Jonathan Majors, Zazie Beetz, Lakieth Stanfield,
Delroy Lindo and Regina King all star.
The film was shot around Sante Fe and other New Mexico
locations and is about an outlaw who discovers that the man who killed his
parents has been released from prison. A posse of revenge ensues.
In prep, Samuel also brought visual references, among
them the work of painter Kadir Nelson.
“It was his use of color saturation that struck a chord with
me,” Malaimare says, who previously created a vivid color palette for Taika
Waititi’s World War II drama JoJo Rabbit, based on period photographs by
Henri Cartier-Bresson.
“It’s not that I Iike repeating myself but I enjoyed working
on the color saturation in JoJo and felt this was another story where
your collective memory puts you into a dusty environment that we felt was too
dusty and drab for what we wanted. We’re not making a documentary. Inevitably
dust will be present anytime you film a cart moving but we want to enhance the
contrast... like a print on a glossy paper.”
The Romanian, who trained as a photographer before entering
film school in Bucharest, prefers to use stills rather than movie references as
a key into all his film projects.
“A good still is designed to be looked at for hours whereas
a single frame in a movie doesn’t work as well unless seen as part of a
sequence.
He continues, “In prep for this film I was struggling to
find a tonal key. Kadir’s paintings are great as a starting point but paint is
a different medium. I need a still photograph as a reference as well and I
couldn’t find anything. I bought a bunch of books of stills from westerns and
nothing stood out – everything was dusty.”
Until he chanced upon the book ‘Congo Tales’ by photographer
Pieter Henket. “Every time I go to a location out of town I make the effort to go to the local
bookstore and buy something,” Malaimare relates. “I don’t mind if it’s more
expensive than getting something online, I want to support local bookshops. On
this occasion it really paid off.”
Henket is not a photographer who ‘captures’ reality. He
carefully builds his compositions, stylising his subjects and mixing light and
color in the manner of a painter. He subtly refers to the Dutch masters of the
17th century, which as a Dutchman he knows through and through. For his images
created in the Congo rainforest, for example, he used a powerful stroboscope
powered by a battery to create Rembrandtesque lighting, evoking an atmosphere
in the photographs that ties in with the myths of the Congolese.
Describing Henket’s work as “insanely saturated primary
colors” Malaimare worked with the film’s art department to use colored light to
accentuate the costume and set design.
“There are certain rules that come with the Western genre
and you don’t want to fight against those,” he says. “You have to have a train
robbery. With our framing of tight shots on cowboy hats we pay homage to Sergio
Leone. And while a lot of westerns were shot spherical to deliver a widescreen
image, for me, it had to be anamorphic.”
The cinematographer’s original choice of Panavision 1.3
Ultra Panatars were, however, not available. Photography was forced to delay
due to Covid and when production resumed in September 2020, Panavision’s
inventory was split all around the world.
“I like the combination of DXL with 1.3x Ultra Panatars
because you don’t crop the sensor too much for 2.40:1 when using the full 8K
aspect ratio of the sensor,” he says. “I needed a plan B.”
The DP was adamant he didn’t want to shoot T Series with a
2x squeeze and also felt the look of the newer glass would be too pristine and
sharp.
“What [Panavision] showed me blew my mind. It was a T Series
detuned from 2x to 1.85 squeeze which means the image is softer and flares
more, all the qualities I wanted from an older set of lenses I found in this
one.”
He took a full set of the detuned T Series plus a full set
of Panaspeed large format spherical primes; Prism anamorphic 57mm, 75mm, 150mm;
a Primo 125mm; 12mm H series and speciality lenses including
135 variable anamorphoser which can squeeze from 1.25 to 1.5.
Malaimare used this for portraits.
“For night shoot sometimes I would go spherical and combine
it with anamorphic without too many issues. I think there is something to
shooting wide open at 1.4 than using a ton of light at 2.8 or 3.5 anamorphic
because most anamorphic glass doesn’t look right when wide open.”
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