American Cinematographer - March 2009 - (Page 20) Left: Cinematographer Marco Onorato, AIC, who shot the picture with director/ cinematographer Matteo Garrone. Right: Franco (Tony Servillo) is the intimidating manager of a toxic dump. desperately wants to join the local clan; Marco and Ciro, two loose cannons who worship Scarface’s Tony Montana; Roberto, a college graduate who takes an apprenticeship in waste-management and discovers its illegal underpinnings; and Pasquale, a tailor who works under the table for the clan in high fashion but secretly trains Chinese competitors. Gomorrah was shot in Super 35mm with a single Arricam Lite. The filmmakers considered shooting Super 16mm and finishing with a digital intermediate as a cost-saving measure, but they were dissatisfied with the test results. They shot Kodak Vision3 500T 5219 and had the ENR process applied to release prints at Technicolor in Rome. “We did a 90-percent application of the ENR process on Kodak [Vision] Premier,” says Onorato. “Shooting widescreen was important because there were some frames that needed widescreen, such as the scene at the beginning of the film that shows the children in a swimming pool,” Garrone notes. The camera starts tight on the children playing in a plastic pool, and as the shot moves wider, it reveals the pool’s location on the roof of a vast, squalid housing project in Scampia, where most of the film was shot. “It’s one of the most famous places in Europe for drug dealers, so it’s a kind of symbol,” says Garrone. He also singles out a shot of a dump where hundreds of barrels of toxic waste are being illegally buried in a quarry. The scene begins with truck drivers walking off the job because of an accident, and the project manager recruits children to drive the eight-wheelers instead. From atop the quarry, a wide shot reveals the scope of the ecological nightmare and the line of trucks snaking down a switchback, their barely-adolescent drivers already in the clan’s employ. “Locations are very important because they tell something more about the story and characters,” says Garrone. “For instance, the two boys who pretend to be Tony Montana are anarchists, so they’re surrounded by open space. That’s completely different from the story of Totò, who wants to go inside the clan. That’s like going into the army or prison, so it was important that [his environment] be claustrophobic.” Garrone and Onorato prefer to use prime lenses, in this case Zeiss Ultra Primes, and avoid zoom lenses. “The only filters I usually use are NDs and polarizers,” adds Onorato. They favored the 20mm, 32mm and 40mm primes. “We didn’t use wide angles very much because, again, we wanted to be invisible,” says Garrone. “I was often very close to the [actor] and pushed the background out of focus. We worked a lot on staying close to the actor.” Many shots in the film run long and without cuts, and the camera moves are always motivated by the characters’ actions. “We worked a lot [of the details] out on location,” says Garrone. “But then we shot like it was something happening in that moment.” A PeeWee dolly, a 13' Robin crane and a 36' Sky King crane with Panther remote head were used, but infrequently. “They’d stick out, so we used them only when we thought it was very necessary,” says Garrone. For example, the PeeWee’s hydraulic lift allowed Garrone to follow Totò as he climbed up a wall to fetch a gun, and a crane provided a key overhead perspective after a clan massacre. “It was important to be above to see all the bodies the character is walking between,” says Garrone. The housing project the production used was slated for demolition, so most of the residents had vacated. “It was like an empty studio — perfect for 20 March 2009
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