American Cinematographer - April 2012 - 70

◗

Sundance Standouts
could in front of the girl with his wrists locked — “one of my favorite camera moves to do,” he says. Zeitlin notes, “We hoped to catch this thing burning down behind her. That was the mentality: whatever we catch, we catch.” One of Richardson’s challenges was keeping the camera close to Hushpuppy’s 4'-tall eye level for the entire film. Going handheld made the camera feel too present for the filmmakers’ taste, and Steadicam was too solid (and also unaffordable for more than a day or two). His solution was an EasyRig. “It was designed to just take the weight off the operator’s shoulder, but I discovered it worked well at hip height, too,” he says. “I didn’t feel footfalls as heavily as I did when I went handheld, and [the images] could be very cinematic.” Shooting on open water also required special strategies. One was finding a boat captain who could pilot a flat-bottomed jon boat like a dolly. Richardson remembers one complicated scene where Wink fishes by hand. With only 15 minutes of daylight remaining, Richardson explained to boat captain Mike Arceneaux how he wanted to slowly dolly in on the actor. “Mike spun the boat around, blasted 500 yards downriver, swung around, came screaming back, killed the throttle and just glided in. I was literally hanging off the front of the boat with Jason’s hand on my belt. We glided for the entire length of that shot — a minuteand-a-half — and did it in one take. It’s absolutely beautiful.” Other moves entailed an underwater pulley system engineered by the boat captains with ropes and a “Cajun anchor,” a 6' spear that could fasten into mud. In shallower waters, Richardson donned waders and jumped in. The camera sat on his shoulder or floated on “the Titanic,” a block of Styrofoam set on a 2'x2' piece of plywood. “When we were in the water, we wanted to feel the water,” says Richardson. Pulling focus in such situations wasn’t easy. “The bayou waters are fast moving, and the tides are strong,” says Richardson. “Setting up shots, we were always getting set for where we’d be in 15 seconds.” Knoll started out trying to take measurements, “but 80 percent of the movie is him just skillfully eyeing it,” adds Richardson. “He got really good.” Given that Beasts is his feature debut, Richardson had his own moments of doubt. “I was giving myself heart attacks daily because I knew how far I wanted to push it,” he says. “I decided the worst thing I could do would be to change what I was doing just to be a little safer. I decided I just couldn’t be afraid.” Fox Searchlight will release Beasts of the Southern Wild in the U.S. on June 29. — Patricia Thomson My Brother the Devil Cinematographer: David Raedeker Director: Sally El Hosaini Set in a public-housing project in London’s East End, My Brother the Devil follows siblings and secondgeneration Egyptian immigrants Rash (James Floyd) and Mo (Fady Elsayed) as they navigate turning points in their respective lives and in their relationship. The street-smart Rash sells drugs for the neighborhood gang but is losing his taste for the criminal life, while the younger Mo yearns for the respect Rash appears to command. The murder of a close friend leads both to take steps in new directions. In presenting David Raedeker with the cinematography award in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition for his work on the picture, Sundance juror Alexei Popogrebsky praised him “for bringing to vibrant, pulsing life a searing drama from a little sector of modern society.” Stepping up to accept the prize, Raedeker credited his close collaboration with director Sally El Hosaini and production designer Stéphane Collonge for making the achievement possible. “This film took us on a journey,” he added, “and it was a rollercoaster.”
American Cinematographer

Indeed, El Hosaini, Raedeker and Collonge formed a strong nucleus that proved instrumental in the success of the project, which encountered challenges that might be considered remarkable even by indie-film standards. Their creative bond was facilitated by five weeks of prep, three of which were spent “dissecting every detail of the script,” says Raedeker. “At that point, I wasn’t thinking about visuals at all. I wanted to understand the story from the inside and let the visuals come out of that.” El Hosaini, who was making her feature-directing debut, knew she wanted the camera to stay close to the brothers and present the world from their perspectives — “to be an insider looking out,” she says. To facilitate this, the team arrived at four rules. El Hosaini explains, “The first rule was that the visuals should be experiencedriven — how is this scene experienced by Mo or Rash? We wanted to use their five senses to access the emotion of the scene and then translate that visually. The second rule was maintaining a 1.5 POV, with Mo’s POV being the 1 and Rash’s being the .5, so that the film would be mostly from Mo’s POV, but not entirely. Rule 3 was no master shots; we wanted to always maintain a subjective style. Rule 4 was simplicity, because it’s an art form, and it’s what we’re all ultimately striving towards.” Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park and Elephant, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and David O. Russell’s The Fighter figured into the discussions, and El Hosaini found Magnum photographer Simon Wheatley’s book Don’t Call Me Urban! a useful way to share with her collaborators some of the details of the world her film would depict. “It’s a world I’d spent years researching, and Simon’s book helped me bring David and Stéphane up to speed on many aspects of it,” says the director. El Hosaini and Raedeker decided a 2.40:1 frame was essential to telling the story, and comparison tests convinced the rest of the team. “Most films that show council estates portray

April 2012

American Cinematographer - April 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - April 2012