The Far Side of the Moon

How did you come to discover this project ?

Jonathan Ricquebourg : When Maud Alpi contacted me to make her movie, I’d first read a screenplay that was more “written” than one might think upon seeing the final product. The human characters were more present, even though you could feel how strongly it wanted to describe the hidden world of abattoirs before morphing into a Miyazaki-esque fable about communication between humans and animals. While we were location scouting, I understood we were heading towards something more radical, something in between a documentary and a fiction, where we’d leave a lot of room for things to happen spontaneously during shooting.

In what ways did that radicalism come to be expressed ?

JR : First, by finding a non-professional actor who came along with his own dog, who had to learn the profession of sheepherder, and by choosing to film in a working abattoir. Indeed, our shooting schedule had to work around the killing schedule. The camera would follow the path of the animals ; a one-way path, a path of no return. I remember that this was also part of the radicalism : we never made an animal turn back and go down that path again, we never stood in the way of the process of slaughter. There was a lot of tension during shooting because we only ever got one take. The animals were scared, and so we were scared, too. I wanted the viewers to see that fear in the animals’ eyes. Filming death is very difficult. I felt that the camera protected me a bit. Sleep was hard to find at night during this project, and my dreams were strange.
Lastly, for Maud and I, the camera had to caress the animals’ fur and create bonds between living beings. We had to capture the love and goodness that exists between animals and also with humans. The camera was constantly moving around in order to reveal a secret and invisible form of communication. I tried to maintain a soft approach to filming in order to contrast with the concentration-camp violence of that place.

Did you have any films you used as references ?

JR : My influences were varied and their roots are pretty deeply buried in the film : Tobe Hopper’s Chainsaw Massacre, for its documentary style, Warner Herzog’s Even Dwarfs Started Small and Wang Bing’s documentaries. Another image that came to me during preparation was the opening of Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, in which you see the characters working at night time in the blast furnaces. That very warm, nearly warlike, atmosphere sets the tone for the entire film. My idea was to recreate that very dark and reddish image, where blood mixes with the night, for all of the abattoir scenes. Working at night was also important in helping to convey the total disorientation suffered by the characters. For us, it was like showing the far side of the moon.

How did you handle things in the abattoir ?

JR : Because the film was shot in early summer, the nights were shot and I had to black out the abattoir in order to recreate a night-time ambience. We were constantly struggling against light getting in, and my gaffer, Clothilde Mignon, spent her time running from one end of the set to the other to stop the light from getting in. In terms of lighting, Maud was afraid of making the animals’ deaths appear beautiful. So, we tried to give a dirty look by using industrial fluorescent tubes and setting the camera at 5,600 K at night-time, so that we could get all the nuances of brown and red. As I found the RED Dragon camera gave the best results at 640 ISO, I often shot those night-time scenes at full aperture with a slight underexposure that helped desaturate the colours.
In order to play on the contrast between day and night, the outdoors scenes were filmed with 4 or 5.6 aperture, which completely transforms the image of the wide aperture Zeiss series by giving a contrast and a sharpness that are in total opposition with the night-time. Moreover, I used a combination of Black Pro-Mist and Classic Soft filters on the nights, which give those scenes a bit of an unreal quality. By combining the full aperture and vignetting, we achieved a rather theatrical effect that I’m quite pleased with.

Did you do testing while preparing ?

JR : We did a few comparison tests, especially with the Sony F55, which seemed handier for the documentary aspect of the film. But the Sony’s image seemed a lot more clinical to me, and had an ultrarealistic side. In the end, the gap between the eye’s reality and the sensor that one gets with the RED won me over. I didn’t want a “realistic” image ; I’m looking for images and directors that bear witness to a vision, and that vision has nothing to do with the real. I like my images to be a transfiguration of what I see. The abattoir was grey and heavily lit, as are many industrial spaces nowadays. But for me, it was Hieronymus Bosch’s Hell, with striking colours amidst the darkness.

It must not have been easy to shoot with a dog as one of the main characters ?

JR : It was a nightmare for me ! First of all, in terms of the camera, because it meant I often had to shoot at a very low angle. I had to do everything with an Easy Rig, even though I don’t much like working with that tool. Then, for Maud, it absolutely had to be the actor’s dog. We had to work with that specific dog… who is totally black ! Because I use a lot of top lights overhead on set, which are placed pretty low to provide contrast, I found myself faced with a dilemma between keeping enough light to see the dog and finding myself with overlit actors ! I usually chose to leave the dog in the dark, even though it worried the director in the beginning. But I knew that we’d be able to seek out the details in the shadows during colour timing. By combining that technique with cast light (Chinese lanterns or monotube Kino 60s) to follow the animal, it worked pretty well.

There are some really beautiful close-ups on that dog, especially during the scene of the calf’s birth…

JR : As shooting progressed, I was increasingly able to light the dog frontally, and in that way to obtain his deeper and more brilliant gaze. It took us time to learn how to work with Boston. Especially since we had to do retakes on that birth scene four months after the end of shooting. The young dog had grown up, and had become calmer. It was all for the better because the scene was shot in multiple locations : the abattoir, a farm, and in a studio with a green screen.

The end of the film provides a true break in terms of the screenplay and the picture…

JR : We had Tarkovski’s Stalker in mind as a reference for the end of the film. The break with all that had come before had to be palpable. We set up in another set, namely a long-abandoned abattoir. By playing on the overexposure of the background, I also recreated light areas on set by reflecting spots off of big, white sheets. We shifted into another world, a futuristic world in which the abattoir’s death machine seems to have disappeared.

A word about colour grading ?

JR : I worked zone-by-zone during colour grading. For example, by blurring some very brilliant areas (like glare off of metal) or giving definition to other darker bits. The decisions made on set determined the image’s texture. Sometimes I added graininess to balance out the flow. I took two weeks to finalize the image with the help of Vincent Amor.

(Interview conducted by François Reumont on behalf of the AFC, and translated from French by Alexander Baron-Raiffe)

Synopsis :
The animals arrive at night-time.
They feel.
They resist.
Before dawn, a young man leads them to their death.
His dog discovers a terrifying world that seems as though it will never stop.

Produced by:Mezzanine Films