American Cinematographer - August 2007 - 22

Production Slate A Portrait of an Artist and a Secret History of the CIA lighting and choice of lenses. He shot the picture with an Arricam package (provided by EPC in Madrid) that included Cooke S4 prime lenses and an Angenieux Optimo zoom. He relied primarily on what he calls “the noble lenses”: 32mm, 40mm, 50mm and 75mm. “Their optical ‘nobility’ or quality is due to the fact that they do not deform the space they represent,” he notes. “They come close to seeing the way the human eye sees and they approach the spatial [rendering] of the classical painters.” He praises the Optimo for “its extraordinary quality” but acknowledges that he favors fixed lenses. A strong proponent of realism in lighting, he works almost exclusively with Softlights, fluorescent fixtures he discovered in Paris while shooting the 1999 film Salsa. “I consider them an essential lighting tool for close-ups and medium shots. They save considerable time on a shoot and the quality of their light is extraordinary. Each T5 lamp contains eight tubes that are much thinner than standard fluorescents. Each unit is very lightweight and very practical. They have incorporated ballasts and their dimensions are such that they can be situated in the most difficult places. “Another advantage is that each unit can be connected to a dimmer [board], so the intensity of light can be varied easily. This proved extremely useful on The Others, allowing me to fluctuate the light in relation to the candles, as well as to lower the intensity of the ambience when Nicole Kidman’s character closed the curtains, leaving the space in semi-darkness.” One of the first sequences in Goya’s Ghosts finds a conclave of monks arguing over Goya’s work. They are gathered in a cavernous room in the 22 August 2007 Goya’s Ghosts photos by Phil Bray, courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films. Father Lorenzo (Javier Bardem) is one of the priests who play a central role in the Spanish Inquisition in Goya’s Ghosts. Immortalizing Spanish Strife by Jean Oppenheimer One of the artists who dared to address the Spanish Inquisition in his work was 18th-century painter Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, who witnessed its horrors firsthand. Goya’s Ghosts hews closely to details of the artist’s life, but it is less a biopic than a look at the tumultuous period through which he lived, one that saw not only the inquisition but also Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and, five years later, the restoration of the Spanish crown. These events are explored through the relationship that Goya (Stellan Skarsgård) has with two fictitious characters: the smug priest Father Lorenzo (Javier Bardem), and Inés (Natalie Portman), a woman wrongly imprisoned for heresy. Goya’s Ghosts marks the first collaboration between cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, AEC and director Milos Forman. A graduate of the Official Film School in Madrid, Aguirresarobe has worked predominantly in Europe on such features as The Others, The Sea Inside and Talk to Her. In American Cinematographer’s 80th anniversary issue (March ’99), his film Secrets of the Heart was listed as one of the best-shot films of the latter 20th century. AC recently spoke to Aguirresarobe with the assistance of translator Mary Kay McCoy. “At one of our first meetings, Milos told me he wanted an image with strong contrasts, where the black was really black and the skin tones looked like skin,” the cinematographer recalls. “That was the premise that guided my work.” Of course, Goya’s paintings were also key, and Aguirresarobe spent hours at the Prado in Madrid, studying not only Goya’s work but also that of classical predecessors such as Velázquez and Ribera. The paintings inspired the filmmakers’ choice of format (standard 1.85:1) and Aguirresarobe’s approach to

American Cinematographer - August 2007

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