Jeanne Lapoirie, AFC, talks about her work on "Enzo", a film by Laurent Cantet, directed by Robin Campillo

Enzo, 16, is an apprentice mason in La Ciotat. Pressured by his father, who wanted him to pursue higher education, the young man seeks to escape the comfortable but stifling environment of the family villa. It is on the construction sites, through his contact with Vlad, a Ukrainian colleague, that Enzo will glimpse a new horizon.

The film’s production seems relatively light, but the setting of Enzo’s parents’ house, with its large bay windows, seems to have required more resources to balance the interior lighting with the exterior bathed in southern sunlight. Can you tell us about that ?

Jeanne Lapoirie : The preparation for the film was cut short and there wasn’t much money, to the point that Robin considered shooting with only one camera, something he hadn’t done since Eastern Boys. In the end, we managed to get two cameras by swapping the Arri Alexa 35s for Arri Alexa Mini and asking my gaffer, Nicolas Dixmier, to frame the second camera. It was quite manageable during the outdoor scenes, but in the parents’ house it was more tense.

It was indeed the most demanding set, a large house on several floors with large bay windows overlooking the pool and the sea in the distance. It was out of the question to have only silhouettes inside when we were shooting so as to see the outside. We used one or two large light sources (9 kW) and luckily there were windows all over the house, not just on the side with the view, so it was relatively easy to compensate. For this set, we had extra help from the electrical team. We also carefully managed the schedule sequence by sequence, knowing that we would be in the sun in the morning and in the shade in the afternoon, and since we stayed on this set for several days, we had some leeway.
There were still some complex sequences, including a long dinner scene between dusk and dawn (shot throughout the day) with Enzo, his brother, and their parents. We had to cheat by starting to shoot during the day and cutting everything we could cut as daylight entries to maintain overall consistency. This scene required a lot of work in post-production.

There’s a series of sequences in the film that I found very powerful : at night, Enzo has just been thrown out of a nightclub. He leaves alone on his scooter, stops in the middle of nowhere and falls asleep on top of the cliffs overlooking the sea. He then returns to his parents’ house at dawn.

JL : In Enzo, for the night exterior sequence, the cliff setting was chosen in a nature park, a protected area where we weren’t allowed to use any spotlights. In any case, Robin doesn’t like very bright nights, so it worked out well. We considered shooting these shots at night, but the sky and the sea were so important to the frame that we ultimately decided against it. I used a Sony Venice camera set to ISO 2,500 and we shot using only the light of the moon, choosing a night as close to the full moon as possible and crossing our fingers that it wouldn’t be cloudy. Using the Helios app, I saw that we would almost never get the moon’s reflection in the water at the right angle, so there’s a shot in the sequence, looking down on Enzo’s face, with the sea below, where the sea was superimposed because the moonlight wasn’t at the right angle and you couldn’t see the white foam of the waves. Robin’s reference for this shot, which he sent me several months after filming, is a shot of Ava Gardner in Albert Lewin’s Pandora.
I liked the raw look of Venice under the moon, rather brown, not blue at all, quite unusual for a night scene. In the widest shot, we really didn’t have much, a little extra light would have been welcome. We boosted the colors quite a bit in the color grading, Robin wanted colors to pop out of the black, like green in the grass, and that created an incredible warm halo around the moon that was absolutely invisible to the eye during filming and almost surreal. We hesitated for a long time about keeping it, for fear that people would think the sun was rising, but it contributed both to the strange atmosphere and to a completely atypical rendering that was very interesting for the scene.
When Enzo returns to his parents’ house at dawn, it was a complicated scene. It’s a temporality that was already apparent in 120 Battements par minute, when the main character dies at night, everyone arrives at his apartment, and it ends in the early morning. But Robin didn’t want to shoot his scene backwards, starting in the evening, so we shot in the order of the film, starting at night and ending at dawn. He wanted to do the same thing on Enzo. But the room has four glass walls, which at night are like four mirrored walls, and we had two cameras, so it was a real headache to position a screen or a projector, and we had reflections everywhere. We had to block out the daylight, but not just with blackout curtains, because it was dawn and we needed to keep the reflections that signaled dawn... We started with a fake dawn on the father, and on Enzo we took advantage of the real dawn in the background with the pink sky.

In terms of colors, in the film, the highlights are warm and the shadows are cold. Is that something you formalize during color grading or as early as the LUT stage of shooting ?

JL : On my first feature film, André Téchiné’s Les Roseaux sauvages, I shot in Super 16, pushing the film because Téchiné wanted a lot of contrast, and I really liked what it did to the colors : the greens turned yellow, the blue was very blue, each color drifted slightly, it almost looked like Kodachrome. When digital came along, I tried to reproduce that, with cold shadows and fairly warm highlights to get closer to the look of film. For Eastern Boys and 120 Beats per Minute, Robin wanted colder images, for The Red Island, on the contrary, he wanted a warmer image, and for Enzo, he wanted us to feel the southern sun on the faces but with color contrasts, areas that could be cold and blue. I always start from the same LUT base, modifying it a little before each film.
In the second project, there’s an image that I love. Enzo walks under an olive tree in front of the house, with the sun behind the camera, so the façade is very white and dazzling, while the olive tree and Enzo are in the shade and completely silhouetted. It’s quite an extreme image, and for this film I wanted to maximize the you feel the very strong presence of the La Ciotat sun, that you feel it physically, so that the parts in the sun remain very, very bright. It’s something I’ve done a lot, and it works particularly well in this film.

I saw that there was rotoscoping in the end credits. When did you need to use this technique ?

JL : It’s for the sequence where Enzo falls off the scaffolding. We did several takes, one with the stuntman and several with Enzo, for the start of the fall and his impact on the ground, so that in the end, in the film, it would be, as Robin had imagined, a single shot.

I’d also like to talk about long-term support. You’ve shot all of Robin Campillo’s films. How does your collaboration unfold over the course of the films ?

JL : Until 120 Beats per Minute, we shot with two shoulder-mounted cameras, but for The Red Island, he wanted less shoulder work, so we used sliders, and for Enzo, he wanted it to be fixed. It’s interesting to see these developments. Before, all his films were shot in 2.35 aspect ratio, but for L’Île rouge we wanted to change and shot in 1.37, and Enzo is in 1.66. Robin is an editor, but the image is very important to him, the editing but also the framing. He’s the only director I know who dreams up his shots in advance, he literally visualizes them, so he’s very precise about the costumes, the sets, and the framing.
For example, there’s a discussion sequence between Enzo and Vlad, where Robin had imagined shadows cast on the wall even though there were no trees. So we set up large branches on stands that we moved regularly depending on the sun. I told him it was Joseph von Sternberg-style lighting, as he used a lot of lighting effects in his films, a reference he fully embraces...

(Interview by Pascale Marin, AFC)