British Cinematographer
The
peace and tranquility of a Egyptian river cruise onboard the S.S Karnak is shattered
after one of the passengers is found murdered. Renowned Belgian detective
Hercule Poirot is entrusted with identifying the killer before they strike
again in an exotic mystery steeped in lust, jealousy and betrayal.
https://britishcinematographer.co.uk/haris-zambarloukos-death-on-the-nile/
Director Kenneth Branagh assembles an
all-star cast of potential murderers for Death
on the Nile, a new feature adaptation of Agatha
Christie’s 1937 novel. Disney’s follow-up to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express sees
Branagh as the fabulously mustachioed and famously fastidious sleuth tasked
with solving the death of an American heiress onboard a honeymoon cruise in
Egypt. Like Orient Express,
it is written for the screen by Michael Green, production designed by Jim Clay
and photographed by Haris Zambarloukos BSC GSC.
One of the delights for an audience
in watching one of the Christie canon is playing detective themselves and
sorting the red herrings from the essential facts among an array of likely
suspects. Death on the Nile features
Gal Gadot as unfortunate heiress Linnett Ridgeway, with Annette Bening, Armie
Hammer, Letitia Wright, Sophie Okonedo, Ali Fazal and British comedy stars
Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French and Russell Brand.
With many cinemas closed, Disney
delayed Nile’s
release by a few months but has stuck by a pre-Christmas theatrical outing.
That’s fantastic news for a production shot at the highest fidelity large
format 65mm film and for which 32 70mm release prints have been struck.
Zambarloukos details the scene of the crime.
There is a coda at the end of Orient in
which Poirot hints at vacating in Egypt. At what point did you know this would
be the next Poirot project?
HZ: We knew that Michael Green had already been
commissioned to write it but we also had to shoot Artemis Fowl first. For
anyone that knows the books, Poirot’s reason for travelling to Egypt in the
first place was not to solve the case that becomes Death on the Nile.
He does go on vacation and then returns. In our film he says, ‘I’ve just got
back and now I have to return.’ So, it was a nice touch from Michael to lead
into Nile at
the end of Orient.
Production was delayed due to the
completion of Disney’s purchase of 20th Century
Fox, so we began in principal photography in September 2019 not 2018 as
planned. That was great because it meant I got a lot of time to prep. I had the
read book, but I did not go back to it because I just wanted to rely on our
interpretation and Michael’s fantastic script. I remember it being my favourite
Christie but I think Michael did a superb job.
In the interim, the whodunnit genre has
been satirised by Rian Johnson’s Knives Out with Daniel Craig
as a Poirot-esque sleuth complete with rogue accent. Did that play into your
approach?
HZ: I enjoyed Knives Out but it really
is a different interpretation to ours. I don’t know anyone who has researched
Agatha Christie’s writing as much as Ken – down to what she was thinking and
feeling while writing each book. This feeds into his interpretation of the
story.
Ken has been championing diversity in
casting for decades now (for example, casting Denzel Washington in 1993’s Much Ado About Nothing).
His philosophy is ‘this is how I want the world to be and it doesn’t
necessarily have to be the one inhabited by the characters defined in the
source material’. He did it on Orient (casting
Leslie Odom Jr. as Dr Arbuthnot) and he’s gone much further on Nile. Together with
Micheal’s script, he’s added a race issue which didn’t exist in the book and is
a much better story for it. We went away from a more English, tamer version of
the story to get under the skin of the human condition.
Similarly, the images could portray the world as if
from a LIFE magazine
issue from the 1930s of a cruise down the Nile but, given the darker outlook
for film, I wondered what it would looked like as a cruise down the
Mississippi. That was always my question to Ken - could we add any elements
that bring that aspect out? Certainly, the choice of a blues soundtrack played
into that.
Did you refer to previous film
adaptations or were you inspired by other artistic references?
HZ: The references are quite varied.
I always look at photojournalism from the period and in this instance Lee
Tanner’s The Jazz Image: Masters of Jazz
Photography and The First World War in Photographs by
Richard Holmes were both great references. Artwork by Edward Hopper provides
another tonal element. For example, his 1939 painting New York Movie depicts
a girl waiting in the wings of a theatre. She’s in the shadows and you can see
the red velvet curtain. In that picture there is nothing ominous or overtly
scary or sexual but it evokes all those things in a very clever and emotional
way without eliciting fear or showing her in a derogatory way, or as a victim.
