American Cinematographer - September 2011 - 17

The young women share a duet at a family gathering.

Keshavarz had to winnow her 110-page script down to 60 pages. She recalls, “The censor said he liked the film, and I was thinking, ‘What film?!’” Once Lebanon was chosen, Hubbard lobbied to shoot film. “I’d heard how unstable the electricity is in Beirut,” he notes. “Plus, we had concerns about the digital cameras that would be available locally and whether we’d have the necessary tech support. So I said to the producers, ‘I know this really great hard drive: film. It has amazing resolution.’” Hubbard tried to obtain a camera capable of shooting 2-perf Super 35mm in Austria, but was stymied by border issues. Producer Karin Chien then suggested shooting Super 16mm. She noted that Gamma, the production’s rental house in Beirut, had an Arri 416 and could also supply a set of Arri/Zeiss Ultra Primes and a Cooke 18-100mm zoom. “I thought Super 16 could look beautiful, but I was concerned about cropping [to 2.40:1],” says Hubbard. He called his NYU mentor, cinematographer Maryse Alberti, to ask for advice. “Maryse was extremely generous in walking through the issues she faced on The Wrestler [AC Jan. ’09]. She said, ‘Crop

it, but make sure you do a test.’ We did, and we liked the results.” Hubbard subsequently chose three Kodak film stocks, Vision3 500T 7219, Vision2 200T 7274 and EXR 50D 7245. Hubbard arrived in Beirut for two months’ prep in late 2009. Photos sent by a source in Tehran provided a visual template. “Tehran is mainly a warm, neutral environment with splashes of color — green and blue are used over and over again as accents,” he says. “Trying to re-create that was what drove our choice of locations and the aesthetics of the movie.” Although Keshavarz was determined to use practical locations, securing them proved to be a Sisyphean task. “Everything was constantly falling through,” recalls Hubbard. “You had to request 10 locations to end up with one. And every neighborhood seemed to be controlled by a different group, so negotiating permission was very time consuming.” In one location, he adds, the use of a balcony outside one end of the room was controlled by one party, while permission to use a balcony off the other end of the room was handled by another. In the end, every room shown in the film was a different location, mostly private
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residences. (The more sensitive scenes were shot in Hubbard’s and Keshavarz’s local apartments.) “Finding the right Ottomanera architecture for Atafeh’s house, the main location, was quite a feat,” says the director. Cost was a significant factor. “Almost everything shot in Lebanon is a commercial for the Arab Emirates, and they have a lot of money!” Keshavarz notes ruefully. “You end up sitting down and having lots of tea, trying to sell people on your project.” Time and again, the filmmakers confronted different ways of doing things in Beirut. “When you rent lights, you rent everything that comes with the lights, including the gaffer and the other technicians,” says Keshavarz. Before Hubbard chose Gamma, he asked to meet with the company’s gaffer, Joseph Khamis, a.k.a. ZuZu, and his crew. “The initial response was, ‘You don’t do that here,’” he recalls. But he persisted, and when he finally met with ZuZu, he discovered the gaffer spoke Arabic, very little French and no English. But then ZuZu walked Hubbard around the corner to show him a rig his team had designed at Hubbard’s request. “Working on a multi-story building in a cramped
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American Cinematographer - September 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 2011
