Savage Beauty: The Visuals for “The Power of the Dog”

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https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/savage-beauty-the-visuals-for-the-power-of-the-dog/

About half way into Jane Campion’s new movie, the knot tightens. It is imperceptible, such is the pace of the way in which tension is built, but it grips, much like the onscreen portrayal of cowboys painstakingly braiding new rope from rawhide. Given that this is a Jane Campion film, the metaphor is surely not coincidental.

Based on the 1967 book written by Thomas Savage, The Power of the Dog contains all the trapping of an archetypal Western but deviates dramatically from cliché.

“Our main inspiration in terms of other films was A Man Escaped (1956) by Robert Bresson, where simplicity and minimalism is used to craft an incredibly tense story,” explains director of photography Ari Wegner ACS (Lady Macbeth, Zola) and winner of this year’s TIFF Variety Artisan Award. “Everything in the film from score to color palette to wardrobe and camera movement is very unshowy. No one element and certainly not the cinematography should not be grabbing your attention.”

Yet grab it does, as The Power of the Dog seduces the audience with an accretion of detail amid the foreboding hills of Montana. Even this feels dislocated since the production shot in the Hawkdun Ranges in Central Otago in South Island, New Zealand. Its sparsely populated, grassy plains and rocky mountains proved a remarkable match for Montana.

Campion has described the deeply complex central character Phil Burbank, a brilliant but cruel, hyper-masculine cattle rancher, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, as one of the all-time great characters of American fiction. He is in an impossible situation of being an alpha male who is homophobic and also homosexual.

Wegner spent roughly a year working with Campion, location scouting, storyboarding, and developing the visual style for the film, as well as working with production designer Grant Major (Oscar winner for Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King).

“For me that was incredibly exciting,” says Wegner. “Not just the prospect of working with Jane on such an amazing story but to be able to prepare properly and spend the time to get it right. I’ve shot there before and I know how the landscape changes from season to season. It was really important for us to spend time at the location in the season that we were going to be shooting. I didn’t do any other projects in that period, familiarizing myself with the property to find the great angles and getting to know the light.”

The property is the large ranch house and outbuildings built in the style of 1920s Montana. This is a settlement on the cusp of modernization, where saddle-hardened cowboys live uneasily with cars and trains, college education and civil society of the nearby town.

“I read the book as soon as I got the call from Jane and its descriptions of the land, the house and the characters within it as well as the minute details make up a holistic world,” Wegner says.

She participated in decision-making about the location of the house and throughout the art department build ensuring that the set allowed her to best capture the interplay of shadow and light that unfolds so dramatically in the mountain ridge behind the set.

“Shooting in New Zealand can take a lot of patience and endurance to deal with really intense weather, but it’s a wonderful experience,” says the native Australian. “I’ve always loved it. It’s a landscape that gives so much. You can photograph a vast plain with a mountain range that rises up behind it as one image, which is something that is not possible in Australia.”

Planning the production, Campion and producer Tanya Seghatchian met with novelist Annie Proulx, who wrote the short story “Brokeback Mountain” and penned an afterword to Savage’s book in 2001. They discussed writing about the American West from a female writer’s perspective. Her encouragement, Campion says, was incredibly helpful in giving her the confidence to tell this very American, masculine story.

An important reference for Campion and Wegner was the work of photojournalist Evelyn Cameron, who documented the American West at the time the film is set. They also referenced Time magazine archives, featuring photography of cowboys of the era, in addition to the Ken Burns documentary series The West, which offered the team a snapshot not only of 1920s Montana, but everything that came before it.

“Cameron’s diary and photographs offered an insight into that world from a woman’s and an outsider’s perspective,” Wegner says. “Her pictures — there is one of a woman standing on a horse that feels super conceptual — evoke a strong feeling that these characters could be alive now. We wanted to create that kind of realness in the moving image.”

Any desire to shoot on film was taken out of their hands because the location was so remote dailies could not be processed in time (and the cost of insurance was prohibitive).

“There are no labs in New Zealand that can take that scale of dailies footage and the idea of shipping unprocessed camera neg is a really scary process for everyone — myself included,” she says.

She shot large-format on Alexa Mini LF paired with vintage anamorphic Ultra Panatar lenses to frame actors against the vast landscapes. The while the interiors of the ranch house, with its Swiss-style wooden architecture are dark. She bounced light off molded glass to simulate moonlight and the brooding atmosphere inside.

Toward the end a sequence takes place in a barn at night between Phil and Peter (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee). There’s so much hiding in the shadows. Everything begins to lean closer: Phil rolling a smoke in a macro closeup, a very tactile shot that unfurls into a slow build that climaxes with the sensual gesture of Peter holding the cigarette to Phil’s lips. Macro shots of rope plaiting are used to underline Phil’s desire and the sexual tension between them. The scene cuts to the horses as a way to transition out of the sensuality into the morning light, but retain the mood and let it sit in the air.

It deconstructs the myth of Marlboro Man.

“The idea of giving love and attention to a macro shot was definitely in the language of the film from the start,” Wegner says. “We know by virtue of the script how much attention we’re going to pay to things like hands on rope, playing the piano, playing the banjo. It’s an easy thing to say you’ll grab a macro but it’s harder to shoot. I had a whole list that we storyboarded and handed to (Steadicam/A Cam) Grant Adam to get. In a way there is something more iconic in the detail and texture of these shots than any of the big vistas.”