All of this added to the way we photographed this film.
The first eight minutes are in French
and in black and white. That’s brave. Why that creative choice?
HZ: It’s a really daring thing to do in a big
studio film. It recounts Poirot’s past as a solider in the first world war, his
approach to remembering and analysing how he becomes who he is. The film then
moves to the ‘30s and a gritty, blues club in London where we feature the music
of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, an African-American blues artist and guitarist. She
is a very assertive woman, standing up and playing guitar. We meet a trio of
characters played by Armie Hammer, Gal Gadot and Emma Mackey in that second
part of the beginning of the film through dance and music. There is dialogue
but it’s really about body language in this dance sequence. We shot this with
very long Steadicams that intertwine the music, the choreography and their
relationship. We planned all of this to be a very visceral and immersive
introduction.
The
design of Orient was bright, classic, glossy. Was this a
template for this film or did you evolve the look?
HZ: It’s definitely evolved but we
had to stay within the same language. We wanted the highest fidelity
photography which is 65mm analogue film, so we managed to stay with that
process and certainly a classic approach to lighting and always an ode to all the
film noir that Ken and I grew up loving such as Dial M for Murder or
those large format human condition films like Giant (1956).
Both Ken and I love John Cassavetes.
For us, it was how do you capture that rawness of performance while making a
studio film? Those were the influences we played around with.
For Orient we’d watched a lot
of Anthony Mann films and those were a huge influence on this film. The Night of the Hunter shot
by Stanley Cortez ASC was a key text. It is a very Americana film that combined
daytimes shot on a real river with night-time work shot in a studio. It’s a
masterpiece in every way with some very iconic imagery but I think my idea of
turning the Nile into the Mississippi is more understandable as a concept when
you see that film.
Yourself and Branagh have shot film for
your previous five collaborations. Did you go with the same camera package
as Orient?
HZ: Yes. Two Panaflex 65mm
synch-sound cameras with a combination of System 65 lenses and Spheros. The
Spheros are slightly older, from the David Lean era of 65mm. The System 65s are
made for the format’s resurgence in the early nineties led by Ron
Howard’s Far and Away (1992)
and Ken’s Hamlet (1996).
Our film stock was a Kodak
combination of 500T 5219 and 250D stock which is super fine grain. Exteriors in
sunlight on 50 ASA 65mm look almost three dimensional. And 200T as well, even
though we were large format we wanted to go further and do large format and
fine grain film. I certainly chose lenses based on their clarity. I know many people
go for a vintage look and find something a little softer. I was going for the
most immersive type of analogue filmmaking I could.
The team at Panavision, led by Hugh Whittaker and
Charlie Toddman, were very supportive in making a 65mm film possible. They have
kept those cameras working over the decades and it’s a privilege to use them.
Likewise, Rob Garvey at Panalux was instrumental in helping us accomplish our
very complicated stage rig.
This was shot like Orient at
Longcross Studios with plates filmed on location in Egypt. Was it ever a
possibility to shoot entirely on location?
HZ: The issue is that 1934 Egypt
barely exists today. For example, in the 1960s they moved the Abu Simbel temple
300 metres away so that the Aswan Dam wouldn’t flood it. So, we built the
entire four-storey high Abu Simbel at Longcross, complete with banks of water.
The same with Giza and the Sphinx. In the 1930s the Nile went up to the feet of
the Sphinx. Now all you see is the concrete expanse of Cairo.
Secondly, it’s difficult to shoot
complex shoots on a river while floating, taking all the cast down there and
scheduling them, on top of ensuring everyone’s safety on such a high-profile
project.
Our whole design and research went
into creating a set. We wanted to build a life-size boat inside and out; not to
break it down into small sets but to shoot it as if we were on a boat. That’s a
huge undertaking. Jim Clay built an amazing set to scale for the Karnak. It was
so big we needed to build a temporary sound stage around it. We also wanted to
use some real daylight when we got great sunlight in Longcross and use a little
bit of water to basically film the boats carrying guests to the Karnak.
