American Cinematographer - February 2011 - 12

Short Takes
Right: Kelly (Marian Brock) falls under the spell of a love dart in God of Love, directed by Luke Matheny and photographed by Bobby Webster. Below: Ray (Matheny) serenades Kelly during an afternoon stroll.

“You can’t control who you love. You can’t control who loves you. You can’t control how it happens or when it happens or why it happens. You can’t control any of that stuff,” muses Ray (Luke Matheny), the protagonist of the short film God of Love. Ray is a lounge singer, and he’s desperately in love with Kelly (Marian Brock), the drummer in the lounge band, but Kelly only has eyes for the guitarist, Fozzie (Christopher Hirsh). The plot thickens when Ray’s fervent wish for Kelly’s affections are answered with a box of magical darts that have aphrodisiacal powers. Matheny also directed God of Love; it was his thesis project for N ew York University’s graduate film program. When he began discussing the movie with classmate and cinematographer Bobby Webster, the two quickly realized they shared many ideas about how
12 February 2011

American Cinematographer

Photos by Michael Seto. Images courtesy of the filmmakers.

God of Love Aims for Amour By Iain Stasukevich

it should be photographed. “Almost every modern independent film has exactly the same kind of look: handheld with a shallow depth-offield,” says Webster. “The look we wanted forGod of Lovewas more about composition and framing and depth.I was excited about doing thoughtful dolly shots and using the camera as part of the blocking. That’s something I don’t see very often in low-budget films.” Matheny adds, “There are some jokes and punch lines that work better when you can see everything that’s happening in the frame. The audience feels like they’ve discovered something in the scene.” Webster and Matheny share a fondness for French New Wave films, and they cite Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and A Woman is a Woman (both photographed by Raoul Coutard) as strong influences on God of Love. Additionally, they looked at Beat-era jazz photography, especially the work of William Claxton. “I’m really inspired by his great, iconic images, those crisp black-and-white photographs of the famous jazz musicians of the day,” says Webster. During prep, Webster assigned Matheny an exercise from their early semesters at NYU. Matheny recalls, “Our aesthetics professor, Gail Segal, would make us write papers to describe our approach to our film. Bobby practically forced me to write a paper [for God of Love], which he then critiqued heavily. I don’t remember what it was like in its original form, but I remember what we concluded: There would be a certain number of close-ups, and we would never get any tighter than that, and whenever Ray prayed, there would be some kind of vertical line in the frame.” “You get a lot of great ideas when you’re preparing a film, and I wanted to capture them,” the cinematographer says of the writing exercise. “When you’re on set trying to work out the framing, it helps to have something to remind you of those ideas. Our decisions still felt organic, but we knew what we were doing going

American Cinematographer - February 2011

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