American Cinematographer - August 2010 - 69

Opposite: Felix (Robert Duvall) and Mattie (Sissy Spacek), friends with a complicated history, take a stroll on Felix’s property. This page: In a scene set earlier in the story, Buddy (Lucas Black), a funeral-home employee, stops in at Felix’s home to discuss the old man’s unusual funeral plans.

shoot in Georgia, where the production’s locations included a Civil War battlefield deep in a wooded national park. That approach led them to undertake some of the most complicated work of their respective careers, such as shooting an entire feature entirely on location, with no sets; burning down a house at twilight and filming it; and operating on land that had strict restrictions about its use. To accomplish these objectives, the filmmakers eschewed most of the digital luxuries feature films routinely incorporate these days, relying instead on in-camera methods and just six significant visual-effects shots (created by Furious FX). “Aaron and I really wanted this to be a classical, traditionally mounted film, as masterful as we could make it,” Boyd explains. “But at the same time, we did not want to call attention to the photography. We wanted it to have the shades and tones of old still photos from that era — I would describe them as dry colors. We started shooting tests in January 2009 to figure out how we’d achieve that.” Through testing, the filmmakers determined that they would shoot anamorphic 2.40:1 using Panavision’s

Unit photography by Sam Emerson. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

C-Series and E-Series prime lenses, which Boyd describes as “old, beautiful lenses, not too technologically advanced by today’s standards. These lenses were the workhorses for the great anamorphic films of the Sixties and Seventies. My first assistant, Lee ‘The Blaster’

“Visually, it needed to be accessible, but it also needed to feel mythic, like a fable.”

Blasingame, secured particular serial numbers of the C and E lenses for us.” Schneider and Boyd also decided to shoot with two Kodak Vision2 stocks, 500T 5218 and 50D 5205, and do a degree of bleach-bypass processing on the negative at Deluxe Laboratories
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in Hollywood to achieve a “weathered, parched look,” says Boyd. He and Schneider had applied a full bleach bypass to Two Soldiers, a period piece also set in the South, but they decided they wanted Get Low’s look to be less extreme. “We dedicated ourselves to the idea that the color palette in Get Low would be established mainly by what we put in front of the camera, and then we would decide what to do with that color in the photography,” says Schneider. “We talked about keeping primary and satured colors out of the film, and [costume designer] Julie Weiss and [production designer] Geoffrey Kirkland, both world-class artists, made our jobs so much easier. “The movie has the feel of a folk tale, so visually, it needed to be accessible, but it also needed to feel mythic, like a fable,” the director continues. “We also wanted to create a kind of veil between the audience and the period without being too heavy-handed.” In consultation with Beverly Wood, an ASC associate member and Deluxe’s executive vice president of technical services, the filmmakers decided a partial bleach bypass would do the trick. “By depriving the negative of some of the bleach baths,
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American Cinematographer - August 2010

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