Cinema Today: A Conversation with Thirty-nine Filmmakers from around the World

1. Cinematography

Ideally, the cinematographer (aka director of photography, or DP) is the director’s greatest ally, but the relationship between director and DP varies. Some independent directors, such as Lance Hammer and Andrew Bujalski, welcome the DP’s input during pre-production and the shooting phase on virtually every decision relating to the film’s visuals and sometimes even on other matters. Some directors plan all the camera shots themselves, often in tandem with blocking the actors’ movements, so the DP’s responsibility is limited to lighting the sets or locations. At times, directors like Brillante Mendoza, Scott Hicks, and Sergei Dvortsevoy even take up the camera themselves. Unless the director writes the script, as do many of the filmmakers interviewed here, his or her vision of the film usually begins to take on life during pre-production, when the words of the script start to evolve into images that will eventually be cut together in the editing room. Camera angles, exterior and interior sets, lighting, and the actors’ movements (blocking) all work together to create the film’s mise-en-scène—the sum total of the film’s visual look and feel. Even if a director approaches the shoot improvisationally—deciding on the spur of the moment how close or far to place the camera from the subject and how the camera will move—he or she has already made many decisions during the film’s pre-production phase, often in collaboration with all the heads of the technical crew. The basic language of cinema has barely altered, but the means by which images and sounds are captured and edited together has been transformed radically in less than two decades. Many independent filmmakers 1 Cinematography 1 CINEMA TODAY 2 are using digital video cameras that store images on hard drives. Almost everyone edits digitally, even when their movies have been shot on film stock, because they believe the aesthetic considerations will affect a viewer’s sense of a film, even if the average filmgoer cannot detect the differences, at least consciously. So one key decision often made jointly by director and DP during preproduction regards format, that is, whether to shoot digitally or on film stock, as well as what type of camera(s) and lenses to use. Shooting on film requires purchasing stock, paying for its development, and risking the possibility of running out of film and breaking the mood during the take of a scene. Shooting digitally requires only sufficient memory storage to hold the captured images. The money saved by shooting a feature on digital video is usually in the low six-figure range—an insignificant amount for some film budgets, but not for many independent filmmakers, whose budgets may range from less than $100,000 to $15 million. However, attempting to approximate the nuanced textures and colors of film stock during post-production is expensive in itself. In any case, it is now common practice to edit digitally by transferring film footage to a digital intermediary (DI), where changes such as the color of a shirt can be accomplished with the click of an icon. The DI is then usually transferred back to film for the final exhibition print. Still, some contemporary filmmakers cling to the visceral, hands-on experience of cutting film on a Steenbeck editing table, and Andrew Bujalski boasts a scar on his hand to prove it. Ideally, the choice should be based on esthetic considerations, because a character delivering the same line in a particular shooting style, lighting scheme, or format will be perceived by viewers differently if shot and lit for a different format. Unfortunately, the cold hard truth is that esthetic discussions over format are often trumped by far more arduous discussions over budget. Once decisions about format are reached, the filmmaker’s choices become primarily issues of lighting and framing. Whatever is shown within the camera frame has a great deal to do with how the area is lit and viewed by adjusting the position and orientation of the camera and choosing a lens in relation to the subject. The camera frame is essentially a device to organize the elements of a film and isolate those elements from their context in order to create a film’s diegetic reality through composition, movement, and light. Every framing choice excludes a part of the world and CINEMATOGRAPHY 3 therefore must be committed, because the filmmaker is...