IBC
Look, lighting and camera movement were stripped back to basics by cinematographer Lukasz Żal to create the stage for Shakespeare’s personal tragedy.
article here
A drama based on the tragic death of Shakespeare’s son and
the impact on the playwright and his wife has been turned into an sensory and
timeless meditation on love, loss and life by Chinese born filmmaker Chloé
Zhao. Hamnet, based on the novel by Maggie O'Farrell, stars Irish actors
Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley and was largely filmed by a Polish crew for
which twice Oscar nominated Polish cinematographer Lukasz Żal (Ida;
Cold War) referenced Russian, Chinese and French new wave films.
“To me this film is about catharsis,” Żal says. “It’s
personal and universal, about the nature of love and intensely about
family - so how was I going to generate these emotions?”
The biggest task, he says, was not to make Hamnet look
like a film set in the late 16th century. “That was what I was
scared of. Shooting a period film can put you in a box. Our story had to feel a
little bit contemporary.”
His first conversations with Zhao were thematic rather than
technical. “We discussed how we were
going to show this world and decided to paint with strong images which are part
of a bigger picture. The idea is that you observe a fragment of reality, a
piece of life, and there should be a sense that this can speak to what is
beyond the screen.
“The only way I can do this is to think of frame and
composition. That is why I always build my films from static images. If the
camera doesn’t need to move, I won’t move it. The aim was to capture a piece of
life in the frame in such a way that it resonates beyond the frame.”
The style of the film evolved over many locations visits to
the UK. Z was usually accompanied by Z and sometimes with location manager
Lindsey Powell and focus puller Rami Bartholdy.
“We spent four days together scouting a forest (Lydney
Forest, Gloucestershire) which really helped me to feel the environment. We
found our places including the hollows in the forest floor and began to create
this world.”
He combined photos he took on the recces with other
references from painting and film and composed a look book for Zhao to digest.
This included the films of Russia’s Andrei Tarkovsky, French innovator Jean-Luc
Godard, 1991 Chinese period drama Raise the Red Lantern “for its central
composition” and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (“though everybody uses this”).
With Zhao he talked the character’s relationships
questioning their depiction of
masculinity and femininity. “What is this dance between this man and
this woman? We were talking about death, love, family - this life cycle - and how
we were going to show it.”
They started down the path of photographing the story from
the point of view of Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife. “But then we understood that we
wanted to change between the points of view of our two characters, Agnes and
Will,” Żal says. “These two people meet, they find love and it’s so intense. I
wanted to create the feeling of being immersed in their feelings. Then we jump
out and see them from a distance. We see them struggle as human beings.”
Żal refined the camera language to four types of camera
movement or position, each with a different motivation. The first was static, a
second was handheld often for close-ups “a very emotional camera immersed in
how they fell in love and how they feel,” he says.
Żal likens the somewhat distant camera used in the house to
a CCTV camera or a “mute person’s point of view” which observes rather than
comments. He had a fourth type of camera mounted on a cart to move slowly “like
a ghost” he says.
“We wanted the ability to jump between perspectives. It’s
like when you argue with someone then suddenly you become conscious of what you
are doing. Perhaps you feel stupid for having the argument and part of you has
detached from the intensity of the moment and becomes more objective.”
For all the careful work in prep in terms of knowing which
camera to use for each scene, Żal virtually threw this away when it came to
set. “On set we worked more like a documentary team. I was observing what was
happening between the actors and because our approach remained open to trying
new things we able to make new decisions.”
He admits to having doubts about what kit to use for scenes
in the forest. “I remember Paul [Mescal] said it was important for him to have
freedom. We were initially thinking about complicated gimbals but changed our
minds to a very simple Alexa 35 camera and nothing else in between Paul and
Jessie and ourselves. It was all about create a space for actors and trying to
be simple and honest.”
For similar reasons they removed the large camera crane they
had planned to shoot with for scenes at London’s Globe Theatre. “It’s a big [piece
of equipment] and doesn’t belong there. Our approach was: the simpler the
better.”
