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To begin with, guests are first invited to share their professional backgrounds. James Friend starts : "I’m a movie buff, I love it. I have one brother who is a doctor and another who is a lawyer, but I left school at 16 ! I started out as an electrician because I was terrible in the camera department ! I couldn’t focus or load a magazine. Then I became a cinematographer because I had more affinity for composing shots. I started out in television, shooting short series. I’m very proud of that, because it taught me to be inventive and work within budget constraints. And that creativity still serves me well today, on bigger-budget shoots."
“The great thing about Edward Berger is that he never starts preparation without his director of photography,” James Friend continues about the film. "So we went to explore the island of Macau together. It was memorable. A car picked us up at the airport, and we crossed the bridge to reach the island, one of the largest in the world. Then we arrived at this incredible place, which is seven times bigger than Las Vegas. It’s impressive during the day, but at night it takes on a whole new look. It’s something I’d never seen anywhere else, I was completely blown away."
“It’s the only place in China where gambling is allowed, so the hotels are full of Chinese tourists dreaming of making their fortune ! The casinos bring in so much money that even the entire budget for the film couldn’t compete ! So for each set, we were instructed to clear the premises if a player arrived. We therefore had to find alternative locations for each set during location scouting.” Harlon Haveland adds, “It was almost exclusively a night shoot, so the schedule was pre-light from 6 or 7 a.m. and shooting from 9 p.m. We had continuous communication via walkie-talkies, which warned us when someone was coming. We had to stop everything, let the person pass, and then resume !” The two partners recount their unlikely anecdotes from the shoot : the time when, for an early morning shoot, the electricians had to move a softlight on a Long John stand every time a car passed ; the scene where the character runs down a hallway, with the whole crew on his heels, but has to turn in front of rooms where guests are sleeping, so he has to turn in absolute silence, etc. “It was really a challenge, every day,” comments James Friend, "but shooting on location brought us a lot. Everything is already there, in the excessiveness of the place, the corridors, the halls, etc. We couldn’t compete with that. But it’s true that it deprived us of the comfort of the studio, which is a blank page on which we add layer by layer what we want to film. Here, the reality was already there, we had to embrace it. No matter where we pointed the camera, it looked crazy. We had lots of problems with the real set. For example, we realized that all the lights in the hotel were flickering ! But the second unit’s DIT shot three-minute references in each of the sets so that we could apply an anti-flickering effect. I don’t know how it works, but it works ! For the casino scenes, we reserved an area with about fifteen tables to shoot the wide shots, but since it was extremely expensive, we just shot plates for the close-ups. A friend told me that he had already shot in Macau, because it also had the world’s largest video wall ! And it happened to be in our hotel ! As it was designed for events, the pitch to pitch was huge, but it was also a very large space, so by standing very far away from the screen, the pitch to pitch decreased, and that’s where we shot the close-ups. These are the only shots that weren’t filmed on a real set."
The second part of the conference takes a more technical turn, discussing the capabilities of the Aputure lights used to illuminate the film. James Friend explains : “The main camera was an Alexa 35, which is very impressive. It’s a fantastic camera with great latitude and beautiful color science.” Aputure offers a light source called Infinimat, which is unique in that it is modular ; you can make it into a 4x4, 8x8, or 20x20 LED. And it’s an incredibly soft light source. I used it in situations where I would have previously used reflected lighting, and it saved a considerable amount of space, especially for close-ups. It was such a difficult shoot, but at least we had lights that made the process easier.” Harlon Haveland continues : “The problem with real sets is that they often come with a whole bunch of lights that you don’t want. For every light in the right place, there are 20 in the wrong place ! So our job was mostly to mask and replace. We replaced all the lights in the hotel. I think we emptied every hardware store on the island of Macau ! Obviously, there was no rental company in Macau. The nearest one was in Hong Kong, so if we needed to bring in additional equipment, there was a two-week delay. This was particularly problematic considering that the island is extremely humid and very hot. It made us realize how spoiled we were in London ! And now we can confirm that Infinimats are waterproof ! It was definitely the hardest shoot of my life, but I would do it again in a heartbeat. It was an exciting, very rewarding adventure with a great team.”
The conversation continues in the Q&A, where the audience is eager to explore the subject of light and color in greater depth. When asked about color temperature, the director of photography jokes : “I have a colorimeter, but I don’t know how to use it ! I leave it to Harlon and ask him to adjust the sources between them !” Harlon Haveland explains : “In the hotel hallway where we replaced the light bulbs, it was like a nightclub ! I tried to adjust as much as possible on set, but now these things can be done very easily in color grading.” “I didn’t want to completely destroy the natural madness of the set either”, continues James Friend. “I remember one scene where Collin walks into a hallway and there’s this crazy fluorescent orange lamp. Even to the naked eye, the color was shocking ! The whole challenge in color grading was to cut out the faces when they passed through the beam of this lamp to preserve the skin tones, while keeping the effect on the set. It was part of it ; it was for this kind of detail that we chose to shoot on a real set”. On the subject of color grading and LUTs, he adds : “A long time ago, I did a series, thinking I was going to do a different LUT for each episode. I ended up completely losing my way. Now I make sure I only have one LUT per project. The colorist suggests a few, the DIT tests them, and we validate one that will work on all sets, regardless of exposure or color temperature. I firmly believe that simplicity is always the best option, whether for lighting or for the camera. I have a lot of respect for those who do very complicated things, but I can’t do it myself ; it’s always with simplicity that I get the best results.”
Another question concerns the choice of equipment to bring along in this particular context. James Friend replies : “I like to go around all the sets before shooting with the director and discuss with him what the widest shot will be. The rest follows naturally. It depends a lot on the set. For this film, I had the set department buy a hundred red Chinese lanterns. That gave me a basis for composing the shots and creating the lighting. I go back and forth with the director and Harlon. It’s great to be able to collaborate together ; we always have more ideas together than we do alone. It’s not an exact science, but if you set off with a truck full of every light in the world, that’s not the right solution either.” Finally, the question of color choices arises. James Friend continues : “These are very instinctive choices. I look through the viewfinder and say to myself, ‘Let’s use blue, or let’s use red’. And the power of LED is that you can control everything on an iPad now, you can make these choices very quickly, and build a visual language that works with the story.”
(Report written by Margot Cavret for the AFC)
