Marine Atlan, cinematographer, and Pierre Mazoyer, colorist for
"The Girl in the Snow", by Louise Hémon

Currently in Italy shooting her next feature film as director, Marine Atlan answered our questions by telephone. The interview is rounded off by a testimonial from colorist Pierre Mazoyer, with whom Atlan has collaborated for several films (notably The Queens of Drama, in selection last year).

When did you start working with the director ?

Marine Atlan : I met Louise Hémon ten years ago. She contacted me after seeing my graduation film from the Fémis film school. We started working together on a very short dance film she was making for a contemporary art foundation. We went on to collaborate on several hybrid projects : documentary, theater (she also forms a directing duo with Emilie Rousset) and video art. For example, we’ve done a series called "Rituals", made up of short works in between documentary and fiction. We’ve been working on The Girl in the Snow for a long time now. I was able to accompany the writing process and read several drafts. We did some tests beforehand to see how we were going to film this Alpine territory, and shot a sequence as part of the Emergence program. It was the scene of the tale of The Shadow : during a wake, the grandmother tells the story in dialect, and the boy translates it into Aimée’s ear. It’s a complex sequence in terms of point of view and parallel narratives, as well as being a group sequence. It was an opportunity to try out new things, both technically and in terms of staging.

If we try to see a continuity between your early work together and this film, is there a search for a way to film the spoken word ?

MA : Yes, it’s true. It’s in Louise’s cinema that it exists, and particularly with this question of entangled narratives, I think. But yes, filming the spoken word and reproducing reality to shift it, I think, or at least make us feel it more.

Yes, feel it, because there’s an obvious sensual dimension, in the first degree even, right away in the film. The theme of the link between reason and sexuality is set out right from the start, but there’s a lot to unravel in the story’s underpinnings. As I understand it, she also drew on stories from her family, which are mentioned in the credits.

MA : Yes, from an area she knows too. It’s a place Louise has lived since she was a child, it’s a family story. So, she was able to tell me about this place. I was able to go to the Hautes Alpes with her well before the shoot. The idea was to film in an isolated setting and tell the story of its immensity, its vertigo, but also its hostility. We scouted out the location with Louise, the producer, and Anna Le Mouël, the production designer, to choose the hamlet where the whole film takes place. We had to find something that, at the same time, spoke of the high mountains and isolation, and also had a structure that was easy to understand in cinematic terms : the isolated house high up, the two houses below. When we found this location after visiting several hamlets, it seemed obvious to us, since we could see its topography in the shots. It was a visual synthesis of the teacher’s situation. The location was obviously also reminiscent of Western movies, with this sort of confrontation. But it’s an extremely difficult territory : there was no water or electricity, and it took 45 minutes to reach it by snow groomer.

Just getting equipment up there was a real challenge. This is where "mise-en-scène" and filming are also linked to constraints. And Louise really wanted a heavy camera, one that would anchor itself in the ground, in this snow, in this rock. She wasn’t at all interested in a light camera, in an almost documentary-like set-up. On the contrary, she said to herself : "I want to put a camera there". In fact, given the very hostile conditions, the cold and the lack of light, we needed to have solid tools with which to film. So, I started thinking about the camera and optics well over a year before the shoot. We decided on the Sony Venice and Panavision Vintage Super Speed lenses. As the territory is complicated, meaning that sometimes you have to dig through 40cm of snow with a shovel before you can set a tripod on it, this also leads to a purity of shots and movements, an economy of mise-en-scene that also goes hand in hand with her own way of telling a story. There’s something very direct and frank about Louise’s way of looking at things. And we had to look at these mountains that way. What’s more, we felt the location in our bodies too, in our difficulty to live in the cold and in exhaustion. We were also going through something similar to what the main character was going through.

Indeed, when you watch the film, you also have the impression of experiencing its making.

MA : Yes, it’s also about creating an almost claustrophobic feeling, both inside and out. How can a space as open and unobstructed, as immense as the mountains, be a constrained, blocked, distressing space ? This whole articulation is based on both the framing and the lighting. For example, we really wanted to show that light was precious and rare in those days. Candles were expensive, wood had to be cut by hand, and there were few windows. So, we played these interiors dark, really dark, to tell the story of how, in the mountains, in contrast to the blinding snow, interiors are bathed in darkness.

Did you choose the Venice so that you could film these two extremes ?

MA : Totally. I chose it for its dynamic range and its sensitivity in outdoor nights, one of the big challenges. I have no way of bringing in a lot of light. We have a small helium balloon with Manon Corone, the gaffer, but we cannot light large areas with it. We can’t install more because there’s too much wind, because we don’t have power, because we don’t have enough money, well, for lots of reasons. So, we’re taking a gamble that, today, seems a bit crazy. And at the same time, it was made possible by the whole team, meaning that it was also relying on a logical shooting schedule and the production’s will to take a risk. We decide to shoot the night scenes on the four nights of full or near-full moon, in natural light. We gamble on the fact that the weather will be fine, and if it’s ugly, we have solutions that don’t allow us to shoot... which are only emergency solutions. Louise, who comes from a documentary background and has an almost anthropological relationship with the land and the times, doesn’t want to feel the artificiality of spotlights at all. Her desire is for the film’s light to come from visible sources, natural phenomena and reality, and for the strangeness of the mise-en-scène to stem from there.

But if there’s one thing that’s artificial in cinema, it’s night, even today.

MA : It’s complicated. With these constraints, we deployed almost black and white nights, as opposed to bluish nights, and almost negative nights : when we’re outside with white ground and the actors in dark clothes, it’s a complete negative compared to the way we usually construct a night. In general, we tend to use dark backgrounds and light faces. And here, on the snow, it’s an inverted contrast. It’s extremely difficult, because as soon as you add a spotlight (we sometimes pushed a little light in), it bounces off the ground, so you really have to work hard to clear faces. As there were storm lamps and fire, shooting day for night was unthinkable anyway. It was really a kind of gymnastics that led us to this rather crazy gamble of shooting nights with a full moon, and it works, since it also allows us to have backgrounds on these nights, i.e. to see the mountains, where Louise’s staging unfolds. Natural day-for-night, in a way ! I’m thinking of the shot where Aimée goes off into the depth, railing against the villagers. These sequences don’t have a lot of coverage, and the shot takes place in the perspective. And then, I think working with natural light also excited us, especially at night.

You took advantage of the Venice’s double ISO.

MA : In daylight, contrasts are crazy. I was shooting at ISO 500, to try and keep the highlights in. Snow is really something, it changes all the relief. These are very deep landscapes, so we only had sunlight for 3h30 a day, and when you’re in the shade, it’s a whole other image. Slopes, for example, don’t give the same feeling when there’s sunshine as when there isn’t. I was glued to my Sunseeker all day long and, when possible, Violette Echazarreta, the first AD, and I chose the exact time of the sequence to be able to describe the altitude, the shade and the cold. There was this idea that in any case, the sun is hard to reach on this territory. It’s at the heart of the story.

Was filming a form of autarky, in such isolation ?

MA : At was definitely a physical and human experience. We were well prepared. Louise knows the mountains well and surrounded herself with people who know about snow and altitude. I’d already filmed a bit in the mountains on Carmen Jaquier’s Thunder, but there’s something constantly threatening, even more so in winter, since there’s the possibility of avalanches, dangerous places, and as soon as you get tired, there’s a risk of slipping.

There’s bound to be added inertia, linked to the dangerousness of the area. There were a few days when we were really, really cold. Our bodies take us back to a state of being, and that inevitably creates tension in what we’re filming. There was one moment, for example, when it was so cold that I had trouble operating because my finger, which I absolutely had to keep out of the glove, wasn’t responding the way I wanted it to !

Did you adapt your camera setup for operating ?

MA : I use a 7-inch screen to operate, to keep some distance from the camera body to make movements. Joséphine Drouin-Viallard, the first AC, had planned the deflector for the snow, and small heating blocks to warm up the camera if necessary. Joséphine did a pretty thorough preparation, and we had no problems with the camera. We shot four weeks in the heights for the exteriors, and then had four weeks indoors in the valley, which had us experience another form of claustrophobia, if I may say so, since it was either this sort of vaulted cellar, where the families live, or the stable-school where Aimée lives.

We worked with a lot of fire as our key light. We did some Fresnel work, but with the gaffer, we mostly made softboxes with candles and aluminum, so we didn’t need a lot of candles to light the scene, and we could have the vibration of the flame without needing an electrician on the dimmer all the time. These fill sources therefore matched the color temperature of the fires when they were in the frame and had to be rounded off or redirected a bit. For the many scenes with lots of characters, where the fire is supposed to be the only light source, we could hide these softboxes in off-camera areas. In the end, this was more practical than a Fresnel light bouncing off a board that was difficult to control, and which would have been too hard used directly. It also gave us a fairly smooth, wide range.

The film’s visual universe is stems from real locations and circumstances, and on strong constraints, but did you have any other pictorial references ?