Żal’s approach to lighting was straightforward. For scenes
among the trees he let the beauty of the natural world dominate. Night interiors
were lit mainly by candlelight with a touch of additional fill from LEDs
diffused with fabrics. DIT Krzysztof Zawieja begged Zal to add even 1% more
light to these scenes since he could barely see any exposure on the monitor.
“It was a constant fight,” Zawieja said. “Lucasz is keen on
the darkness. I had no information at all [on the monitor] and I was on the
verge of tears but Lucas was adamant that it would work. And you know what? He
was right.”
The final sequence set inside the Globe theatre while
‘Hamlet’ is staged, Shakespeare’s family including Agnes and her brother Bartholomew
appear as faces in the crowd.
“We wanted them to be in a crowd of human beings. Agnes
understands that the bond she shares with Will is as strong as this collective
way of experiencing things. As human beings we are all connected. We are born.
We die. We all come from the same place. To me this is central to the movie
themes.”
The concept of stripping everything back to basics followed
in post. Zhao had shot the film with a LUT designed with colourist Damien
Vandercruyssen and completed the grade with a bleach bypass so there was higher
contrast and more grain.
“In the grade Chloé started to favour regular Rec.709 (the
industry standard for HD TV). Then we had a polite but creative struggle. I
thought she was pulling the contrast back too much but she has great intuition.
All our efforts was to create a film which will look natural not fake.
I don’t like the commercial Hollywood look. I don’t like it when a film looks
like a film. To me that’s terrible.”
Freedom and constraint
The verdant woods depicted in the film contrast with the
comparatively claustrophobic dimensions of Henley House, the residence that
Agnes and Will call home. This set was constructed on soundstages at Elstree
Studios and was a composite of Elizabethan locations designed by production
designer Fiona Crombie.
“When I first spoke to Chloé, it was about architecture as
containment and the weight of the ceilings and what it’s doing to characters,”
Crombie says. “When I looked at Tudor architecture, I was struck by the graphic
arrangement of the beams. They ran vertically like bars with horizontal cross
beams. The ceilings were low and heavy. There was something restrictive and
constraining about the architecture that I had never noted before. It felt to
me like it would be hard for Agnes to live under those constraints, to be boxed
in.”
Crombie also subtly conveys the legacy of violence
perpetrated by Shakespeare’s father. It’s a house with physical scars. Items in
the home—bowls, plates, furniture—exhibit signs of rupture and repair.
“The reality is that the Shakespeare house was an old house
by the time Will and Agnes lived there so there would have been imperfection
and history,” Crombie says. “We built into the design signs of John’s violence.
A broken spindle on the staircase, a cracked windowpane, a dent in the
plaster.”
Renaissance instruments and ASMR
Hamnet’s haunting score is created by Max Richter,
the Emmy nominated British composer who wrote what he describes as a series of
“colour studies” inspired by Elizabethan music. Zhao was so taken with these
compositions that she played them on set to help create a certain atmosphere
for the cast.
“Certainly when I was there, which was toward the end of the
shoot, they were looping a lot of the
material pretty much continuously. It became a sort of amniotic fluid
surrounding this thing,” he says.
Richter emphasised harp and piano and injected a degree of
abstraction into the score by using vocal material to evoke sensation.
“I wanted to lean into the experiential aspect,” he
explains. “We had a set of Renaissance instruments but did not play them in a
traditional way. We focused on the contact noises, those little almost ASMR
sort of experiences of the way a human interacts with an instrument—scrapes and
squeaks and all these things that feel very alive.”
One of Richter’s existing compositions, ‘On the Nature of
Daylight,’ which was originally written for his second album, 2004’s The Blue
Notebooks and appears in the films Shutter Island and Arrival is
included as part of the score. This music particularly resonated with Buckley
who says they played it throughout shooting the end of the film.
“All of a sudden it became incredibly clear emotionally what the end of the film was meant to feel like from hearing this piece of music,” Buckley says in the film’s production notes. “It was really the thing that opened the door for me at the end of the film about how I could actually surrender into it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment