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Cinematographer Dan Laustsen tells IBC365 why he and
Guillermo del Toro turned the classic nightmare, Frankenstein, into a love
story of ice and warmth between father and son.
Having spent decades contemplating his vision, Guillermo del
Toro had a fully conceived approach to his magisterial screen
version of Frankenstein, which would test the capabilities of
every single aspect of film craft. There would be giant sets, huge props, and a
complex wardrobe.
Set against the backdrop of the Crimean War, but otherwise
largely faithful to Mary Shelley’s gothic fable, this is the tale of scientist
Victor Frankenstein (played by Actor Oscar Isaac) who reanimates a new creature
(played by Actor Jacob Elordi) from the body parts of dead soldiers – only to
realise that his control has limits.
Creature design
In the film, Frankenstein selects mutilated bodies for his
experiment and puts the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. The makeup
needed to reflect that, but also have a certain beauty to it.
Creature Makeup Designer and Prosthetics Master Mike
Hill previously helped transform Actor Doug Jones into the Amphibian Man
in 2017’s The Shape of Water, and conjured the carnival
sideshow performers in 2021’s Nightmare Alley.
“We agreed that we didn’t want all these garish wounds and
stitching,” Hill says. “Victor Frankenstein is not a butcher. He’s trying to
make the perfect man, so he wouldn’t make this thing look like a car
accident. This was a sympathetic being. I didn’t want to make [the creature]
too good-looking because at the end of the day, he is a revived corpse, but it
was very smart of Guillermo to say that these body parts came from soldiers,
all moderately healthy and strong young men.”
Hill’s design was convincing enough that DoP Dan Laustsen
could shoot Elordi’s monster as he would any other character. “The
creature feels like a normal person,” Lausten says. “It was a character and
didn’t require any special treatment.”
The new creature takes the form of a soldier resurrected
from a mass grave who needs to feel like a baby, and then like a philosopher,
and then like a man.
Crafting a classic
“I wanted it to feel like an old movie that was made in the
heyday of Hollywood,” the director explains in a ‘making of’ featurette.
“Luscious and beautiful and operatic.”
He shared this vision with Laustsen, working with del Toro
on their fifth film together after winning Academy Award-nominations for The
Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley.
“We talked about making a classic movie, but it also had to
look modern. To do so, we were shooting wide angle with the camera moving a
lot, and having big vistas, strong close-ups, single source lighting, and a
very strong colour palette,” the Danish DoP explains to IBC365.
Unpicking those key decisions, Laustsen says his first
instinct was to shoot with a large-format (LF) Alexa 65 camera to produce an
image close to the classic 70mm print.
“We shot Nightmare Alley half with Alexa 65
and half with Alexa LF, but I felt Frankenstein needed to be
shot with Alexa 65 all the way,” he says. “I had to check with my Steadicam
Operator James Frater if that was possible because the Alexa 65 camera is a
monster. It's a really heavy camera. I didn't want to shoot part of the picture
with the Alexa Mini LF, but to shoot 65 throughout.”
Frater was okay with the choice, so Laustsen proceeded to
deploy LF Leitz Thalia lenses, which were more wide-angle than on his previous
del Toro productions.
“I think one of the reasons it looks so classical is that we
shot most of the movie on the 24mm, the widest lens Leitz makes for the Thalia
range. Again, using classic film language, we often start on a big wide
shot, so we see more or less everything in the set and end on a big close-up of
one of the actors.”
To further this classic feel, diffusion filters were
inserted inside the camera to create a specific type of romantic image. “The
Leica lenses are really nice because they're sharp from edge to edge. If we
want to have a flare, we can produce one; there are no surprises. The flip
side is that the image is very sharp. That's okay for the sets, but it's not
good for the skin tones. So, we shot with a Black Pro-mist 1/ 4 and 1/8 filter
inside the camera. We can have deep blacks but still a kind of flare in
the highlights. It’s organic and beautiful.”
A language of colour
Light and colour are always vital elements in a del Toro
film. Here, del Toro conceived of Frankenstein’s childhood in black and white
and red. His mother and his home are red, and since the character loses both as
a child, the colour haunts him. For the rest of the movie, he’s the only
character who wears red – red gloves, red scarf.
Before anybody joins him on a project, Guillermo’s already
got strong ideas about sets, the costume and the colour palette for different
scenes,” Laustsen says. “That's a really good idea because it acts as a guide
for every head of department [HoD]. We’re starting from the same position.
Everything is planned together and blended together. There’s a very close
relationship between HoDs and it’s based on this colour palette.”
