American Cinematographer - January 2009 - (Page 24)

Above: The Ram is slammed into a corner support by a younger rival. Below: The filmmakers captured most match footage during real wrestling events with paying crowds. and she had spent many years working in documentaries.” (Her credits in that discipline include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side.) He and Alberti spent about five weeks scouting locations and planning some shots, but roughly 40 percent of The Wrestler was entirely unscripted. “There were many ways I could have chosen to tell this story, but Mickey [Rourke] is very much in the moment — he’s very unpredictable between ‘Action’ and ‘Cut,’” notes Aronofsky. “I wanted to create a visual language that would be as free as possible to capture that.” The director’s quest for realism led the filmmakers to shoot The Ram’s performances in the midst of real wrestling matches, or “promotions.” Alberti explains, “We would go in with Mickey in the middle of a match, shoot a little bit, get out, and then come back in to shoot a little bit more.” They shot sporadically because The Ram’s matches were so physically demanding, and because the time lapse allowed the real wrestlers to get back into the ring while the crew reloaded. The wrestlers were thus able to rile up the crowd for when the camera got rolling again. “It’s hard to shoot in the middle of a screaming crowd when you have to keep a pace, because the people had come to see a show, and they only had so much patience for the film crew,” recalls Alberti. “But we were on top of everything, and nothing went wrong.” Aronofsky’s desire for an improvisational feel extended to the lighting of a number of scenes. A-camera operator Peter Nolan recalls, “To get a shot of Mickey at a phone booth at night, we literally rolled up in a couple of vans, the prop guys pulled out the phone booth, and Maryse lit it with two 1-by-1 Litepanels LEDs. It was a very quick setup, but it was right for the shot — we weren’t skimping in any way.” Alberti often does her own operating, and when she signed onto The Wrestler, she planned to do that, “but I very quickly realized Darren does a lot of takes, and that physically it was going to be too demanding — I wouldn’t have had enough time to really look at the lighting,” she says. “I was very lucky to have Peter.” A longtime operator on the FX series Rescue Me, which emphasizes handheld camerawork, Nolan reports that he was “basically shooting with my handheld bag of tricks to make sure I could deliver the shot.” With the help of key grip Chris Skutch, he was able to bring some techniques he uses on Rescue Me to The Wrestler. For instance, he often maneuvered around scenes with half an apple box tethered to his waist so that whenever he sat down, he would always have a flat surface on his lap where he could rest his arms. “It looks very funny on set, obviously, but it’s a great technique, and it works,” says Nolan. “When you’re in a very low seated position with the camera on your shoulder, your center of gravity is often too high for you to stand smoothly and travel with the actor,” he continues. “I devised a system where my D-ring belt could stick up out of my back brace, creating a handle the dolly grip could use to physically boom me up and down. For quick height changes, I found that by unlocking the medium eyepiece on the Arri 416 so it could swivel freely, I was able to use it as a left-hand grip while cradling the camera with my right 24 January 2009

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2008

American Cinematographer - January 2009 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes: Triangle of Need Production Slate: Frost/Nixon, The Wrestler Close Focus An Old Soul Brothers in Arms A Cut Above Post Focus: HPA Awards, Still Me New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index In Memoriam: Robert C. Jessup, ASC Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Gabriel Beristain

American Cinematographer - January 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.