American Cinematographer - September 2008 - 14

Short Takes Cheater’s Justice by Iain Stasukevich Though Scocchera normally focuses his energies on long, complicated screenplays requiring exorbitant budgets, he wanted A Perfect Place to be just the opposite — short, cheap and simple. His more specific plans, though, complicated matters a bit. “Specifically, he wanted to shoot it in anamorphic,” explains cinematographer Hiro Narita, ASC (Never Cry Wolf, The Rocketeer). “Specifically, he wanted to shoot it in black-and-white, and specifically, he wanted a large depth of field.” What Scocchera sought was the distinctive black-and-white ’Scope look of films like In Cold Blood (shot by Conrad Hall, ASC) and the The Hustler (shot by Eugene Shuftan, who won an Academy Award for his work). “A lot of my favorite films have been made in that format,” says Scocchera, who also lists Manhattan (Gordon Willis, ASC) and The Elephant Man (Freddie Francis, BSC) among his influences. Scocchera’s preferred stock was Kodak Double-X 5222, a panchromatic film with an ASA of 200T/250D. Although Double-X is the fastest blackand-white negative Kodak manufactures, he still had concerns about how it would respond to the film’s numerous night exteriors. “The producers and I talked to a lot of professional cinematographers while we were prepping the movie,” says Scocchera. “People were telling us that we wouldn’t be able to shoot at a T-stop slow enough to get the deep-focus look. Everyone said we’d have to shoot color and then transfer to black-and-white because they thought [Double-X] would be too slow.” When the cinematographer Scocchera originally hired dropped out of the production at the last minute because of a scheduling conflict, 14 September 2008 Photos, frame grabs and storyboards courtesy of Derrick Scocchera. Above: When a card game takes an unfriendly turn, Tom (Mark Boone Junior, right) and Eddie (Bill Moseley) find themselves with a corpse on their hands in A Perfect Place, directed by Derrick Scocchera. Below: Cinematographer Hiro Narita, ASC keeps a close watch on the culprits’ actions. D errick Scocchera’s short film A Perfect Place begins moments after a poker game between three buddies comes to a grisly end; after one of them is caught with an ace up his sleeve, the only prize he collects is a bass guitar to the head. With a corpse on their hands, the two remaining card players — known to the audience simply as Tom and Eddie (a scheming Mark Boone Junior and a hapless Bill Moseley, respectively) — need to dump the body before anyone discovers the crime. When Scocchera first sat down to write the script, he admits that frustration was a significant motivator. Through his company, Fantoma, he had been paying the bills distributing DVDs of films by eclectic directors such as Kenneth Anger and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and he felt his creative side beginning to atrophy. “I was getting distracted by the DVDs and I wasn’t getting my scripts made,” the director says. “I finally decided to make a short film just for the experience of making it.”

American Cinematographer - September 2008

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