For scenes depicting Victor with his creature, Laustsen and
del Toro brought together “two sides of the colour wheel”, moving from
steel-blue cyan to deep, warm amber tones offset with heavy layers of shadow.
“We are playing a lot with the contrast between amber and
the steel blue. When the creature and Frankenstein are together, the creature
is lit with steel blue and his father is lit by tungsten. It’s totally
unrealistic, but it evokes a feeling of coldness contrasted with warmth. This
horror story is about love.”
Light up the room
“We are not afraid of the darkness. We are not afraid of
single-source lighting. When you're shooting locations like dining rooms, we
need to have a lot of negative fill inside the room.”
To illuminate the lavish sets created by Production Designer
Tamara Deverell, Laustsen placed powerful 24kw tungsten lamps outside. Laustsen
adds: “To keep the same mood and colour palette consistent across all those
sets, you have to be able to control the light from outside. By lighting from
behind the windows, we can control the sunlight through the atmosphere and keep
the blacks pretty deep.”
This decision allowed the actors to move around with ease
and created pathways for the sizable camera on dollies, cranes, and Steadicam.
Additionally, coloured gels in front of the lights created the desired hue.
“We didn’t make a LUT [look-up table]. My mindset was ‘I'm
shooting it as if it were shot on film, so if I want to change the colour, I'm
going to change that on the lights. I'm not changing the colour in the camera.’
I shot more or less the whole movie at 4200 Kelvin, a colour temperature at
which the candles look good and the daylight combines well with the steel
blue.”
Set the stage
Frankenstein’s family home, depicted in the first half of
the movie, is a composite of stately residences shot on location at: Gosford
House in East Lothian; Burghley House in Lincolnshire; Dunecht House in
Aberdeenshire; and Wilton House in Wiltshire.
“We used a lot of atmospheres like mist, steam, and smoke,
and the windows acted as a gobo to control the shape of the emitted light and
its shadow. This adds a dimensionality to the image that I hope will feel
particularly immersive.”
The elaborate staircase at Wilton serves as a focal point
for the fictional Frankenstein estate and links del Toro’s production to one of
legendary director Stanley Kubrick’s most revered projects, Barry
Lyndon. That period production famously shot scenes on film lit by real
fires and candlelight.
“Guillermo and I talked about going with candlelight, and we
did a lot of tests there. Every cinematographer in the world wants to shoot
something like Barry Lyndon, but we wanted to have a bit more
control over the light. When you have candles everywhere, you cannot control
the contrast, so we decided to use fewer practicals in favour of single-source
lighting. I shot the whole movie at the same T-stop [exposure, in this case, a
T-4] inside and out.”
Playing with fire
The team did, however, use real fire torches as the key
light for night scenes set on the exploration vessel ‘Horisont’, which is
icebound in the Arctic. Instead of creating the ship in VFX, del Toro insisted
on a scale build at outdoor stages in Toronto and mounted on a mechanical
gimbal so it would look as if it were being rocked physically by the
creature.
“We had big discussions about using flaming torches because,
of course, they can be very dangerous, and we’d need to use LED torches, but
Guillermo and I were keen to shoot as authentically as possible. When you have
a real torch, the light will constantly flicker. It looks organic because it
is, and the effect is much more dramatic.”
The gigantic conflagration that destroys Frankenstein’s
laboratory was also achieved in-camera by blending photography of the set in
Toronto, Canada, with a miniature 20:1 scale set shot in London on a RED
camera.
“The key was to shoot high speed between 72 and 125 frames,
which is why we shot that scene with a RED camera. It has a large sensor, so I
can still use the same Thalia lenses we shot the whole movie on.”
A father-son interpretation
Frankenstein has endured as a tale partly
because it allows for different readings. The story could demonise the creature
as the embodiment of everything that is inhuman, or condemn Frankenstein as the
true monster for daring to be a god. Del Toro’s version reveals the humanity in
both characters through their father-son relationship.
“The first time Victor sees the Creator for real, when he
opens the blinds and lets sunshine come in, we shoot it a little bit like a
love story. There's warm light for the first time that the father and son are
together.”
Similar warm light is used in an early scene when we see
Frankenstein senior trying to teach his young son about science.
“One of the scenes I like very much is the first time the
creature sits with his father in the lab, and his father is tenderly shaving
him. It’s a simple scene with the sunrise reflecting in a broken mirror. You
feel the chemistry between the two actors, and you can also see that Daddy
doesn't understand anything about kids.”
This arrangement is mirrored in the film’s final scene when
the pair reconcile, and sunrise streams in through the window.
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