We recycled the railway from Orient and built the
boat on that so we could wheel it in from outdoors to indoors. We built a very
elaborate lighting rig that you could pull back and see the entire boat in one
shot. You could step onto the boat and walk through all the rooms which were
all lit for an analogue film f-stop. It was complicated and took most of our
planning but I personally don’t think you can tell the difference when we cut -
even from a shot filmed outside in real sunlight juxtaposed with one in
apparent sunlight on our sound stage. It’s seamless because we took such great
care and a detailed approach to our rig and construction.
You augmented the studio work with
plates photographed on location in Egypt. Tell us about that.
HZ: We filmed on the Nile from a boat
with a 14 8K Red camera array. We had a 360-degree bubble on top of the boat
and two three-camera arrays pointing forwards and backwards as we travelled up
and down. We specifically chose areas where modernity wasn’t present (or where
it was, we removed it in post) and we also shot plates from the point of view
of passengers onboard the Karnak.
VFX supervisor George Murphy edited the footage and
stitched the plates together into an essentially very, very advanced virtual
reality rig in which I could pan my camera. We did that before principal
photography, so we never had to guess a month or so later what to put there.
That’s a big help. Most shoots do their plate photography afterwards. It meant
I could pretty much place the camera on any deck of the Karnak for any scene and
know what the background would be.
As with Orient, did you
play back footage realtime on LED screens outside the boat set?
HZ: I’d love to have done it live but
on Orient we
were only dealing with one wagon’s windows at a time. It was still the biggest
LED set-up ever done to that point, but the Karnak set is 20 time bigger than
that. There aren’t enough LED screens available – plus it would have been
prohibitively expensive.
Instead, I went for a much larger
version of a technique I’d used on Mamma
Mia which was to hang back
projection screens all around the boat – 200m in circumference, 15m high. We
used Arri SkyPanels at a distance to create a sky or a part of the background.
It could also be converted into a blue screen when we needed to. It meant that
if I had a shot looking above the horizon line into the sky then it could be
done in camera.
How confident were you of retaining
colour and contrast from set to post?
HZ: I took stills on the recce and we
used those to the create colours with this back projection for our skies. I
take prints (not digital stills) so there is no misinterpretation. A still is a
piece of paper that you can see. Once something is emailed across and seen by
someone watching on another screen the information can get lost.
At the same time there were a lot
more checks and balances put in place. We had a projector at Longcross and I
watched dailies with (dailies colourist) Sam Spurgeon every lunchtime. With
Kodak and Digital Orchard we have a very quick process to convert analogue
filmmaking into digital by the next morning. Film is processed at night, they
scan at 4am and by mid-morning those digital images are transferred to our
dailies suite at Longcross. At lunch we’d watch it digitally projected, having
been processed, scanned and graded at 2K.
I check that first and give notes to Sam and those
get transferred onto our dailies which is what Ken, the editorial team, VFX and
studio team sees. That’s a major check. It’s me with someone in a room, rather
than me talking over the phone which is a big difference. I have a very good relationship
with Goldcrest and (DI colourist) Rob Pizzey who also sees things along the
way. I supervise the grade at the end. So, there’s no need for anyone to
interpret anything. It’s a collaboration in which we all look at the same
images.
Did you shoot black and white for the
opening scene or convert?
HZ: We shot colour for a couple of
reasons. Although Kodak could manufacture BW 65, there is no lab in the world
to processes it. Plus, there’s a certain skill to grading BW using colour
negative and the added benefits are that that you can place a grey tone to a
colour. For example, you could take red and decide it will look a very dark
grey or a light grey, so you get very detailed tones. Ultimately, I get much
more control in the DI this way. They were very monochromatic battlefield sets
and costumes so it was quite limited in this case. The Germans wore grey and
the Belgians wore dark blue and it’s a dark sooty gas-filled battlefield but
you could manipulate the blue in the sky a little bit more and certainly
manipulate the intensity of people’s eyes - especially if they had blue eyes
(which Branagh does).
Tell us about your operating team.
