American Cinematographer - April 2012 - 65

Left: Beasts of the Southern Wild. Middle: My Brother the Devil. Right: 5 Broken Cameras.

Beasts of the Southern Wild Cinematographer: Ben Richardson Director: Benh Zeitlin Beasts of the Southern Wild , the most-buzzed-about film at Sundance this year, won both the Grand Jury Prize and the cinematography prize in the Dramatic Competition. A grassroots production to its core, this Super 16mm project marks the feature debuts of director Benh Zeitlin and cinematographer Ben Richardson. The mythic tale centers on Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a 6year-old girl living in the ramshackle community of The Bathtub, beyond the protective levee in southern Louisiana. Having lost her mother, she is being raised by her hooch-loving father, Wink (Dwight Henry), who begins to show signs of a mysterious illness. That’s not her only challenge: Melting glaciers have created a rising sea that threatens to swallow The Bathtub, and prehistoric creatures called Aurochs, held captive by the ice for centuries, are now speeding toward the bayou.

“It’s about a little girl trying to survive the death of her home and the death of her father,” says Zeitlin, who co-wrote the script with Lucy Alibar. This synopsis might sound downbeat, but Beasts is anything but — the characters exhibit a strong can-do spirit that is evidenced by their celebrations and their scrappy homes, which are pieced together from oil tanks and other flotsam. “Everything in The Bathtub is strapped together in this rickety way,” notes Zeitlin. The filmmakers’ goal was to create the movie using a similar ethos. Zeitlin is a founding member of Court 13, a New Orleans-based filmmaking collective that focuses on “real people on the margins” and “seeks to tell huge stories out of small parts.” He explains, “The Court 13 approach is to feel like you’re living inside the story you’re telling. You work with your friends, and everything is DIY; it’s all held together with rope and tape. It’s trying to make something big out of very small resources. It’s not a hardship; it’s the adventure of the film.” Zeitlin and Richardson share a background in stop-motion animation, which Richardson calls “a great training ground, because it’s a world where anything you can imagine is possible. You can pull off these huge, fantastical worlds by working alone in a little room. You are nature; you can create an overcast day, or you can create sunlight. My lighting strategies have really been shaped by working that way.” Born in England, Richardson moved to the Czech Republic with a University of London schoolmate, Daniel Bird, when Bird landed a job in Jan Svankmajer’s workshop in Prague. There the pair co-directed the stopmotion short Seed, which Richardson photographed. “It was a 605-day shoot,” Richardson says with a laugh. Zeitlin, who had also followed a friend to Prague, wound up building sets for Seed. After Richardson moved to New York, Zeitlin asked him to come to Louisiana to shoot a live-action short
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titled Glory at Sea. Two years later, when Zeitlin was ready to make Beasts, he asked Richardson to shoot the miniatures and creature effects. Even though nonprofessionals filled the ranks of both cast and crew, the producers mandated that several key crewmembers, including the director of photography, should have feature-film experience. But Zeitlin found that experienced cinematographers were reluctant to sign on. He recalls, “They looked at the project, looked at our budget, and said, ‘There’s no way this can look good.’ Some of them wanted to bring their regular crew, and we couldn’t afford their wages. We were only going to have a few lenses, and we could only afford HMIs for a couple of days. Even though we would be shooting on film, all the money would go into processing the neg. We didn’t have the infrastructure behind the camera department that most people would expect.” After two cinematographers backed out, Richardson took action. He went to the Hushpuppy compound with his Canon Vixia HV20 and followed a friend around as he interacted with Zeitlin’s pet pig and chickens. Using what he calls a “gentle and exploratory camera,” Richardson shot for an hour, and then he cut a reel, labeled it “Matt in the Bayou,” and made sure a copy found its way into the hands of Zeitlin and the producers. After viewing the reel, they decided to roll the dice on Richardson. Beasts’ logistics made shooting on film almost a foregone conclusion. The practical locations were in the middle of nowhere, numerous scenes were set on water in full sun, light would be difficult to control, and power sources would be limited. Richardson, who did his own operating, used an Arri 416, which he describes as “the perfect camera — a little brick.” He chose two Kodak negatives, Vision3 500T 7219 and Vision2 200T 7217. “I definitely wanted to shoot film because I wanted to be pullprocessing and underexposing, and digging down into the shadows without ➣ stressing about pattern noise.”
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American Cinematographer - April 2012

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