American Cinematographer - April 2012 - 8

Editor’s Note
Those of you who miss the Machiavellian mob intrigue of The Sopranos may want to travel back in time with Showtime’s The Borgias, which dramatizes the misdeeds of Rodrigo Borgia, who assumed divine power as Pope Alexander VI. Portrayed with silky malice by Jeremy Irons, Borgia earned his reputation as one of the most evil people of the 15thcentury, sinning freely while exploiting the papacy’s perks. The show offers a luxe period look fashioned by Paul Sarossy, BSC, CSC, who serves as consigliere to series creator Neil Jordan. Sarossy tells AC correspondent Mark Hope-Jones that he enjoys Jordan’s cinematic approach to the drama, which is captured digitally with the Arri Alexa. “Neil’s method was to shoot with prime lenses, as though he was shooting a movie,” Sarossy notes (“Vice at the Vatican,” page 32). “On TV projects, many directors love the idea of shooting with zoom lenses and adjusting the frame between takes. My ideal way of working is the way Neil does it, where we’re constantly making very committed choices for the scene.” AC technical editor Christopher Probst, an award-winning cinematographer, expresses similar enthusiasm in a first-person piece about his first feature,Detention, which he describes as “a schizophrenic mash-up of dissimilar genres, including slasher films, comedies and science fiction” (“Back to School,” page 44). Probst and director Joseph Kahn have worked together for more than 15 years on music videos and commercials, and they went for broke on the frenetically paced feature. “When I decided to do this film, I said, ‘I’m going to bet the farm on this movie, but I don’t want to repeat what we have done before. I want to push the limits of everything we know!’” Kahn declares. The pair shot the movie in 2.40:1 anamorphic with Red One MX cameras. Digital capture was also employed on two of the three Sundance Film Festival projects detailed in our coverage of this year’s festival (“Sundance Standouts,” page 64). Cinematographer David Raedeker shot My Brother the Devil with the Alexa in order to exploit the camera’s latitude with a minimal lighting package. On 5 Broken Cameras, self-taught cinematographer Emad Burnat inspired his movie’s title by going through five digital-video cameras — a JVC GR-D54E, a Sony DCR-PC110 and DSR-PDX10P, and a Panasonic NV-GS140 and AG-HVX200 — while documenting protests in the West Bank village of Bil’in, where Israeli settlers were encroaching upon land long cultivated by Palestinian farmers. Ben Richardson shot our third spotlighted Sundance project, Beasts of the Southern Wild , on Super 16mm. “I definitely wanted to shoot film because I wanted to be pull-processing and underexposing, and digging down into the shadows without stressing about pattern noise,” he explains. Another Red-camera project, 4:44 Last Day on Earth (Production Slate, page 24), required Ken Kelsch, ASC to convince director Abel Ferrara, a proponent of film, that digital capture was the best option in light of the project’s indie budget. “You do what you have to do to get a movie done,” Kelsch says. “We had other options, but moneywise the Red was the best option.”

Stephen Pizzello Executive Editor
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Photo by Owen Roizman, ASC.

American Cinematographer - April 2012

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