American Cinematographer - April 2014 - 26

Top: Hemingway and his sidekick Dickie (Richard E. Grant) travel to France in this frame grab.
Bottom: An Arri Alexa was mounted to each side of a Rolls Royce for a scene with Law
and Grant in the backseat.

Drive, shot by Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC
(AC Oct. '11). "We watched a DCP of Drive
and thought it looked fantastic," recalls
Nuttgens. "The flesh tones looked great,
and it was contrasty in the right places but
had all the detail in the other places. It
wasn't a huge-budget film, and neither was
ours, so we thought, 'We can do something
with the Alexa. We can make this work.'"
There were in-depth discussions
about specific shots and much rehearsing.
Nuttgens recorded much of the blocking,
nearly all of which was done on location.
"We went in extremely prepared," Shepard
says. The shooting schedule was divided
among eight days in France, 15 in London
(including three at Pinewood Studios) and
26

April 2014

six days of interiors on the Isle of Man.
Shepard and Nuttgens devised a
bold color palette with production designer
Laurence Dorman and costume designer
Julian Day, one that encompassed limegreen walls in Hemingway's prison mess
hall, an intense aquamarine in Fontaine's
swimming pool, and vibrant London graffiti.
"I told all my collaborators this wasn't a Ken
Loach kitchen-sink drama," Shepard says.
"Don's a two-bit criminal, but in his mind
he's a superstar, so I wanted this to be a
bright, widescreen version of his life. Also,
when he's in France, there are 30 minutes in
which there are only four people onscreen,
so how do you keep an audience's senses
excited? It's not just the dialect and the
American Cinematographer

action; it's also what they're looking at, and
I felt color could give some energy."
It's one thing to capture vivid colors
when you can paint the walls of a set
onstage, and quite another when you're
shooting at Brompton Cemetery on a
cloudy day. That was the setting for a scene
in which a remorseful Hemingway breaks
down when visiting his ex-wife's grave.
Nuttgens' crew shone an 18K Fresnel gelled
with 1⁄4 CTS through a 12'x12' Half Grid
Cloth as a soft, three-quarter-frontal key,
and another 18K direct as backlight for the
surrounding foliage. "There's no quality to
the daylight on dull November days in
London," Nuttgens observes, "so we had to
do a lot of work on that scene in the DI. By
pushing a bit and accepting within the
image a certain amount of what I would call
'texture' - others might call it 'noise' - we
created colors out of a dull day and made it
feel like the rest of the film."
Nuttgens, who does his own operating, shot the cemetery scene using an
Angenieux Optimo 24-290mm T2.8 zoom
lens, with the camera on a dolly operated by
key grip Peter Myslowski. But he estimates
that he shot 70 percent of the movie handheld. "As long as you are accustomed to
lighting simply and quickly, the turnarounds
are fast [with handheld]," says Nuttgens.
"When the actors are ready to go, they can
lose their energy if you say, 'You have to sit
down for 20 minutes while I turn around.'"
A scene in which an unhinged
Hemingway threatens Fontaine in his villa as

American Cinematographer - April 2014

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