American Cinematographer - February 2008 - (Page 17) minutes, so it makes quite a big difference when you’re just trying to get on with it. I can’t wait to try out the new movements in 2-perf, where 1,000 feet lasts 22 minutes!” Pope had four weeks of prep, and much of that work involved location scouting in rural Alabama alongside production designer Toby Corbett. “I made sure Dick and Toby were both there when we planned the interior sets we would build,” says Sayles. “Dick could think about the lighting, and I was there to say, ‘Here are the four shots I need in this place.’” The look Sayles wanted was very specific, based on rare color photographs of the deep South taken by Farm Security Administration photographers; these images had surfaced in the 2004 publication Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43, a book Pope calls “the bible of the film.” Shot on an early version of Kodachrome, the photos, when printed in full color, were a revelation to Pope. “As much as on The Illusionist [AC Sept. ’06], when [director Neil Burger] showed me a book featuring autochromes, an early color-photography process, John absolutely inspired me with this book,” he says. Honeydripper is set in a town called Harmony in 1950, when the South was still in a post-Depression state. Things were rapidly changing on the music front, however, and that’s what the film captures: the moment when the electric guitar emerged, intersected with gospel and rhythm-and-blues, and gave birth to rock ’n’ roll. Loosely based on Sayles’ short story “Killing Time,” the movie centers on Ty (Danny Glover), a down-on-his-luck piano player who owns a bar, the Honeydripper. Hoping to turn his bar into a success, he books a local legend, Guitar Sam from New Orleans, but when he discovers the guitarist won’t show up, he hires a young drifter, Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.), who has appeared in town carting a newfangled electric guitar. As the film builds to its climax, other storylines flesh out a portrait of the rural South and touch on religion, race and class in ’50s America. Re-creating the Kodachrome look involved close collaboration between the costume, production design and camera departments. “The palette is a little more primary for two reasons: the chemical processing of the time couldn’t give you all the range, and there wasn’t that much color in clothing then,” notes Sayles. “There weren’t that many clothing dyes, and there were only a few kinds of house paints. So the range of color they were shooting was smaller.” Costume designer Hope Hanafin created a color arc for the film. Scenes in the cotton fields and military barracks, both places of hard labor, feature pale, faded colors; locations where people sought respite and wanted to look their finest, such as the church revival tent and the Honeydripper, feature clothing with bright, saturated colors. Working with Fuji film stocks, Pope played up the various palettes in camera. He used Super F-125T 8532 to film most day exteriors “to create a finegrained, saturated, fairly contrasty Kodachrome look,” he says. “Yellow is very evident in the old Kodachromes, so I used a filtration system that gave me a Above: Two young boys use cardboard instruments to imitate the musicians they admire. Below: Looking on as camera operator Matthew Clark and 1st AC Larry Huston (wearing green) film a close-up of one of the boys are (background, from left) director John Sayles, Pope, 1st AD Cas Donovan, boom operator Jaime Reyes, assistant prop master Romain Gateau and loader Jelani Wilson. American Cinematographer 17
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