AFC’s Conversations

Jean-Marie Dreujou, AFC, has been a faithful partner to Jean-Jacques Annaud since they worked together on Two Brothers. He is responsible for the cinematography of eight films by Patrice Leconte (including Girl on the Bridge, which was nominated for the César Award for best Cinematography in 2000). Today, writer, director and poet Alejandro Jodorowski has entrusted him with the camera on his latest movie, The Dance of Reality, an autobiographical film he directed on the eve of his eighty-third spring.

Since The Beat that my Heart Skipped, for which he was awarded the César Award for Best Cinematography in 2006, Stéphane Fontaine has worked on Jacques Audiard’s films and received a second César Award for A Prophet. He has once again joined forces with Arnaud Desplechin, ten years after working together on In the Company of Men, for a film shot in the USA entitled Jimmy P., which was nominated in the Official Selection at Cannes 2013.

Tom Erisman, NSC, is a Dutch cinematographer who received his cinema training during his work as a gaffer between 1976 and 1987. After his shift to filming, he was behind the photography on a number of television series and films in the Netherlands. Amongst the directors with whom he has worked is Alex Van Warmerdam, with whom he worked in the past on The Northerners in 1992 (2^nd unit) and more recently on The Last Days of Emma Blank in 2009. Borgman is his latest film. (FR).

The three-time Oscar nominee (Amélie Poulain,A Very Long Engagement and the sixth Harry Potter movie), Bruno Delbonnel, AFC, ASC, recently filmed Dark Shadows, by Tim Burton and Faust by Alexander Skouras. Joel et Ethan Coen called on him to visually recreate 1960’s New York for the set of Inside Llewyn Davis

Howard Preston is the founder of the company that bears his name and that manufacturers the world’s most widely used professional focus and lens control systems. Another high-profile manufacturer for the cinema industry, Jacques Delacoux, CEO of Transvideo, took advantage of Howard Preston’s attendance at the 13^th Micro Salon to have an animated discussion with him.

An encounter with Jacques Delacoux, one of the AFC’s associate members who has remained as genuine and likeable as the first day his company, Transvideo, became an associate member of our association. An indefatigable globetrotter, he attends international trade fairs, workshops, festivals, and master classes all over the world. He opened the doors of his company in Verneuil-sur-Avre to us, in order to tell us about the company’s beginnings, the equipment it manufactures, his perspective on his profession, his encounters, his choices, and to sum it up, just what cinema means to him.

For a Sundance audience, experiencing something magical and wondrous that seems almost impossible to realize (especially when it was made with so little money) is normal, but for Cannes, a director presenting their debut feature film that is also his cinematographers first feature film winning the Caméra d’or is indeed astounding. Such is the case for Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, photographed by Ben Richardson.

Thierry Arbogast, AFC is best known for his more than twenty-year-long collaboration with director and producer Luc Besson that began with La Femme Nikita in 1990. But he was also the director of cinematography of The Horseman on the Roof by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, The Crimson Rivers by Mathieu Kassovitz, and Ridicule by Patrice Leconte. In The Patience Stone, he accompanied writer Atiq Rahimi in the screen adaptation of his novel, which was awarded the Goncourt Prize in 2008.

Director of photography Rauno Ronkainen, President of the FSC (Finnish Society of Cinematographers), visited Paris to attend the retrospective organized in his honour at the Finnish Institute. During his visit, Michel Abramowicz, AFC, and François Reumont were able to ask him some questions about his profession and what it is like to work as a cinematographer in Finland.

Charlotte Bruus Christensen is a Danish cinematographer who completed her studies in England. Upon returning to her native country, she began to work on a number of short films, one of which got her recognized by Thomas Vinterberg who hired her to do his film Submarino in 2009.
Since then, she has signed her name on two other films, Hunky Dory by Welsh director Marc Evans, and Min bedste fende by Danish director Oliver Ussing. Then, Thomas Vinterberg provided her the opportunity to earn her first selection at Cannes with The Hunt.

