American Cinematographer - September 2008 - (Page 16) Scocchera’s storyboards guided the production, which found inspiration in such films as In Cold Blood and The Hustler. Accordingly, the filmmakers elected to shoot with black-andwhite film stock and anamorphic lenses. Narita’s name appeared on a shortlist of potential replacements. Scocchera recalls, “Hiro was the first person to say, ‘I haven’t done this before, which is why I want to do it,’ as opposed to what I’d been hearing, which was ‘I haven’t done this before, so let’s do it the way I’m comfortable with instead.’” With little more than a week until principal photography began, Scocchera met with Narita to review storyboards and shot lists. Once again, the question was raised about whether to shoot on a higher-speed color stock and desaturate the images to a monochrome palette using a digital intermediate (DI). It was an idea Scocchera vehemently opposed. “I’d always fought against that,” he remarks. “Black-andwhite is black-and-white. The silver in the film is part of the look.” Narita agreed with the director. “You can make a black-and-white print from a color negative, but what you’ll end up with will be very flat and gray,” says the cinematographer. “Shooting it the way we did, we got the real blackand-white result we wanted without having to spend any extra money on the back end.” The filmmakers also had to weigh the benefits and difficulties inherent in the anamorphic format. Anamorphic-lens characteristics double the horizontal angle of their spherical counterparts, meaning a 50mm anamorphic lens is roughly equivalent to the horizontal field of view of a 25mm spherical lens. Also, anamorphic lenses tend to work at their best between T4 and 5.6; if the lens aperture is too wide-open, the edges of the frame start to get fuzzy, and when the lenses are stopped down above T11, the contrast of the image increases along with the depth of field — an ideal but ultimately unrealistic option for A Perfect Place. There simply wasn’t enough room in the budget for all the lights that would have been necessary to achieve a T11. Consequently, to achieve the best performance from his lenses and film stock, Narita chose to shoot the film in the T4/5.6 sweet spot. Working with a Panavision package, the cinematogra- pher limited himself to 40mm and 50mm Primo anamorphics, and with the exception of pushing or pulling the negative, there would be little room for adjusting the image once it was put on film. Shooting black-and-white affected more than Narita’s work. A few days before the shoot began, the cinematographer took his monochromatic viewfinder and paid a visit to production designer Ben Nichols and costumer Diane Cornelius. “I wanted to show them what happens with the colors,” says Narita, “because [in black-and-white], the color doesn’t matter — it’s the contrast. We were able to see it through the viewfinder: blue looks much lighter than it really is, and red and green will probably go almost black. “If you want white walls, don’t paint them pure white,” he continues. “You may have a beautiful costume, but if it’s very plain, it’s not going to stand out.” As the filmmakers rolled into production, they realized that the idea of what they were doing was significantly more frightening than the actual execution; what they lacked in money and equipment, they made up for with imagination and improvisation. “You can get a lot from minimal resources,” Narita notes. “Most of the time, you’ll find that the cheap solutions are just as good as the expensive ones.” One such solution included using the same set for two different locations. Early in the film, Tom and Eddie decide to bury the Cheat’s body in the woods, so they pay a visit to their octogenarian neighbor, Mrs. Newburg (Isabelle Maynard), to cajole her into loaning them her car. A generic apartment — along with a hallway and an elevator — was built in an empty warehouse at the Alameda Navy Base near San Francisco. Narita employed a grid to pre-light the room as Eddie’s apartment and as Mrs. Newburg’s; once the space was shot out as one apartment, the set was redressed and the grid cues were switched. After managing to stuff the Cheat’s body into the back of Mrs, Newburg’s car without being seen, Tom and Eddie navigate the busy nighttime streets of San Francisco. To shoot the 16 September 2008
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