Seamus McGarvey, ASC, BSC, ISC, talks about his work on "Die My Love", by Lynne Ramsay

The film baths in a postmodern fairy tale atmosphere. We enter the story as if after the end of Cinderella, when the tale ends with "and they lived happily ever after with lots of children!"... How did Lynne Ramsay present this project to you?

Seamus McGarvey: It’s essentially a love story... Even though a lot of people at Cannes insisted on the postpartum thema, but Lynne’s original idea was really to make a comedy-drama about love, sex, desire, faith,trust and deceit in a couple. And Lynne is very good at this kind of thing, where you offer the viewer frames of the mind. We Need to Talk About Kevin was a kind of model about this. What interests her in each film, I think, is more what you find between the lines of dialogue, even between frames. She’s very good at capturing those silences, for example, which can say as much as words.
She’s also very good at the camera, having studied cinematography, and we speak the same language. The natural syntax she develops on set, with much less coverage and her talent for moving from one shot to the next is fascinating. It’s really amazing to see her weave her movie narrative, which is both simple and full of resonance.
One thing I can quote about this film, for instance, is the very intimate relationship she has with sound. I remember she often guided me through sound. In some scenes, she just describes the final mix she has in mind to help me with the framing. In the Meadow scenes, for example, I remember her talking about the sound of insects, about literally making the place come alive with the buzzing of all the crickets and bugs.. . That’s why I suggested keeping the camera almost on the ground, as close as possible to this soundscape she was describing to me. She’s definetly a very eloquent filmmaker, and it’s fascinating to work with her on every shot!

That first shot of Grace crawling through the grass with a knife in her hand is really something !
Not to mention all those almost gothic day for night scenes...

SMG: Oh yes, that shot of Jennifer crawling on all fours in the meadow, was shot with a Petzval lens. It’s one of the first shots of her alone, and the way the background falls into this kind of completely swirling blur, you almost feel like you’re in a centrifuge!
I love this effect, which focuses all the attention and interpretation of the shot on her face and her character... The kind of abstraction that invades the film was really linked to the theme of Grace’s isolation. I think this film is built on the idea of reality interruption. Just like the the Ektachrome choice for the film, with the magnificent distortion of reality it brings. Or the day for night scenes you mention. We really didn’t want to make a naturalistic film, rooted in reality. Of course, we wanted to retain elements of reality, but we wanted this loss of desire to be reflected in this distortion. And then it’s also a film with a fairly tight budget... Given the number of outdoor sequences we had planned to shoot at night, the day for night option was also going to save us a lot of time... I was very keen on working in these conditions. It’s not a technique I’ve used that much in in the past, but every time I did, it’s been a real success. It creates such a mysterious stylisation! It’s a bit like a night of the mind. And I love all those Westerns that led French critics in the 1960s to give this technique the magical name of "nuit américaine"! I think it’s a way of intimately associating the essence of cinema and cinematography, without that other Hollywood side of night-time, featuring all the light and condors we’re familiar with. And also, when you’re actually filming at night, you can never capture that kind of grandeur of the sky. The option of shooting digitally and relying on the extreme sensitivity of the sensor to try to bring them out can be chosen. But it’s never the same as when you shoot in broad daylight. I’m really amazed by the rendering of these clouds, they create a pattern in the image, such a psychic presence!

How did you do it?

SMG: Well, I got back my set of filters, which was very useful on "M. Son of the Century" (see our previous talk with Seamus). But this time, not to use a vignetting effect. I rather mainly used them to darken the skies directly during shooting, literally painting on the filter or the parts of the image I wanted to darken with black candle smoke.

I must admit that not everything was done during the shoot, and special effects also helped us a lot, especially when adding stars, or softening the sun in the frame to make it look like moon. In all of those scenes, we were really going for an artistic style reminiscent of Edward Steichen, a Luxembourg painter and photographer from the early 20^th century who worked extensively with cyanotypes. When you look at Steichen’s night photos, you’re struck by the structure of the blacks. There’s something in those images that you could almost compare to a painter’s touch, with very soft, uncertain blacks, as if painted with a brush.
For me, it perfectly captures the physical reality of night-time perception... You know when your eyes gradually switch from cones to rods, and your colour vision changes. On that note, we desaturated the nights quite a bit, leaving only certain dominant colours. This splendid work was done at Harbor in London by Adam Inglis, the colourist I had already worked with on Atonement. It was a great fun to shoot those scenes! And working during the day, made the schedule a lot easier, especially with the little child’s presence.

