Jonathan Ricquebourg, AFC, "La Tour de glace", by Lucile Hadzihalilovic

The 1970s. From her village in the high mountains, 15-year-old Jeanne dreams of leaving her childhood orphanage and discovering the world. Running away to the city of lights, she finds refuge in a warehouse. In the morning, the dazzling Snow Queen appears to her. The warehouse turns out to be a studio where a film adaptation of the fairy tale is being shot. Cristina, the star who plays the Queen, reigns supreme on the set. Fascinated by this cruel woman with a troubled charm, at once powerful and vulnerable, Jeanne becomes her protégée and confidante as the trap closes in on her.

Do you like constraints?

Jonathan Ricquebourg: That’s always a question. I think that on paper we have too many tools at our disposal in cinema. There’s a huge amount choice, and few directors manage to really make use of all these technical parameters. For me, fixing some of these variables gives us a framework for artistic expression and frees up a certain amount of creativity. With Lucile, for example, it’s the way she shoots that sets a lot of things in motion. You can’t pan or crop. The camera is always locked on a frame, at 35mm, which is the only focal length used. And without spotlights, in other words, without any external source that’s not a prop light. Except that this new film was a little unusual in that the action takes place during a film shoot. So we allowed ourselves to use sources, since the film studio and the film environment within the film allowed us to show them. At the same time, I decided to maintain a certain logic, forbidding me to relight between shots, or to intervene in close-ups. In this way, Lucile’s working method was not called into question by this particular context. So I only used the sources that were installed on the catwalks, without ever placing anything on the ground. A way of simultaneously shooting two fundamentally different films, but in the same spirit.

Some of the film’s shots are reminiscent of Jacques Demy’s Peau d’Âne...

JR: That wasn’t a reference to the film, which I find far too kitschy, but when we were shooting, we found that Marion looked a little like Delphine Seyrig (the Lilac Fairy in Jacques Demy’s film). 
Lucile’s fairy-tale quality comes more from the cinema of the 1930s and 1950s. In particular, Max Reinhardt’s 1935 adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its incredible cinematography. That film, for example, gave us the idea for the Queen’s gown, and all those magnificent shimmers on the cobwebs were also a great inspiration. The other great examples we followed were the two legendary films by Powell and Pressburger (Black Narcissus and The Red Slippers), notably for their use of painted backdrops, which we decided to do ourselves. Then Lucile introduced me to Mishima, Paul Schrader’s biopic of the Japanese writer, in which reality and re-enactment blend. The film features a number of scenes deliberately shot in the studio and shown as such. An extremely bold visual gamble.

A tribute to cinema?

JR: We really didn’t want to fall into an overdone homage or an emulation. We’re not in the same era anymore, these films have already been made... The original idea was to open up the visual imagination. Admittedly, I sometimes allowed myself to use Fresnels, or large tungsten lamps that were very gentle on the face. But on the other hand, we completely abandoned the use of well-adjusted backlighting... It just looked too applied, too academic. It was a way of saying to viewers, "Look, it’s just like the old days! Probably also the best way to jolt them out of the film... We opted for a more uncertain balance, with an era that’s hard to pin down...

Did you treat the real-life part of the film differently from the film part?

JR: To create a break between these two dimensions of the story - and keep a marker of the 1970s in the visuals- I decided to use anamorphic for everything related to the film within the film. The lighting was thought out differently, and we filtered in a different way too. Everything else was filmed spherically, still framed in 2.39, but with a 35mm Summilux. Of course, we kept the single focal length constraint with the Scope, and equipped the Alexa Mini with a 75mm Ultra Scope for these scenes.

So how did you light the daytime exterior scenes in the studio?

JR: For everything that was shot in the studio, I looked for the most naturalistic lighting possible. This meant bringing the real into the studio context, and at the same time bringing the artificial into the real when we shot on location. Lucile likes very complex stories, and she works this complexity even more into the editing - as with characters who are going to resemble each other, or connections that will break the linearity. So I think it’s very important, as a counterpoint, to give the image a kind of simplicity and realism. So I opted for an installation with 180 Astera tubes in the ceiling, which enabled me to recreate a fairly realistic daylight. It’s a style of outdoor daytime lighting that came to me while watching Juraj Herz’s Beauty and the Beast. The tube-covered ceiling creates an extremely soft atmosphere, very similar to that of a sky without direct sunlight, as Lucile is so fond of.

What about doubt? Is that important to you? When you embark on an installation like this, for example...

JR: Doubt is very important on a set. In other words, someone in the team who’s in doubt will come to you with their question, and this will often help you to make choices on your own, to find the right way forward. The interesting thing about doubt is what it provokes. For example, when the director says “no” to an idea or suggestion, it’s not that refusal that you have to take in, but rather think about all the things it can provoke afterwards. Sometimes you make a mistake, but because there’s real trust there, this process moves the film forward. I remember, for example, a night scene at the very beginning of the film where our protagonist is looking at a pearl necklace right in front of an open window... As usual, Lucille describes the shot to me as being in an indeterminate half-light, a little as if it were actually shot at night, without the addition of a source. And then, after the set-up, she comes up to me and finally mentions a moonbeam... At this point, the crew laughed, as I had of course told them that we’d be shooting without spotlights. We had to find a stand high enough to perch a Fresnel, and, for the duration of a shot, override the main guideline she had given us at the outset. This just goes to show that constraints are well and truly made to be circumvented.

Is there a sequence you’re particularly proud of?

JR: The whole beginning of the film takes place in the snow, in the mountains. And Lucille is very demanding when it comes to rendering exteriors. We always have to maintain a gray, sunless, half-tone atmosphere. It’s a continuity she’s very careful about, and one that’s all the more complicated for me to manage because I don’t have any projectors...

For these scenes shot in the Hautes-Alpes, I had to do a great deal of preparation with the assistant director to indicate precise time slots on each set, so as to avoid the sun every time; and to take advantage of the slopes that went into the shade.

One scene in particular, the night scene on the edge of the precipice, was particularly complex to shoot. Entirely storyboarded, it called on several locations to recreate one, between the Col du Lautaret and the Gap region. The studio was also employed on this scene, with the glacier recreated in VFX by Mac Guff. I really had to think about how to see the mountain while giving the impression of night, but without the usual day-for-night tricks. At one point during prep work, I remember being interested in the night scenes in Nope (cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema), where infrared cameras were used...

And then I ended up choosing the twilight option, which had the merit of still providing enough light, without having to relight or push too hard on the camera sensor. Shooting on location, as we did in the studio, and treating these alpine views a bit like painted backgrounds. A configuration that lent itself all the more to this since backgrounds in the Alps can quickly become very flat and 2D. 
A sort of Michael Powell setup, but contemporary!

(Interview by François Reumont, for the AFC, translated from French by A. Baron-Raiffe for the AFC)