Because of the importance to us as cinematographers of the opening of a new place where cinema is made, without further ado, on the eve of The Studios de Paris’ inauguration in September, we went to meet with Didier Diaz, who is their current director. After giving us a tour of the Cité du Cinéma and the studios themselves, Didier sat down to converse with us.

Caroline Champetier, AFC, has worked alongside Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Lanzmann, Benoît Jacquot, Jacques Doillon, Amos Gitai, Arnaud Desplechin and Xavier Beauvois, to name a few. It was thanks to the success of Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux) that she won the César award for Best Cinematography in 2001. Her work has been frequently selected for competition in the Cannes Film Festival (The Sentinel, Don’t Forget You’re Going to Die, The School of Flesh, H Story, Tokyo, Of Gods and Men), she is back this year with Holy Motors, the first new feature-length film by Léos Carax in eleven years. This film reprises ten characters, including the character invented during their 2008 collaboration on the Merde segment from the skit-based film Tokyo, also directed by Michel Gondry and Bong Joon Ho).

I went to meet Julie in New York a month and a half after finishing shooting Skylab with her. We shot one film right after the other and wanted to keep the same HD filming and data archival procedures.

Since his beginnings as a director of photography in the early 1990’s alongside Jean-Pierre Jeunet and FJ Hossang, Darius Khondji, AFC, ASC, has developed an international reputation through his work on films by some of the greatest directors on both sides of the Atlantic. His impressive filmography includes David Fincher’s Seven, Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights, or Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen. Today, he is competing in the 65^th Cannes Film Festival with his film Love, directed by Michael Haneke.
This is his second film with this great director, following Funny Games in 2007.

Jean François Hensgens SBC, who joined the AFC in 2010, began his career as First AC on the Dardenne’s brothers movies La Promesse, Rosetta and Le Fils. He was then assisting Alain Marcoen SBC, long time cinematographer of the famous directors.
He photographed his first movie in 2004: Fratricide a film by Yelmas Arslan and then started his collaboration with Olivier Van Hoofstad on the 2 movies: Dikkenek and Go Fast.
Later he shot Banlieue 13-Ultimatum by Patrick Alessandrin, Tête de Turc by Pascal Elbé, Cat Run and Darktide by John Stockwell.
Joachim Lafosse’s last script is based on a real tragic story: a mother of five, killed her children by cutting their throat. This horrible story shocked whole Belgium five years ago.
For this drama, Emilie Dequenne ( Rosetta in the Dardenne’s film) and the partners from Le Prophète , Jacques Audiard’s actors , Niels Arestrup and Tahar Rahim joined the casting.

After working on Wilde Salome directed by Al Pacino, which was screened at the last Venice Film Festival, Benoît Delhomme, AFC, continues his career in the USA by filming Lawless. Following The Proposition in 2005, this is his second collaboration with Australian director John Hillcoat and his fellow countryman Nick Cave, singer and screenwriter.
This film has one of the most prestigious casts of any presented at the 65^th Cannes Film Festival (Guy Pearce, Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska et Gary Oldman). (F. R.)

Yves Cape studied at the INSAS film school in Brussels. After having started out as an assistant he made his debut as DoP on short films in the 90’s. His encounter with Alain Berliner on the short film Rose (1993) led to the signing for the photography of the successful feature Ma vie en rose.
Since then his filmography has included films in France (Persécution by Patrice Chéreau, White material by Claire Denis) and abroad (Le Gardien des buffles in Vietnam, L’amore inperfetto in Italy or In Gods Hands in the US). A close collaborator of director Bruno Dumont he is at his side for the fourth time at this years Cannes Film Festival with the film Hors Satan.

Alain Marcoen, SBC, studied at the IAD Brussels, but not being very attracted to the pressures a camera assistant has to face, he preferred to start out as a lighting technician. Getting some work on documentaries and drama, he met Jean-Claude Riga for whom he started to operate.
Being from Liège, he quickly got accustomed to shooting films that deal with the social problems of large steel city. In collaboration with operator Benoît Dervaux, another long time crew member of the Dardenne brothers, they signed for the photography of all their films since La Promesse.