HZ: Absolutely. If there’s any merit
or artistry in cinematography it is 100 percent because of the crew. I have a
fantastic team, many have been collaborators for decades now. My A camera
operator is Luke Redgrave, B camera Andrei Austin, Steadicam is Stamos
Triantafyllos. I cannot describe how difficult it is to do the shots Stamos
does at those lengths carrying that weight. I don’t know anyone else who could
do it. It’s a combination of extreme artistry and extreme physical ability.
My fantastic key grip is Malcolm
Hughes. The work that Luke and Malcolm do on a crane is incredible. My great
gaffer was Dan Lowe and my A cam focus puller was Dean Thompson who has been my
first since Cinderella and
is an expert on 65mm.
How did you handle sound sync?
HZ: To do sound sync work on Orient we used sound
cameras that are twice as heavy as high-speed cameras, so I wanted to develop
soundproof housing (blimp) for our camera on Nile. I took the
problem to Stuart Heath at BGI Supplies at Longcross. They’ve made all sorts of
props for us before, from Cinderella’s carriage to the furniture on Nile. I told him that I
needed it really quickly. All my other attempts had failed. Stuart suggested
using a material that they soundproof the interior of helicopters with. He
brought a draper in who basically measured the camera as if making a dinner
suit for it and quickly made a couple of versions for us. It was very effective
and really opened up the Steadicam possibility for us. All from just wandering
onto a workshop on the lot and asking a friend if he had any ideas about how to
achieve something. In the old days that’s what everyone did – the answer was
somewhere on the lot.
In Orient you created
some stylish direct overheads of the train carriage. You’ve told us of the
Steadicam dance sequence in Nile. Were there other stylistic
flourishes?
HZ: Inside the sound stage we went
twice round the Karnak with the entire cast all choreographed for this one
great reveal of a murder. It was really hard work to do. I understand why it
was cut in the edit although they have kept a lot of other single long takes
and there are lots of places where you see the whole cast in a single shot.
However difficult you might think
setting up a long single is in terms of lighting and operating, it is equally,
if not more difficult, to block a scene with multiple actors, keep the audience
engaged and choreograph it in a way that is exciting and at the same time reveals
things gradually. There’s a lot of pressure on a lot of people in shots like
that. Everyone’s got to be on top of their game. Because we’re all so
interdependent, it’s a domino effect in that the further you go in the take,
the bigger the responsibility is for not getting it wrong whether that’s the
operator, focus puller, the actor saying the final line, the gaffer lighting a
corner at just the right time. We always get excited about those shots but also
very nervous.
Did you complete an HDR grade?
HZ: We did a HDR DI and one in Dolby Vision. I’m in
two minds whether I prefer the 70mm analogue print or the Dolby Vision DCP.
Film is inherently HDR but projectors now are interpreting the information that
exists in a film neg. They are only just getting to where they can interpret
the dynamic range of a digital camera, let alone of a film camera. There is
nothing more immersive or more HDR than a 65mm neg scanned at 8K down to a 4K
Dolby DCP. It has everything you’d want in a projection. We pushed the limits
in our DI with Rob and I’d do minute adjustments in Dolby Vision. The HDR
process is becoming very seamless.
Finally, after six films and 14 years
working with Ken Branagh, could you tell us what makes your relationship tick?
HZ: It is a fantastic friendship. To
begin with you must be able to maintain a professional friendship with any cast
and crew which is all about doing your very best and understanding where you
have common aesthetics and shared thoughts about humanity. Ask what kind of
world you want this to be, because that will come through in your filmmaking.
As you say, I’ve spent years working
in close proximity to Ken and we have a mutual affection and admiration for
each other otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it for so long. He is relentless in
pursuit of perfection and in his advancement of storytelling and is inspiring
to work with. It means you have to be as relentless in your area of craft.
I think we both like making the same kinds of
films. I’m a Greek Cypriot who grew up with Greek myth and tragedy. Ken’s love
of Shakespeare is legendary. You can easily see the lineage between Aeschylus
(the ancient Greek creator of tragedy) that goes all the way to Shakespeare.
Perhaps that appreciation for the human condition in its best and worst forms
is the tie that binds.
