William Lubtchansky about his work on "The Border of Dawn"

Tell us, William, of your meeting with Philippe Garrel and his way of working...
Philippe Garrel has worked with Raoul Coutard – he also collaborated with Caroline Champetier, Jacques Loiseleux for his more recent films –, but Coutard has more or less stopped working on productions. Philippe wanted an "old guy" because for his principle of shooting – shoot only one takeı – he wanted "someone who gets right it on the first try” ... He therefore called me for Regular Lovers and I accepted because I love his movies.
He has a very special way of working. For him, film is a sum of money that he does not want to exceed. He says to his producer : "Look, I want to make a film with so many thousands of euros, give me the money and I will manage everything". Indeed, he decides who will be hired to do what. He also decides on the composition of the team. Here, there is no script supervisor, there is one person who is AD-stage manager-production manager, no makeup artist. We were a dozen crew members. That’s how he likes to work and then voilà we make a "real" film which goes to Cannes !

It’s a very peculiar system, for example, he proposes a "deal" to his crew : be paid for eight weeks of filming and shoot nine, not to work more but to relax more ! There is no overtime, sometimes we’re off for three days and as he shoots in order, when we finished a scene in a location and the following scene happens to be elsewhere, we will not move on the same day. So, the days are sometimes very short. We arrive at noon, and at five, it’s over ! I am not saying that the production was delighted, in a "normal" production we could have shot in six weeks, but Philippe wants to shoot like that, so everyone takes their time, there is no precipitation, so nobody gets hurt – that is his recurring fear that someone gets hurt ! I have never seen a production like that, I would not say it’s a holiday because it’s still work, but it was calm and tranquil.

Shooting only one take is an uncommon and risky choice, does it require a lot preparation and rehearsal ?
Yes and no, Philippe works a lot beforehand with the actors on the text. This explains why, in general, the first take is good. Yes, he does do rehearsals, but as the shoot progresses he does fewer and fewer rehearsals, because he is eager to shoot. The actors plead for a second take, but he almost never gives in ! He says that if the first take is not good, it will take ten more to get a good one ! It is pretty economic from the point of view of film consumption : 15 000 meters for The Border of Dawn, that’s really low.
He has another peculiarity : he determines the frame with a director’s finder which is not at all calibrated with the camera lenses ; we have offered to calibrate it, but he refused, saying : "Don’t waste your time with that !" He finds a frame, it’s precise and at the same time I can change the focal length if it’s better a little wider, or I do something which wasn’t planned... At one point, we shot a scene with a girl on a bed in a big close-up. The actor must leave to go somewhere else, I followed him, but that wasn’t planned ... Well, I could have done better, I was waiting for a gesture from him to help me move. Garrel loves everything that is not planned !

When there’s only one shot, that’s a pretty daring thing to do ! (William smiles, his eye mischievous, his air quiet and assured ...)
As with Regular Lovers the film is in black and white, why this choice ?
This choice came mainly because of the sets. Philippe thinks that you can’t shoot if you don’t repaint : the colors are ugly, the cars in the streets are ugly. And repainting everything would cost a fortune ! So he chose black and white, it’s goes down easier, and you aren’t attacked by the colors ...
I did black and white as we practiced it when I started working. We had the opportunity to change the gamma of the film based on the contrast. We did a lot of testing beforehand, I tested various development times until I found what interested me. We would write the development time on the film cans : four minutes and thirty seconds, five minutes... The advantage is that you gain in sensitivity with no real increase in grain. Anyway, now with the film, it has become difficult to get grain !
As with Regular Lovers, it’s a peculiar black and white, pretty contrasty, with very little gray ; I wanted that, real blacks, beautiful whites. For exteriors, I had too much contrast, I pulled the film.

Did you use filters ?
Not a lot. When you filter in black and white, it’s mainly for exteriors and on The Border of Dawn, there aren’t many exteriors. I recently made a short film with Jean-Marie Straub in black and white entirely outdoors and there I filtered – red, yellow, orange filters – the more you go red and the more the blue sky turns black . This works very well for day for night, provided that you have a sky that’s really blue.

What lighting and camera equipment did you use ?
The camera was the Panavision Millennium – number 419 – which is practically "mine", as they say at Cinecam. I like it a lot because it’s the quietest. I used two Primo zooms, the small one, 17,5 to 75mm and the big one, 24 to 275mm. Initially, I didn’t want to mix the two because the big one is a little less good, but as I didn’t shoot wide open, I was at T4 or 5.6, mixing the two zooms went very well.

For grip, I had a Panther dolly, but we shot in apartments on the 4th or 5th floor, returning there ten or fifteen times, so the stairs ... Finally Garrel didn’t care whether we followed the actors moving up or down, so we just kept the Elemack of Bobol, my key grip, it stayed in the main location for two months ...
I mixed tungsten and HMI, I didn’t have a lot of light, the sets were small. In the photographers studio (played by Louis Garrel) which was an actual studio, there was no possibility for putting light outside, which I usually like to do, so I used mirrors. I was only able to light from the outside in the actress’ apartment, because it had a balcony that went all around.

There is a special effect when Laura Smet, the film’s ghost, appears in a mirror. Did you do this effect yourself ?
Yes. This effect takes place three times and Philippe Garrel wanted to do it in camera. He had asked someone to take care of it and they had ordered a very dark peep-show glass, which complicated things a little because when someone looks in that kind of glass, the image in front of them can’t be as bright as it should be in a mirror. Me, I wanted to order a 50-50 optical glass, but it would have cost ten times as much ...

And in the end, the person who was in charge of this effect left, so I took it over ( which I wanted to do from the beginning)... In the room where this takes place, there was a shower space about 1 meter wide and 2 meters long. We made a hole in the wall of the shower space where we put the mirror. Laura Smet is on the other side of that mirror, but we don’t see her because the walls are painted black. We did a lighting change, and he more or less disappears and she appears in the reflection ; in the end it works pretty well. The iris fades and closures were also done on location. Fades to black were done with the T stop, which forced me to film those shots wide open. The timing was done traditionally in photochemical, and edited traditionally on film...

So there is no trace of digital in this film ?!
No, not one pixel...

(Interviewed by Brigitte Barbier for the AFC, translated by Benjamin B)

Actors : Laura Smet, Louis Garrel, Clementine Podatz, Vladislav Gallard
Gaffer : Jim Howe
Key grip : Guy Boleat-Auguste (known as Bobol)
First assistant camera : Jean-Paul Toraille
Second assistant camera : Louise Botkay
Camera equipment : Panavision Cinecam, Panaflex Millennium
Film : Kodak Double X
Laboratory : Eclair (which sub-contracts black and white to Cinédia)
Color timer : Sonia Nabil