Henry Braham BSC talks about shooting Apple TV’s movie
The Instigators on RED in a truncated timeframe of a little over a month.
article here
Laid-back comedy caper The Instigators succeeds
on its own terms in feeling unencumbered by the weight of a big studio movie
despite the A-list charms of Matt Damon, Casey Affleck (who also co-wrote the
script) and Hong Chau, a number of weighty character actors (Ving Rhames, Ron
Perlman, Toby Jones) and being bankrolled by Apple.
Director Doug Liman is a master at flipping a paper thin
plot into slickly entertaining escapade (see Mr. & Mrs. Smith, American
Made) and has shot his last two movies in concert with cinematographer
Henry Braham BSC.
Braham is renowned for his work in developing character
driven performances stretching back to indie fayre like Stefan Schwartz’ Soft
Top Hard Shoulder (1992) through Nanny McPhee (2005)
to studio blockbusters The Golden Compass (2007)
and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017).
“It sounds really obvious but Road House was
about the heat and the water. Set in the Keys, shot in the Dominican Republic.
It's a cowboy movie, an action movie, it’s all about the fights,” says Braham
of the Jake Gyllenhaal feature directed by Liman which released earlier
this year on Amazon Prime.
“The Instigators is the exact opposite. It's
cold. It’s Boston. It’s a buddy movie about hapless guys for whom everything
goes wrong. The common thing between them is Doug's approach to filmmaking.”
As part of his prep Braham scouted locations in Boston and
New York. “[The production] had great collaboration from the city. We were
allowed to run amok in Boston City Hall [the modern concrete behemoth that
dominates downtown] and across the streets. It was important that we shot
during winter time so that there was a sort of a greyness to it and nothing
looked too pretty.”
That fits with the blue-collar post-industrial milieu
of the film which to a degree recalls Michael Mann’s Chicago set heist
movie Thief (1981) where the hero (a career best performance
from James Caan) believes that stealing from the rich equates to social
justice, provided no-one gets harmed.
Affleck’s screenplay for The Instigators also
has downtrodden heroes sticking it ‘to the man’ – in this case corrupt
politicians. Braham leans into the cloudy skies and gives the film a grey-blue
hue.
“Obviously the story is fantastical but if you can ground it
more in reality then you buy into the story better,” he says. “Although it's
ridiculous there are all kinds of truths that come through the movie. So,
photographically it's important that we ground it.”
He continues, “It wasn't important to me to show off the
Boston locations. It was about telling the story of these two guys and the
chaos around them.”
The interior of the mayor’s office was built at Broadway
Stages in Brooklyn with a layout based on the real thing, duplicating Boston
City Hall’s exposed concrete structure and high ceilings.
Braham’s camera is hardly ever static and often frames
close-up to the actors and very close indeed with shots inside vehicles during
the car chase [one of the most extensive ever filmed in downtown Boston which
also filmed inside the I-93 expressway tunnel]. The cinematographer says his
aim was to keep connected to the performances, not to over plan shots and to be
intuitive to the moment.
“Hopefully the audience is not aware of the camera at all
but just feels very connected to the story. A classic way of doing that is for
the camera to stand back and be on longer lenses and to observe what's going
on. There are brilliant examples of that in Doug's early movies, especially in
his first Bourne picture (The Bourne Identity 2002).”
Another example is In The Mood For Love (shot
by Christopher Doyle for Wong Kar Wai) which Braham says is “beautifully
observed and not shot conventionally at all.”
“Those are two ways of doing it but there's a new way of
doing it which technology has recently allowed us to achieve. It's where we can
shoot on large format cameras which are physically small and which enable you
to get the camera close in and amongst the actors.
“Because the negative format is large you can use wider
lenses that don't look like wider lenses on screen. In every filmmaker's dream
there's a thing called a ‘tight wide’ shot which is where you want to see
everything but at the same time you want to be close and connected to what's
going on.
“In the old days we used to have a wide shot or a
tight shot. But now, thanks to the advent of large format digital cameras, we
can have our cake and eat it, which is a tight wide shot.
Braham has been developing this technique and related
philosophy over a number of films with James Gunn including Suicide
Squad (2021), and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) and The
Flash for director Andy Muschietti. All are in the Marvel
or DC Universe and foreground character over VFX.
“It means you can be entirely intuitive with a handheld
camera,” says Braham who likes to operate himself. “You can be very precise
about the relationship of the camera to the actors. The actors aren't bound by
marks on the floor. I can always keep the camera in the right relationship to
them and they will always be in the right relationship to the other actors and
the set.”
This approach frees actors, directors and camera to perform
and respond more freely on set. “It's a really fun way of making a movie. It’s
not consciously artful. That’s hard to explain but I think when you shoot
something conventionally there's an artfulness to it which audiences are aware
of. For lots of movies that's entirely appropriate. But in a movie like this,
it’s not.”
