American Cinematographer - March 2009 - (Page 28) Left: Ashizawa lines up a shot. Right: Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa runs through a scene with Kagawa. son, who has left home to assist U.S. troops in Iraq and appears shell-shocked by the experience. “The dream sequence was something Kurosawa and I talked about a lot, especially concerning to what extent we should convey it as a dream,” recalls Ashizawa. “It couldn’t be too obvious, but it also couldn’t be so subtle that the audience wouldn’t register it as a dream. When you underexpose shots but print [the negative] to normal density, the black appears hazy, and the image is blurred. It’s usually considered a mishap, but we used it intentionally with the 5218.” In a bizarre plot twist, Megumi is kidnapped from her home by a hapless burglar (Koji Yakusho) and ends up willingly spending the night with him in a beach house by the ocean. She briefly considers the possibility of running away with him and starting a new life, but as she walks along the shore the next morning, she seems to have an epiphany about her matriarchal role. The subtle play of emotion on her face is augmented by the rising sun. “Initially, we hoped to use only natural light as the sun came up, but that’s very difficult to achieve,” notes Ashizawa. “In the end, it was better to work toward the exact look we wanted for the scene; [the final look] has a surreal quality that I love. An 18K HMI and the camera were mounted separately on pickup trucks, and we waited until dawn. We needed to capture the exact moment when the sky turns bright, which occurs for just a single moment. Kyoko understood that very well and did a remarkable job in just one take.” The Sasakis’ story culminates 28 March 2009 some months later, in a wordless scene in a music hall. The parents have each accepted their lots in life, and Ryuhei has relaxed his once-unyielding attitude about his young son’s desire to play piano. The camera watches from a stationary position in the distance as the boy’s flawless performance of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” renders his parents and the entire recital audience speechless. “It was important that the final scene look entirely different from the rest of the film,” says Ashizawa. “The recital hall was formerly a bank that was built in 1927. The ceiling was very high, so we set up a few 10K HMIs on the upstairs landing area, but we focused the light on the floor and not directly on the subject so the light would be diffused around [the boy]. Between the lights, we used what Ichikawa and I call ‘seaweed,’ a partition that controls the light and renders a subtle effect.” Kurosawa observes that the film’s melancholy mood was augmented by the winter season in which it was filmed. “The diagonal ray of light in the winter gives the work a wonderfully nuanced shade,” says the director. “Maybe I feel that way because I am Japanese. This may be a bit strange, but I feel the light in Tokyo Sonata is very European, and I feel that the unexpected manifestation of European influences in a Japanese film shows how this film was somehow blessed with an ability of transcend nationality. “I think the story of Tokyo Sonata is particular to Japan, but even a strictly localized story can be accepted by everyone around the world as a global expression once it is transformed into film,” he adds. “That is probably an inherent trait of cinema.” TECHNICAL SPECS 1.85:1 35mm Arri 535B Zeiss Superspeed lenses Kodak Vision2 50D 5201, 500T 5218 Printed on Kodak Vision Premier 2393 I ERRATA One of the cutlines in our coverage of Quantum of Solace (Nov. ’08) contained an error. In the photo at the top of page 30, Daniel Craig is walking past the terminal at England’s Farnborough Airport, not a set built by the production. “Our production designer, Dennis Gassner, is one of the most talented designers I’ve worked with, but this was not one of his sets,” reports Roberto Schaefer, ASC, the film’s director of photography. “The Farnborough terminal was chosen for its stunning modern architecture.” In our coverage of Slumdog Millionaire (Dec. ’08), we incorrectly reported that the Canon EOS-D1 Mark III can shoot bursts of up to 30 RAW frames per second. According to director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle, BSC, DFF, “the camera could only reach up to about 11-fps bursts. This depended on the use of menus in the camera as well as the size of the files.”
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