American Cinematographer - January 2010 - 24

TECHNICAL SPECS Super 1.85:1 3-perf Super 35mm Moviecam Compact Cooke S4 lenses Kodak Vision3 500T 5219, 250D 5207 Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak 2302 January 2010 American Cinematographer The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus photos by Liam Daniel and Richard Bain. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. light; the color-correction was done on a Baselight 8; and the 2K filmout was done on an Arrilaser. Berger notes that colorist Willi Willinger did a “superb job.” There is a visual consistency to all of Berger’s work with Haneke. Some of their stylistic hallmarks are long oners and an avoidance of wide angles. “Michael makes very precise storyboards, with arrows indicating movements to the right or left,” says Berger. “He draws them himself on the back of each page of the script; the entire crew gets a copy. “The camera is kept at eye level or slightly below, and it never moves on its own — moves are prompted by an action or even by the finest gesture in an actor’s face,” he adds. “The 32mm and 40mm lenses are our standard because Haneke prefers the normal human perspective. On rare occasions, we’ll use a 27mm or a 50mm. A fluid head allows the camera to ‘breathe’ with the actor. Socalled static shots are never really static. There are always tiny movements, and they’re led by the actors.” Berger admits that things can get stressful on Haneke’s set. There were times on The White Ribbon when “Haneke pushed me to the limit, but I have to thank him for that, because you never fall back on your repertoire of easy solutions or old tricks. Even the most common problem becomes a new challenge.” To meet those challenges, he stresses, one needs a good crew — “people you can trust absolutely.” In addition to the aforementioned collaborators, he puts gaffer Kimber Lee Jerrett and executive producer Michael Katz in that category. “Michael Katz is an extraordinarily sensitive production leader, and that’s quite rare,” he observes. “We had some complex problems on this project, and he was able to handle all of them.” Left to right: Percy (Verne Troyer), Anton (Andrew Garfield), Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), Valentina (Lily Cole) and Tony (Heath Ledger) update their traveling-theater show in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I Through the Looking Glass by Jon D. Witmer It’s a cold, rainy day when AC arrives at The Bridge Studios in Vancouver, British Columbia, where director Terry Gilliam is leading cast and crew through the second half of a turbulent shooting schedule on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. A few months earlier, the production came to an abrupt halt when its star, Heath Ledger, died mid-shoot. Ready to throw in the towel, Gilliam was ultimately convinced to complete the film by his daughter, producer Amy Gilliam, and cinematographer, Nicola Pecorini. “Heath’s work [on the film] was so bloody good, and I felt it would have been totally unfair to Terry and to the film that Heath wanted to make to not finish it,” says Pecorini. Ledger plays Tony, an apparent amnesiac who joins a traveling theater troupe headed by Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), who is aided and abetted by his daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole); his young assistant, Anton (Andrew Garfield); and his longtime friend and confessor, Percy (Verne Troyer). The band takes its horse-drawn wagon through London’s modern streets, pausing hither and yon to stage a show fueled by the doctor’s unbridled imagina- tion. “We didn’t start with a story in mind; it was just an idea of a traveling theater arriving in a modern city and nobody paying attention to this extraordinary, wonderful little show,” says Gilliam, who penned the screenplay with Charles McKeown. “I was digging through my drawers of ideas that I’d never used, and we’d stick things in.” Parnassus divides its time between the real world and the surreal Imaginarium, located on the other side of a magic mirror on the wagon’s stage. Scenes set in the real world were shot primarily on location in London, whereas everything set in the Imaginarium was saved for stage work in Vancouver. When Ledger died, the actor had already completed the London portion of the shoot, and jumping through the magic mirror offered Gilliam a reason to have three different actors step into the role of Tony: Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. The Imaginarium reflects the mind of the individual inside it, so the interior landscape shifts radically each time it appears onscreen. To achieve the different vistas, Gilliam, Pecorini and visual-effects supervisors Richard Bain and John Paul Docherty opted to shoot against greenscreen and bluescreen with certain physical set pieces. (At the end of the shooting schedule, the

American Cinematographer - January 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2010