British Cinematographer
Guy
Ritchie's new spy-fi action comedy pairs a duo of special agents on
opposite sides of thc cold war. In roles popularised in the 1960s MGM
V series starring Robert Vaughn and David Mccallum. The characters,
like the cars featured in the movie are vintage. But the story is
new.
For
the film, Ritchie and co-writer and producer, Lionel Wigram,
conceived the idea of an ‘origins’ story that would reveal how
CIA operative Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and KGB agent Illya
Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) met and arrived at their unlikely
collaboration for the mysterious United Network Command for Law
and Enforcement (U.N.C.L.E.).
Philippe
Rousselot AFC ASC, who had lensed Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of
Shadows for Ritchie was
assigned to the project but unfortunately had to withdraw at the
eleventh hour. So the ball passed to John Mathieson BSC – a more
capable substitute you could not imagine.
As
far as Mathieson can tell, he got the gig following recommendations
from co-producer Max Keene, gaffer Chuck Finch, and camera operator
Chris Plevin – all collaborators with Ritchie on Sherlock and
each with connections to Mathieson, the two time Oscar nominee
(Gladiator, The Phantom Of The Opera), through
their work together on films such as 47 Ronin, Robin
Hood and Kingdom Of
Heaven.
“I
kind of got the show by way of a few references and the misfortune of
a fellow DP,” explains Mathieson. “It came rather quickly and the
technical crew and much of the key decision-making was already in
train.”
The
timing wasn't ideal for this avowed enthusiast for film. In early
2013, in the wake of the pending closure of Technicolor's processing
lab at Pinewood but before Deluxe-owned Company3 joined with
iDailies, and long before Disney landed Star Wars in
the country, UK film processing was on the verge of collapse. “There
wasn't a choice about U.N.C.L.E.'s
shooting format, we had to shoot digital,” he says.
Mathieson
had shot with REDs and ARRI Alexas previously but doesn't favour one
over another, viewing all digital cameras as essentially inferior to
negative. “I couldn't really care if I never saw a digital camera
ever again,” he says. “With digital you don't have to be a
craftsman. You can shoot and add colour and exposure in hindsight
rather than sculpt instinctively in stone. But U.N.C.L.E.
was not a bad project to do digitally. Digital cameras will give you
synthetic primaries, rather than burnt Renaissance painting colour,
but then this is a Sixties’ pastiche comic-strip with bright, bold
colours. So I thought, 'let's just go with it and not be a Luddite
about it’.”
Principal
photography began in September 2013 on Alexa XT with some B-roll shot
on GoPro Hero (unused in the event). Canon EOS 5Ds proved more useful
for stunt sequences, including one which resulted in a car being
submerged underwater. “We sank the vehicle and couldn't retrieve
the footage until a week later but it was perfectly serviceable,”
he says.
Like
Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films
and his 1998 feature debut, Lock, Stock And Two
Smoking Barrels, The
Man From U.N.C.L.E. inhabits a
world of both flash and toughness. The director largely left
Mathieson to his own devices, concentrating on working with the
actors rather than engaging his cinematographer in animated
shot-by-shot conversation or suggesting a definitive look.
“We
tried to tip our hat to the period,” says Mathieson. “We shot
mainly with Panavision E Series Anamorphic primes and older
Technovision spherical lenses, which all had the feeling of the time.
They possessed aberrations and a fogging or veiling which helped to
set the film back, not as far as the Sixties, but certainly a
throwback to the past.”
Other
glass included an old Cooke Cine Varotal MKII 25-250mm T3.9 zoom,
Cooke Varotal 40-200mm, an Elite zoom 240-1040mm and Cooke Varotal T3
for night work.
The
closest filmic references for The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
were the early 007 James Bond movies of Dr No (1962)
and From Russia With Love
(1963), both shot by DP Ted Moore BSC. “A lot of the look of those
films was achieved in the styling – of two-tone suits, jet-black
waxed hair and skinny ties with girls in polyester dresses and
classic cars, but the look was quite colourful too,” observes
Mathieson. “The film stock of the time is quite rich and contrasty
with strong blacks and deep colours. That's not quite so easy to
achieve on digital.”
Some
16mm Bolex negative was shot as a transition between the title
sequence, containing scene-setting newsreel of President's Kennedy
and Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, “to bring
us into the digital world as gently as possible,” he says. “You
couldn't really cut directly to the Alexa. It's about bending the
format to taste. This the look of the 1960s from a 2015 lens.”