MA : I had the Austrian photographer Heinrich Kühn, who photographed the 19th century, for the texture, the colors. And Louise had The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Ermanno Olmi’s film about a group of peasants. It was a reference for the light, the framing, the group and the texture. At the same time, we didn’t have any reference for darkness, which is the fruit of Louise’s radical approach to the historical narrative of these spaces. Of course, we could think of Italian painting, of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, but Louise didn’t want to go through that door, we shouldn’t make things beautiful. We share this taste and sensibility of cinema.

Let’s talk about darkness and matter. Did you have something that organic and swarming in mind from the start ?

MA : Yes, I think that comes from both of us, and from our taste for filmstock, obviously, and for a lively, textured image. We exposed the image this way, particularly because I was working at ISO 2,500 for the nights, so noise was intrinsic to the image. What I also liked about this camera in the tests we did a year earlier, was that these images of mountain with just the black shadows of the trees reminded me of the first daytime photographs, where the blacks are very charcoal-like, very thick. It was moving to see how technical progress made it possible to capture this image at night, echoing an image that was captured during the day at the time. We came back to these images through a different medium and under different lighting conditions. In fact, there was a bridge between the eras, I think, in the image it could give. It became our line of sight, our direction. Since the nights were going to be like this, days had to be aligned. At the same time, we also wanted to create a dazzling textured effect, i.e. that these exteriors, although very bright, should also be inhabited by living matter. To achieve this, we tended to underexpose the overall picture. The choice of lenses served the same purpose. We completed the spherical primes with an anamorphic Angénieux zoom.

While the 1.33 aspect ratio remains the same throughout.

MA : This Angénieux 25-250mm zoom lens and its material appealed to us like that, with the anamorphosis. We needed a zoom anyway, because Louise likes movement.

That long pull back ending in a tracking shot down the slope close to the end is terrifying and totally exhilarating, I must say.

MA : In this case, the shot was written as a long backward movement. The great thing is that when you find a good set, you find the shots that are written. There was an alignment between Louise’s writing and what was possible. And then there’s the zoom of guilt, because that’s the question that runs through the whole film : how guilty is this woman ? The movement, the zoom, also serves to create real tension in Louise. As there is very little movement, each camera move is almost breathtaking. Louise comes from a documentary background, but she also comes from theater. It’s also an alliance between fiction, tales and fantasy, which is very present in the film. It’s a film that goes in search of the fantastic potential of reality. The rationality Aimée clings to, based on reality, lasts for a while, but when it shakes a little, when it disintegrates, belief remains. That’s when we go looking for terrifying faces in the shadows of the trees, looking for the fantastic in a territory that is nonetheless of unrivalled real power. And that’s what really comes from her, from her gaze. But it was a fascinating thing for us to seek out, I think.

Getting back to the texture of the image, which filters did you use ?

MA : Mitchell and Glimmer, constantly. Mitchell for definition and Glimmer for diffusion.

Once you arrive in DI, you already have strong textures and levels of darkness.

MA : Denoising was possible and worked quite well. If we hadn’t wanted grain, we could have gotten rid of it. On the other hand, there wasn’t much more information, especially at the beginning of the film. On the whole, you see what you see. We don’t have anything left under our belts. It was a real discussion. Margaux Juvénal, the producer, was aware of this, and I think she wanted to support Louise’s artistic desire. It also comes from a trust in the spectators, and the evocative power of the night, in this place where you can see faces in the shadows. Louise is a very mature director who follows her desire to direct. She dares to be radical. Indeed, at a time when people can be afraid to do so. And she wasn’t afraid to do it. And I think that in terms of the film’s sensory experience, that’s very significant.

• Interview with Pierre Mazoyer, colorist on The Girl in the Snow, by telephone and in writing while she was co-directing the photography for Marine Atlan’s feature film in Italy.

Did you start working on image density and texture right from the first tests ?

Pierre Mazoyer : The question of the film’s density is raised by the narrative : it’s a film about light and shadow, about clairvoyance and mystery. Outside, it’s the great reflecting white. In the houses, we show that the interiors of the time had very small windows, and that people would stand near the openings to see something, or near the fireplace, by the light of a candle or an oil lamp. Interiors are thus worked/devoured by darkness.
During testing, I don’t think I immediately realized Louise and Marine’s desire to make something so dense. I understood it a little better when I received the first dailies, and when I got to final DI, I saw where they really wanted to work on the curve.
Dazzle was also part of the narrative : as we moved from the dark interior to the snowy exterior, we could decide when to dazzle the viewer and when not. We therefore positioned the highlights, especially the snow, differently according to the sequence, either by calming them to link the spaces and accompany the viewer’s iris, or on the contrary by leaving them as high as they were in real life, with the idea of giving the viewer a shock. This had been anticipated by Marine during testing, by filming the actors alongside large poly boards in the Panavision studio to try and achieve the same levels of highlights as the snow.
Another thing that happened early on in the preparation was that they wanted to film certain nights under a full moon, and I think that’s what decided for the Venice. Unexpectedly, it wasn’t the full moon nights that turned out to be the darkest in grading. I was really surprised, as there was a lot of information and faces were clearly visible. The contrast was quite different from daylight, but you could still feel certain volumes. So, I really wanted them to exist as they were in the color-grading, so that we could see them clearly, almost as a tribute to the technique that had made it possible to record them. But Louise said that we could see more than we could with the naked eye on location. She had a real desire for veracity, to show the viewer this extraordinary cosmic phenomenon : "days for night" but natural ! And for the whole beginning of the film, which is very dark, it was the same objective : that the spectators’ eyes work as if they were really in the scene, in the places, with the actors, that they search the shots.

