Balthazar Lab explains his choices for Ariane Labed’s "September Says"

July faces the cruelty of high school thanks to the protection of her older sister September. Their mother, Sheela, worries when September is expelled, and July takes advantage of the situation to assert her independence. After a mysterious event, the three sheltered in a country house, but everything has changed...

How did you approach the project ?

Balthazar Lab : The first thing we said was that we were going to shoot on film. This was negotiated at the outset of the project between Ariane Labed, the director, and her producers. And they kept their word !
Then there’s Ariane’s approach, which I know from having already shot a short film (Olla, selected at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes, in 2019) with her : always put the actors and actresses at the center, trust the sets and costumes, and take the most minimal approach possible to lighting. Yet September Says is a genre film, but that had to come from the substance itself, rather than the effects.

Film references are never a starting point for Ariane. We started with photographic references, mainly Justin Kurdland and Janka Piotrovska :.. Even if these references are quickly put aside, there remains a "full" side to the image, which comes from this photographic school : trying to favor a significant depth of field, favoring wide values, slow camera movements...
It puts the viewer in an active position, ideal for a film that’s shrouded in mystery.

Two formats ?

BL : The script revolves around a black hole, a mystery, which splits the film into two parts and turns the characters’ lives upside down. The question was how to "open the investigation" with the viewer, how to visually give him the idea of changing his view of the second part of the story. This is where the change of format comes in.
It’s a way of visually telling the viewer : "something has to change".
The mystery also profoundly changes the relationship between our three main characters. While the first part of the film shows a rather close-knit family, after the mysterious event, things are turned upside down and a distance is established between the characters. This worked well with the arrival of the widescreen format : suddenly space and distance appeared. It becomes a pleasure to put the two sisters on opposite sides of the frame, with this great void in the middle. The distance, even the confrontation between the characters, becomes perceptible in the image.

Shooting on film in 2024

BL : We had thought of shooting the entire film in 16mm, switching to anamorphic 16mm for the second half. Unfortunately, production was unable to reach an acceptable negotiation with the rental company.
We had the chance to test different options well in advance of shooting. That’s so important ! This work is sometimes neglected. It was also an opportunity to test the different scanners offered to us by Digital Orchard, Kodak London’s partner. The differences were really noticeable, and I think it’s a subject we should delve a little deeper into...
Cropping a 2.39 ratio in Super 16 wasn’t really a viable option for me, as it would have thickened the material in the second half, whereas I had the intuition that a form of clarity should make the viewer want to plunge into the image to investigate the film’s mystery.
The ideal option was therefore 35mm 2 perforations : lighten the material, keep the "transparent" aspect of spherical optics, while remaining within a certain budgetary realism... I thought for a long time that production wouldn’t go along with us on this, but apart from 16mm anamorphic I had no alternative proposal. They saw the tests, understood our vision and said yes !
That’s why 16mm and 35mm 2 perforations were the mediums of choice, as they offer great depth of field, the right amount of material, and acceptable shooting times per magazine... In the end, shooting on film, mixing 16 and 35mm, was a real joy. There’s always this feeling with film that the medium works for us, that it’s not up to us to work the medium to make it interesting.
This was especially true here, where the film material really went 100% in the chosen artistic direction.

Three formats ?

BL : Yes ! Later in the film comes the "revelation", a sequence in which the mystery is revealed. We had the intuition that this moment had to be very special ; to break away from the usual cinematographic temporality.
We came up with the idea of shots with long exposure times, but this created a real tension : treating the whole sequence like this meant taking a narrative risk. The complexity of the sequence and the film’s shooting time left no room for experimentation. I suggested we do both !
We set up a Rig-3D with, instead of two digital cameras, an Arricam LT on one side and a Canon EOS-3 on the other, so that we could shoot with the exposure time we wanted. Ariane, the director, had a remote shutter release and could shoot whenever she wanted from the combo.

In the end, the editing mixes EOS-3 stills and Arricam LT moving images. So we have three formats in the film : 16mm, 35mm 2 perforations and the 35mm 8 perforations of the still camera.

Lenses ?

BL : As mentioned earlier, the idea was to avoid too many effects, to be able to work finely with the sets and the distances to the actors and actresses, and to be able to work with very little light. I picked the Ultra 16 and Master Primes series, which also offered the most intermediate focal length options, which is important in 2-shot, where you quickly find yourself working with relatively short focal lengths, where many series have "holes". The 12mm Master Prime, a relatively rare focal length, was truly a lens of choice for wide shots.
Combined with Angénieux Optimo lenses, the 15-40mm and the 24-290mm for two "special" shots, we ended up with a truly coherent package, perfect for the film.

Lighting ?

BL : The idea was to set up a minimal set-up and rely on the quality of film. The way this medium absorbs and restores colors is always magical. The time this saves in color grading is really appreciable when compared with workflows where we spend a lot of time trying to give texture and identity to a digital medium.
It’s probably the smallest light pack I’ve ever made for a feature film. It’s easy to underestimate what 500T can do with Master Primes ! The fire sequence on the beach, for example, is done entirely with firelight... We had gas booms, but apart from that, not a spotlight ! The lighting team felt really weird about it ! I really like what it produces : naturalness and a focus on the characters. A thick blackness surrounds them, and I find the sensation and memories of similar moments. Only a flashlight cuts through the night, showing us the rocks and waves.
In the same way, there are some sequences with screens that we have filmed using only the light they produce. This is entirely possible with modern emulsions and optics. You just have to have confidence in the medium, and it makes things much simpler and smoother on set. Tim Fletcher, the gaffer, really supported me in this, and it was a great help to be able to completely reduce our lighting set-up over a large part of the film, so as to have more means for the most critical sequences. I have to say that the director’s support and encouragement to go in this direction was essential to the functioning of this set-up.

Grip ?

BL : We knew we didn’t want to do handheld on this film, and we wanted simple frames with clear, meaningful camera movements. I really like to combine a dolly with a stabilized head, which often makes it possible to do complex tracking shots or movements with great simplicity of set-up. It was relatively easy to set up with the 416 - my Ronin 2 does the job very well - but we had a much harder time finding a solution with the Arricam. The huge HD video assist prevented us from putting it on the SRH3, the option available in Ireland. The other options were either too bulky or too expensive. We settled on a Talon Head, which really saved us on certain sequences, notably in the microscopic bathroom of the main house.

(Interview conducted by Lucie Baudinaud for The AFC)