Mathieson's
lighting package was generally in keeping with the period, mainly met
with Tungsten 5K – 20Ks. “We were not using HMI, Kino or
LEDs. The Sixties had a lot of fantastic design conveying an opulence
and optimism about how things should be, but the computers in our
world flash like car indicators. It's not high-tech. The
palate for this film is colourful and warm and we felt Tungsten lamps
suited that mood. We'd probably have gone with LEDs
and fluorescents if we were shooting a more modern type of
film.”
Although
some Steadicam was deployed, the period nature of the piece lent
itself more to track work. “I think we'd all rather track if we
could,” he says. “In some ways it can be much quicker to work on
set using tracks. It doesn't take long to run a track around and it
means you can stop and interrogate a frame, talk about a shot,
redress the set or adjust for lighting as necessary while the camera
operator isn't bending their back.”
Being
a Warner Bros project, Leavesden was the show's studio home
supplemented with a considerable amount of location shooting. The
Royal Victoria Docks near London's City Airport was a
mock-Mediterranean harbour. An old mill near City Airport
and derelict buildings at Chatham Docks provided a backdrop for
bombed-out East Berlin. A scene set under Brixton's railway arches
was used for “spies coming out of greasy garages exchanging
packages, picking up fast cars”, and Greenwich's Maritime Museum
doubled as Berlin and the backdrop for a car chase. Various London
interiors in keeping with the ‘60’s period were also used. A café
was specially-built in Regent's Park.
The
mission itself begins in Italy on location in Rome, Naples and
Neapolitan islands, including interiors of large municipal buildings
of the La Dolce Vita period
“with shiny floors, columns and lots of glass. A certain degree of
elegance you wouldn't get anywhere else,” Mathieson recalls. “We
shot in the Grand Plaza hotel near Rome's Piazza del Popolo which we
just shot for what it was – falling down rococo with old-fashioned
décor, a wonderful staircase and reception areas.”
The
Alexa data was handled by DIT Francesco Luigi Giardiello on-set and
on to Technicolor for post, using the Codex workflow, but Mathieson
professes to be more interested in getting the images right and
controlling the final look than the technical process that happens in
between.
“If
you give it the right exposure you can achieve a very different
feeling within the same lens,” he says. “If you want a hard look
or a soft, swimming look with flare you can do so within the iris.
Some of the older zooms have had their front elements taking quite a
beating which was great to play with.”
He
continues: “When you look at the Log or at the RAW image in digital
it's horrifying, but you want to make sure the images are as good as
graded rushes. When things are in editorial the scenes will move up
and downstream and the story arc and time of day will change and,
therefore, so will the look. You might then have to soften the
lighting to move from a dawn to dusk scene.”
He
worked with colourist Paul Ensby over ten days, locking the picture
down by summer 2014. “I'm not someone who spends hours in the grade
finessing each detail. I view the DI process as a piece of music with
shades of fortissimo
and mezzoforte and
that the more you tinker with the image, the more you risk ruining
its rhythm.”
He
says, “The way I like to grade is to take the best shot in a
particular sequence then grade around that, rather than trying to add
in windows which just tends to average everything out. Maybe the end
result is rough around the edges, but I'd rather have that than a
piece which is bland and boring. I got it to where I wanted it to be.
But I would have made it look better on film.”
This
from a craftsman who learned his trade on U-Matic and BetaSP before
graduating to film. “It's a great shame that there's a generation
of kids who have never had a chance to try 16mm. Now everyone
graduates to shoot digital. Even if they want to shoot film they are
not given the confidence to expose film.
“We're
talking about the key craft skill of using one's eye to judge
exposure, to really look at the light rather than looking over your
shoulder at a monitor with a waveform and vector scope before
pressing a record button.”
He
adds: “I can't tell the difference between the looks of a lot of
the big VFX films. Did any cameraman put their stamp on it or even
design it?”
Mathieson
is well aware of the irony of currently filming the hefty CGI
fantasy Knights Of The Roundtable: King Arthur,
also for Ritchie, back at Leavesden.
“There
is a place for massive stories told in VFX using a computer, but the
sadness is that we've lost a generation unable to make the leap to
shooting film,” he says. “I could teach twenty students how to
light for greenscreen in just half a day. When I shoot greenscreen my
arm is tied behind my back and I just glaze over since my input is
redundant. If I sound disillusioned, I'm afraid that's how I feel.”
