American Cinematographer - January 2013 - 24

Upon arriving in a rural town to pitch the locals on a fracking plan, Steve Butler (Matt Damon, left) finds retired engineer Frank Yates (Hal Holbrook) to be a very tough sell.

A Conscience Decision By David Heuring

To present the rural setting of the drama Promised Land with the richest detail and greatest clarity possible, Swedish cinematographer Linus Sandgren, FSF and director Gus Van Sant brought an unusual format to the big screen: Super 1.85:1 achieved with a 4-perf Super 35mm negative and Hawk 1.3x anamorphic prime lenses. The format, which boosts image size on the negative, is made possible by the combination of DI techniques and the 1.3x lenses. “It has been used in some commercials, but never in a feature film,” Sandgren attests. “By shooting 4-perf Super 35mm in a squeezed ratio of 1.42:1, we worked with a negative area that was 70 percent larger than Academy 1.85:1 and 30 percent larger than 3-perf Super 1.85.” Promised Land follows Steve Butler (Matt Damon), a salesman for a natural-gas company who arrives in a small, economically depressed town in upstate New York with his work partner, Sue (Frances McDormand), and tries to talk the locals into signing over the drilling rights to their farmland. It isn’t an easy sell, and as he spends more time talking to the townspeople, Butler
24 January 2013

struggles with whether he is doing the right thing. In prep, Van Sant and Sandgren discussed their mutual admiration for photojournalism of the latter 20th century, particularly images captured with Leica cameras, and decided to try to capture a similar level of detail in Promised Land’s rural locations (in Avonmore and Apollo, Pa.). Sandgren tested a range of formats to determine how best to deliver this look. They took inspiration from large-format still photography, especially the work of Stephen Shore, but also the reportage-style images of Steve McCurry, Mitch Epstein and Eve Arnold. There were conversations about shooting 65mm, but that format was deemed impractical. Anamorphic 2.40:1 was considered, but Van Sant decided he wanted a 1.85:1 aspect ratio to make the images feel “more natural,” says Sandgren. “Gus thought these Kodachrome stills shot in the American countryside in the 1970s and ’80s were perfect. You see a lot of detail, not much grain, and everything has nice latitude, with nothing really blowing out. There’s exposure everywhere, but it’s still contrasty.” The images they were viewing had faded slightly with age, and Van Sant also liked that quality. Sandgren found that a
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combination of overexposing and pull processing the negative helped. “By overexposing 1⁄3 of a stop and pull processing 1 stop, we got even exposure and great, strong contrast. The blacks are dense but soft.” (Deluxe Laboratories in New York processed the production’s negative.) He shot most of Promised Land on two Fujifilm Eterna Vivid negatives, 250D 8546 and 500 8547. For bright day exteriors, he occasionally used Fujifilm F-64D 8522. “I wanted to get a lot of saturation so that we could perhaps mute it later [in post],” he says. “I wanted everything to have color. In window highlights with white curtains, the Vivid stocks seemed to register those subtle tones of cyan or yellow that exist in the world. Those reportage photos we were referencing blow most people’s minds because they make you feel like you’re there, and the Vivid stocks helped us [achieve] that same effect by capturing even minimal saturation. By pull processing, we maintained even exposure and maintained highlights, and I found that the mid-tones, where most of the important information is, maintained contrast, while the blacks and the highlights were softened. The blacks don’t develop enough to be completely contrasty, and the highlights don’t process enough to burn out. White clouds are

Promised Land photos by Scott Green, courtesy of Focus Features.

American Cinematographer - January 2013

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