American Cinematographer - August 2010 - 16

Production Slate
The French comedy Amélie, shot by Bruno Delbonnel, ASC, AFC, landed in the top spot in a recent AC poll to determine the 10 bestshot films of 1998-2008. More than 17,000 people participated in the online vote.

AC Poll Names 10 Best-Shot Films of 1998-2008 By Rachael K. Bosley

Bucking the conventional wisdom that says comedies do not present cinematographers with as many creative opportunities as dramas do, the French comedy Amélie, shot by Bruno Delbonnel, ASC, AFC, was voted the best-shot film of 1998-2008 in a recent American Cinematographer poll. “Cinematography is a desire, the desire to challenge yourself and the desire to give the audience a visual experience, and this desire is the same whether you’re shooting a comedy or a drama,” observed Delbonnel, responding to news of the poll results via e-mail. “I am very thankful to the readers of AC. This is a real honor, especially considering the other movies on this list. These are some of the finest cinematographers, and I’m not sure I deserve to be among them, but I am very happy to be. All of these movies are visually stunning, but more importantly, all of these cinematographers are consistent. From the first frame to the last, they stick to the look they’ve chosen. And they are all explorers.” More than 17,000 people around the world participated in the online vote, which updates the comprehensive reader poll AC published in March ’99 in honor of the ASC’s 80th anniversary. (That vote covered the best-shot films of 1894-1997.) For the new poll, each voter chose 10 films from a list of 50 nominated by AC subscribers. Here’s the Top 10: 1) Amélie (2001): Bruno Delbonnel, ASC, AFC. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s comedy about a sheltered young woman (Audrey Tatou) with an overactive imagination is a vivid example of the unusual looks filmmakers could achieve with early digital-intermediate technology. However, given limited time for preproduction testing, Delbonnel actually decided to create as much of the film’s unusual gold-green hue as possible in-camera. In a Sept. ’01 interview with AC, he
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explained, “I thought that maybe this [post] process wouldn’t really work … [and] I always believe in doing as much as possible during the actual photography, because the result looks better than when you do all the manipulation in post.” Reflecting on Amélie today, he says, “It’s difficult to remember how things started, [but] I had this idea that it would be interesting to depart from the idea of following what the script said in terms of effects — day, morning, evening and so on — and work on a mood rather than an effect, a mood that could reflect not only the story, but also the mood of the character. I think I’m like most cinematographers: we try something on a specific movie that is based on our thoughts at a specific time in our life and career. Today I see Amélie as a starting point in my way of thinking about light, and since then I’ve kept developing what is more or less the same theory, pushing it a bit further every time. This was the first film I shot where I started to think of the script as a music score. In each movie, there’s a melody I try to find [and] translate into light. Amélie was probably a very light, not-so-fast melody with this single note, which is the overall yellow-green color in the film.” Delbonnel earned ASC and Oscar nominations for the film, his first feature with Jeunet. Super 35mm. 2) Children of Men (2006): Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC. For his fifth film with director Alfonso Cuarón, Lubezki boldly applied a documentary aesthetic to a science-fiction narrative, employing a handheld camera and very few movie lights to tell the story of a Londoner (Clive Owen) who is drawn into an underground effort to save mankind in the wake of an ecological disaster. “It’s a future that reminds you of the present,” Lubezki told AC (Dec. ’06). The filmmakers eschewed traditional coverage, often staging shots with complex action to play out in single takes. Of his minimalistic approach to lighting, the cinematographer noted, “It took me a long time to go back to basics and say, ‘I don’t want this movie to look

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American Cinematographer - August 2010

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