These full moon nights are therefore almost in black and white.

PM : I was fascinated by the idea that the photons we were going to record had passed by the moon : they had started from the sun, ricocheted off the moon and then descended to earth, before bouncing off a skin and ending up on the camera’s sensor. I wondered what it would look like in terms of texture and color. I find that you can feel in the color grade when you’re dealing with a photon stemming from the sun, an HMI or a LED, but you don’t know the one from the moon. And indeed, it’s not very colorful, which is rather in keeping with the way we can see the night with a naked eye. There’s a scene where an actor runs outside under a full moon wearing a blue mask. Louise and Marine asked me to get some blue out of this mask and indeed, it was very light, but I was able to key it and raise it. The spectrum of these photons is initially that of the sun, but as they bounce off the moon it’s as if they’ve lost their superbness ! In any case, I’m very happy to have had the opportunity to grade images whose photons had travelled so far.

Did you make LUTs in prep ?

PM : Marine and I have been making LUTs together since her second feature film. But with every new camera, there are new problems. We’ve now mastered the RED and the Alexa, but for the Venice (as well as the Burano we’re currently shooting with), I had trouble making LUTs that worked in the camera’s small monitors as well as when I applied them on Resolve. Because we make LUTs that are quite distinctive ! So, the LUTs we made initially didn’t all work, and we made new ones along the way. I haven’t figured out why yet, but I will !
Luts in the edit are a serious topic. Directors often become attached to the images they work with over a period of months, and this is normal ; the colors of these images play a part in the way they are perceived and therefore influence the editing process. Hence the importance of pre-grading proxies as much as possible. But what’s interesting is that sometimes, when we show them what they had in the edit as we’re grading, they’re surprised. In fact, it was their brain that was making the live image they wanted to see.
This wasn’t really the case with Louise, who has a very precise eye and knew very well where she was starting from and where she wanted to go. On the whole, then, the image was shot dark by Marine on set. The color grading remained relatively close to what was in the edit. And often, what we saw was what we had. Sometimes, in fact, I’d work on a few pixels at the very toe of the curve, and they’d say to me, "Can we have her face back a bit ?" I’d frown, put a little spot of light on the face, and they’d be delighted. It really was a delicate, precise process.

The grain is that of the camera, it was in the rushes.

PM : Yes, totally. Marine chooses a camera mainly for its texture. If material is added, it’s to harmonize. She’s very sensitive to this (more so than I am) and it’s important to her that the texture is produced live, that it comes from the camera itself. On this film, it was quite organic. I remember having green noise that tinted the nights a little and took them a little towards cyan. But I don’t remember any particularly surprising noise. The feeling of noise is variable, it depends on a lot of factors, and sometimes there are things I see on the scopes that you can’t feel on the image. For example, that green in the low lights, you don’t see it so much in the film, even though I know it’s there. But it has a way of blending in with the rest of the image that just gives a feeling of night that works and is very beautiful.

Did you make a pass for the other masters ?

PM : For the other deliverables, the issue was not so much compression and grain, but contrast and density. In fact, the penultimate colour-grading version at the beginning of the film was even denser than the final print. We wanted to keep the radical density, but when we saw the film in other theaters, on other screens, it was clear that it wasn’t going to be seen in the same way, and that the transport of this color grading wasn’t going to be controllable.
Colour-grading took two weeks at TransPerfect Media. It was a fairly simple grade, compared with The Queens of Drama, for example, where we only had enough time to do everything. Here, we were extremely precise on everything, a real goldsmith’s job, but with simplicity. We obviously worked on skin tones, which are different for each film, but the subject was really contrast. When we started colour-grading, the film’s image was already there, and Louise and Marine were happy on the whole ; we worked a lot, but above all to make everything finer and more precise.

(Interview by Hélène de Roux for the AFC)