IBC
The heat, concrete and mystery of 1940’s LA recreated in Barcelona with a stylish neon twist by cinematographer Xavi Gimenez
There have been numerous movie adaptations featuring Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled gumshoe Phillip Marlowe but none that use colour like a weapon.
That’s how director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) described the work of cinematographer Xavi Gimenez in helping make new film Marlowe stand out from the pack.
“Xavi and I, we’re not making something ‘real’ here,” Jordan elaborates in the film’s production notes, “We’re making something sort of hyper-real — so let’s use the intensity of the light, the colours and strips of neon that Xavi used very beautifully in the night scenes. It created a heightened version of a noir film. Here using colour almost felt like using a weapon.”
Marlowe is an old school throw back to classic film noir such as The Big Sleep (1946) starring Humphrey Bogart while doffing its hat to 1974’s Chinatown (Danny Huston has a prominent role in Marlowe, recalling his father’s famous turn in Polanski’s movie) but it is Blade Runner, a sci-fi noir, which was Jordan’s principal stylistic reference.
This touchstone emanated from the production’s decision to shoot the entire movie in Barcelona, standing in for 1940s Los Angeles. It’s not the first Chandler movie to relocate. Michael Winner’s 1978 version of The Big Sleep swapped ‘40s LA for 1970s London.
“If you go to LA there is nothing of that period left,” director Neil Jordan explained at the film’s premier in San Sebastian. “They destroy the past. We had to invent an imaginary city. That to me was the challenge of the film rather than trying to approximate a noir aesthetic.”
He continued, “To make it work you have to reinvent the idea of a noir movie. When I was speaking with Xavi and [production designer] John Beard the reference I chose was Blade Runner. Weird I know. Our Marlowe is set in the LA of the past not the future but in a strange way we are building a science fiction landscape to this movie.”
Speaking to IBC365, Gimenez says the lighting scheme for Ridley Scott’s film was more “neurotic and electric” than he felt Marlowe needed. “I decided not to jump too far into this or to just to copy the concept of film noir. Of course, Blade Runner was always floating around us as a reference but it was not the exact final concept.
In the first scene for example you can see these ideas. It begins in proper noir territory, with Marlowe (Liam Neeson) handed a job by mysterious client (Diane Kruger) in his downtown office splintered by afternoon light streaming in behind window blinds. Gimenez explains that he chose to bath everything in a bourbon-coloured almost-dusk.
“There is a little bit of hazy cigarette smoke but not too much, the lines of light come through the blinds but it is not extreme high contrast. We want to integrate the stylistics of noir naturalistically into the movie, not have them shout out and detract from the story.”
Gimenez baths the whole production in a sun-dappled, sinister feel that befits a California noir, with shadows, concrete and gardens filled with secrecy and inscrutability.
“I had two different concepts – one related to heat, the other related to black and white,” he shares. “Since we weren’t going to shoot black and white [for commercial reasons] we decided to create a constant colour as if it were our black and white. I decided to use this particular yellow because in my imagination yellow has a connection with jazz and jazz has a connection with the warring gangs of 1920s to 1940s.
“With heat our idea was to create this feeling of ambient humidity. We achieve this by over exposing all the day exteriors just little a bit more than normal. To light scenes we used filament bulbs, normal bulbs, to which we added a yellow tint.”
In addition to which, Gimenez shoots a driving scene with Marlowe and scheming villain (Alan Cumming), in a LED volume where neon street signs are reflected on and viewed through the windows. As the film progresses, he dials up the neon so that entire scenes are filtered in red or blue light as from a John Wick or Nicholas Winding Refn thriller.
Not surprisingly, Gimenez has made a fair share of horror movies particularly at the beginning of his career including Intacto, before making his breakthrough with The Machinist. This is the 2004 psychological thriller for which Christian Bale famously shed 62 pounds of bodyweight. Set in California, the film was shot entirety in Barcelona including the Tibidabo amusement park and urban districts of El Prat de Llobregat (near the Fira exhibition centre) and Sant Adrià del Besòs.
It’s also a dark film, thematically and pictorially, which director Brad Anderson, likened to noir.
“Barcelona has an extreme dark side,” says Gimenez who was born and lives in the city. “At the beginning of the 20th century and during the late 1920s there was a lot of anarchism with guns and gangsters in the street.” He’s referring to the series of violent worker’s strikes in the city that culminated in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the rise of Franco as dictator.
“I think Barcelona can perfectly match noir. For Marlowe we were looking for locations with palm trees, Venice beach and suitable architecture.”
An abandoned paper factory in the city doubled for several locations including the film’s recreation of a Hollywood studio.
Gimenez went to film school in Barcelona in the late 1980s to study sound. “I never thought I could be a DoP. We had a teacher who taught about aesthetics he showed us lots of different films. One of them was Blade Runner but I remember at that time I didn’t even know what a DP was. I didn’t know about credits or that there was such a profession.
“One time I asked in the middle of class, who does that – who films the movies. Then I learned about the director of photography and began to get really obsessed about it.
“You know, cinematography is a drug. If you talk with lot of different DPs you realise we are absolutely in shock about light and how it is possible to manage it, to train it, how to understand it as a material to create emotions. I was shocked and impressed by this concept – that it is possible to create emotions with light.”
Like all film school students, Gimenez studied every aspect of production including sound, direction, design and script. In his last year he focused on cinematography.
“My first idea to make documentaries but the producers were more interested in my cinematography of my docs than of the docs themselves. That’s when they started to call me and offer me work solely as a cameraman.
He did his time as second assistant camera on movies including on Bigas Luna directed films Golden Balls, starring Javier Bardem, and The Tit and the Moon (1994) but his heart wasn’t in it. A friend gave him a book, ‘The Peter Principal’ by Laurence J Peter which talked about the straitjackets of conventional hierarchies and promotion.
“I realised I had to jump straight to being a DP because follow on from second to first assistant camera was impossible because head doesn’t work at this level. Focus pulling is extremely precise work and my soul doesn’t work in this manner. I live too much in abstraction for this. I had to be a DP. And it worked.”
He lensed the thriller Transsiberian for Anderson starring Woody Harrelson and shot episodes of Sky’s gothic horror series Penny Dreadful, exec produced by Sam Mendes.
Like many artists he never switches off. He regularly carries a digital stills camera around with to take pictures of anything that catches his eye, to file away for future use. Usually, these pictures are about light.
“I used to teach film at university and I tried to explain that when you become a DP you have to be DP 24 hrs a day. You have to study every day to discover new forms of light or new concept of lighting that you find in the street. It’s like to be a dancer you have to be training every day, learning and investigating every day and not just as a technical process. The difficult thing is the emotion, the connection of lighting and emotion. I always tell my students you have to be practicing every day because the what audiences want is changing very fast.”
He seems torn between working up close and personal with the actors, holding the camera, or being by the director further away between takes. The latter is more of a norm with digital cameras which allow a director and DP to monitor a shot from distance but can detract from a cinematographer’s appreciation for being involved intimately in a scene.
“I love to work as camera operator but sometimes the movie is too big and doesn’t permit this. It’s most important to be side by side with the director to push a movie but at the same time I feel the actor doesn’t have quite the same reference to the frame of the camera if you are not with them. It is important as a cinematographer to understand the actor at work.
His own heroes of cinema include Pasquale De Santis an Italian cinematographer who shot Death In Venice and collaborated with Robert Bresson, Joseph Losey and Frederico Fellini; the Mexican Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity, Birdman) and British legend Roger Deakins (Empire of Light), of whom he says, “I am not able to talk about him. The feel of emotion of his lighting is amazing. I can only aspire to reach his level.”
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