Man to Man

Paru le La Lettre AFC n°143 Autres formats

[English] [français]

I don’t have the skill of a press publicist for summarizing a film, so here are just a few words about the story.

I don’t have the skill of a press publicist for summarizing a film, so here are just a few words about the story.
During the Victorian era, Scottish scientists send one of their own (Joseph Fiennes) to capture and bring back Pygmies so as to study them and present them as the “missing link”. An adventurous woman (Kristin Scott Thomas) assists this mission. At a time when every European capital “exhibited” their own “savages” to justify their colonial politics, the story of the film finds its juice in the different reactions of the characters to the Pygmies, the latter being themselves “anthropologists” of English culture. Carried by Régis’ camera, as mobile and moving as ever, the film takes us on a romanesque yet serious adventure.

Man to Man is in fact the first film I have lit intended for international audiences. My confrontation with South African and English cultures and methods involved dialogues in English and, especially, making images with foreign collaborators. When one agrees to be an itinerant director of photography, you can’t carry a lot of baggage, and you must remain receptive to other ways of working ; it’s obviously in the creative interest of the film. Though I had the continuity of my operator and camera assistant for the entire film, I had to change gaffers and key grips in the middle of filming when we left Africa for England and Scotland. But in this financial choice by the production, our English executive producer having lost his “deal” with thefavored gaffer, I was able to obtain my French gaffer, Pascal Pajaud, and a lucky thing too, as the first English location was 4 old sailing rigs in a harbor at night...

At the beginning of the shoot, I looked at Régis (who speaks perfect English !) as he dealt with very precise questions from the English cast and, right afterwards, as he tried to direct Lomama (a Pygmy actor from the Congo) by means of gestures, a few words learned in his native tongue and a lot of patience ; I told myself that his wish was to have the same quality of communication with all the actors, English and Pygmy.
I tried to be a good student, and if, at the end of the film, my English still made others smile, I had the sentiment of having gone towards my crew as much as they had come towards me. I hope to have given them the desire to share my work ; you don’t shoot for five months all by yourself...

Régis wanted an image in the same style as that of Est-Ouest, our first collaboration. For the record, we had used an ENR process (almost bleach bypass) on the release prints. This solution yielded excellent results as long as the prints were actually developed using this special process. The French audience saw the film in good conditions, but abroad, except for certain countries that had Éclair copies delivered to, foreign audiences saw a completely gray film.
At a time when we are all trying to redefine what the work and responsibility of the director of photography is on a film, we owe it to ourselves to add a chapter on the preservation of the image as it meanders through mercantile distribution networks, in France and abroad. To counter this, I proposed to post the film in DI before delivering an “industrial strength” negative to distributors to be printed in the standard way. I only succeeded partially... To really obtain all the subtleties of nuance of this film we have to use Vision Premiere print stock... which is more expensive ! The foreign distribution of Man to Man will have to be closely monitored.

To shoot a film in two countries as different from each other as South Africa and Scotland is an interesting challenge, even if they have unpredictable weather in common. I was confronted with a shooting schedule and budgetary decisions and I had to shoot Scottish scenes in Africa, which is not a big problem for interiors, but becomes problematic in exteriors when actors leave frame in Africa and enter frame in England...
To shoot in Scotland under the rough Southern light, I often used Kodak 5246 with pull processing. For all these predictable reasons, I took the decision to finish the image digitally. We shot 3 Perf to try and save a little money for the DI that wasn’t in the initial budget... While this option sometimes weighed heavy on certain sequences (interiors with smoke for example), it was a pleasure for matching weather in exteriors and for an entire sequence shot day for night...

This was the hardest sequence to approach. Already, in the script, the sequence begins at night and ends at dawn on a landscape of cliffs and the sea with a mixture of interiors and exteriors. I had already done, for Est-Ouest, a “modern” day for night sequence graded digitally, but it was shot outside the shooting schedule right before sunrise or right after sunset... But here, with all the trucks and trailers and this big crew, it was impossible to impose this kind of rhythm... And I also hate to give directors image ultimatums... I prayed for the weather to offer a dense gray sky for 7 days... and let’s say it could have turned out a lot worse... When you take these kinds of risks, you better be lucky ! I had used up all my wild cards in South Africa by not shooting for 2 days in the deepest forest with inclement weather, so it had to work in Scotland !!!
I was very scared the first morning on the cliff, under a radiant sun, as we put up the crane, which cast a magnificent shadow looming over the entire set ! ... Then the clouds came ! A big crew, lots of extras, horses, a crane, etc. All of which means no scheduling flexibility and no back-up location, especially when the director of photography asks for very bad weather ! In the end, with Isabelle Julien on the Lustre, we succeeded in getting a day for night which evolved towards dawn.

Another difficulty in shooting were the night locations in Scottish castles, all historic monuments of course, so no flames, and no possible approach. I worked with big « Christmas light » nets and incandescent tubes, and I worried about the result even if it did make for pretty set photographs !

As I write this, I realize that this is my first period piece (RRRrrr ! by Alain Chabat doesn’t belong in this category) and I hope I have made you want to see it. I await your criticisms impatiently ! And thanks to all those, near or far, who helped me in this adventure.

Shot in South Africa (Durban region) and in Scotland.

(Translated from French by Benjamin Bergery)

Équipe

Director : Régis Wargnier
Production : Vertigo
Production Designer : Maria Djurkovic
1st AD : Nick Heckstall-Smith
Operator and Steadicam : Stuart Howell

Technique

Negative stocks : Kodak 5245, 5246, 5229
Cameras : Arricam Studio and Arricam Light (Arrimedia London)
Lenses : Cooke S4 and Angénieux Optimo zoom
Laboratories : Video Lab (South Africa), Technicolor (UK), Éclair (France)
DI : Éclair (Isabelle Julien)