How did you shoot the other scenes?

SMG: Almost the entire film was shot on location in the Calgary area, with the exception of a hotel room in a studio and the car shots. It was such a pleasure to shoot in 35mm again. It’s really a question of engagement... A lot of things are decided on set. The intention is set on camera, live with the actors... Especially when you decide to put filters in front of the lens and paint part of the image on the go with smoke black... Then you know there’s really no way back, even if digital post-production can help you add that little extra something you’re missing live... Or subtly correct certain flaws. And it’s a bit the same thing for the days, shooting in Ektachrome. The result is extremely high contrast—about only 6 stops of latitude—which is quite prehistoric compared to the digital Alexa 35’s 17 stops . You commit to the image, and I think that’s an extremely powerful feeling for the crew and the cast.

Are those day for night scenes also shot on Ekta?

SMG: No..., as a lot of it was staged in the heart of a forest, I still needed a bit of more latitude and speed, I chose a combination of 5219 (500T) and 5213 (200T)... This allowed me to shoot even in really dark areas in these sequences. Also made the additional special effects work I mentioned earlier easier.

How did the shoot go?

SMG: It was definetly a small team work, with a very intimate feel. No storyboards or shot lists. We watched the rehearsals and created the images live, based on the space, the lighting architecture of the location and the actors’ movements. All the decisions made on camera that I mentioned earlier were made on the spot, based on all these things.
Of course, we stuck to the main guidelines, such as the 1.33 aspect ratio, which we deliberately chose for the portrait-like quality, the main essence of the film. It has an Irving Penn feel to it, if you know what I mean... that way of limiting the perspective. Well, I’ll admit that Lyne shared doubts with me at times, especially when on the beach scene, or in the meadow... but after seeing the film on the huge screen at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, we really conclude the 4:3 format was the right one. There’s a kind of confinement, a visual prison for Grace’s character that works wonderfully. The claustrophobia is real on screen.
And then a word about Jennifer Lawrence’s performance, an absolutely incredible actress. She’s a girl who can joke around with the crew and then, in a matter of minutes, literally transform into this kind of feral in front of the camera. It’s really amazing and an experience I wish every cinematographer could live.

Tell me about the car scenes, which are also quite stylised. Whether it’s the setting or the lighting, they’re a far cry from the usual car scenes!

SMG: We wanted to have total control over these scenes. And as you know, whether it’s cinematography or acting, shooting in a real car is always a nightmare. Of course, we have tools to vary the rigging systems, but the unexpected, the extreme heaviness of mechanics and slowness of the process usually affect the quality of the scene.
In addition, Lynne had the idea of having an extremely free camera inside the car, for example, one that could pan from the glove compartment to the actors. And there was also this sequence where the car hits the horse, for which there was no question of doing any stunts, as Jennifer Lawrence was expecting her baby during the shooting of those scenes. For all these reasons, we decided to go to a studio with a wall made of LEDs.
The slightly crazy gamble I took, refusing to mix film and digital photography in this film, was to shoot these sequences on a wall of LEDs in Ektachrome! To do this, only the plates were shot by a second team with a multi-camera digital car rig (RED). Then screened after colour grading onto the LED background in the studio. Although we took care to ensure a precise connection between the actors and the Leds back projection on the set, the video tap from the 35mm Panavision Millennium camera we were shooting with wasn’t accurate enough to do this. As with the night sequences, Adam Inglis in colour grading managed to refine this connection using masks. The final result has a slightly strange feel to it, that’s for sure, but it contributes to the distortion of reality I was mentioning before.

So, with the exception of those plates, everything was shot on film, was’nt it?

SMG: Well, I have to admit that despite my commitment to shoot everything on film, it turns out that during the editing process, some of those digital plates for LEDs were extracted from the daylies and edited into the final film!
It was a shock for me when I discovered this at the end of editing... There was such a huge different image structure with the rest of the film... A bit crazy thing indeed... We worked a lot with Adam Inglis to bring them back to the film look of the rest of the film, but I can tell you that it was really tough work. Looking back, I definitely should have insisted on sending a crew out for a day to shoot these kinds of simple road shots with one of our film cameras... but we didn’t have the time, and that’s how things turned out in the end. That’s life as a dop!

(Interview conducted by François Reumont for the AFC)

Die My Love
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Director of photography: Seamus McGarvey, ASC, BSC, ISC
Production Designer: Tim Grimes
Costume designer: Catherine George