He cites the 1971 classic The French Connection shot
by Owen Roizman as revolutionary in breaking many of the established rules.
“They didn’t use wide, mid-shot to close-up. Their response
to the story on location was intuitive and that was enabled by being able to
use small cameras rolling a single strip of film and cameras which were among
the first to be single-lens reflex – the operator could look through the lens
and see exactly what the camera was seeing. Plus, it was one of the first films
to take advantage of the zoom lens. I believe where we are now with
digital cine technology is the next genuine progression since that era of
filmmaking.”
Most of the enjoyment in watching The Instigators comes
from the repartee of the three leads. Their comic timing is often captured in
camera rather than feeling manufactured in the edit and is testimony to Braham
and Liman’s approach.
“Doug encouraged improvisation and because we have a
shooting style that can evolve with the scene we can capture moments that feel
spontaneous. That’s a lot harder when there's a team of people directly behind
the camera worried about getting into territory that hasn't been discussed.
“In this case, most of the film is shot single camera and it is myself and my
demon focus puller (A camera assistant Dermot Hickey) who has to react to what
I’m doing which he often won’t know in advance.
“Doug has got this antenna for things that don't feel
truthful. If it's not working in one way, he'll try something completely
different and that could just literally turn the whole scene on its head. To
have the flexibility to do that is important for a filmmaker like that. We
always ended up with something significantly better.”
Shooting RED
The look of Road House may be entirely
different but Braham used the same camera package of RED V-Raptor with Leitz M
0.8 glass. He’s been working with RED on all of his recent films and says he
changes up as new sensors or features are released to always work with the
latest model.
“In camera technology there's been a steady progression of
improvements but I've kept the same fundamental principles for every film I’ve
shot over last four to five years.
“When RED developed their first VistaVision camera it was
revolutionary because the moment you have the larger negative the lenses you
can use change completely. When you get used to shooting VistaVision and then
go back to 35mm it’s like going backwards to 16mm. The profound
step forward in movie making technique is the move to large format.
“Secondly, it’s putting that sensor in a camera the size of
a Hasselblad. RED really nailed this. The V-Raptor is so light it enables you
to do all sorts of things that are intimate or to put the camera in places
which wouldn’t fit a larger one.
“In the days of film the cinematographer would take time to
get to understand a new film stock when it came out. You had to get to know the
material. It’s a bit like an artist testing the canvas or wood or texture on
which they will paint. Your raw materials react differently. It's the same with
photography. Each time something changes from my point of view, I really have
to understand what that is. Once I’ve understood the tools then goes into the
background. I’ll just know the photographic range I’m working with and what a
particular camera is good at.”
In this endeavour Braham has been aided by the bespoke
designs of David Freeth co-developer of the stabiliser system Stabileye. “It’s
incredibly expressive,” Braham says of the remotely-operated, miniature
stabilised head. “It kind of allows the camera to dance with whatever's going
on in front of it.”
He has just shot Superman for James Gunn
and says 90 per cent of the film was shot in this fashion. “A
few years ago we used to think a big, big movie like this had to be approached
in a certain way but I don't think you need to now. Directors change their
minds when they discover the freedom they get from this approach.”
The tight 36-day shoot would arguably not have been possible
without the Braham-Freeth proprietary system that can emulate a dolly shot, a
crane shot, a handheld shot, all with the same camera system. It meant that
with a pre-lit the set designed for naturalism Liman could point the camera
anywhere without need to wait between set-ups.
Big or small screen?
There has been some reported disagreement between Liman and
Amazon over theatrical release of Road House. Liman seemed to
suggest that an agreement by the streamer to give the film a cinema run was
reneged on. The Instigators has also gone straight to AppleTV+
but the filmmaker seems to have known this in advance.
“The way we shot Road House was intended
for the big screen,” Braham says. “It was a very immersive kind of roller
coaster ride. The fight scenes are specifically designed for IMAX and we colour
timed those on a big screen so the idea is that the audience is literally part
of the fight.
“My approach is always to assume everything's going on a big
screen. Because we shoot in a way I’ve described using the tight wide shot, it
works whichever size screen. I’ll often see movies in the cinema but I’ll go
back and watch them on TV over the years simply because I enjoy them. A good
film well told will stand up to being viewed repeatedly.”
He worked with regular colourist Stefan Sonnenfeld of
Company 3 to grade the film. “My process now is to shoot material during prep
and to build a colour bible of how the movie is going to look. You can
talk about these things and look at bits of reference but I found it most
helpful to shoot some material and build the look so that everybody from design
to costume can work toward the same goal. It’s like designing your own
print stock. I love that it's like starting with a blank sheet of paper. Some
people don't like that because they want some rules to work with. I'm more
interested in there being no rules.”
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