American Cinematographer - September 2011 - 22

Left: Pinkie (Sam Riley) leads a pack of scooter-riding mods on his way to a criminal rendezvous in Brighton Rock. To find riders, the production placed a newspaper ad that drew hordes of scooter enthusiasts. “They came out in droves,” marvels cinematographer John Mathieson, BSC. “ We put the old buggers who were my age at the back, and their good-looking sons up front.” Right: Pinkie romances Rose (Andrea Riseborough), the only witness who can tie him to a gangland slaying. Mathieson notes, “In the way we lit her, we were trying to create the idea that she’s pure and will do anything for this man, even though she’s basically selling herself to the devil.”

When you see enough anamorphic films, you become conscious of the particular flares and defocused highlights that certain anamorphic lenses produce. For example, Panavision lens flares have a very distinct shape. But the flares in this picture had a very different feel. Mathieson: Yeah, they’re sort of unusual and chaotic. These lenses produce a lot of blooming because some of the front elements look like old skating rinks! But that was all part of the feel. We wanted an oldlooking film and didn’t have much of a budget, so I started to think about not shooting with beautiful lenses and maybe mucking things up a bit. The Crystal Express lenses are also really good at capturing the kind of soft light and delicate colors you see in the bedroom scenes — the peachy colors and the gold weaves in the bedspread, for instance. On the other hand, they couldn’t really handle the contrast in the scenes under the pier; the backgrounds have that blooming, milked-out look. The lenses are appallingly soft and they don’t bite, but they have very interesting qualities. I loved the 200mm, but my focus puller, Simon Hume, kept trying to hide it from me — it created highlights that were like little Chinese fans,
22 September 2011

but there was a big lump in them at around the 15-foot mark, and he hated pulling focus on them. But they gave us magical things. When the girl’s in the church getting married, I just kept bashing light on her until she started looking like a piece of porcelain, very ‘Victorian romantic.’ You can use direct light with these lenses and [the image] won’t look hard and coarse. You definitely lose sharpness and crispness, but they work well if you happen to be doing an impressionistic film noir with flashy lighting. I suppose that harks back to noir’s classic period — the lenses weren’t incredibly sharp in terms of resolution, and they were very lowcontrast, but if you lit quite hard you could introduce a sense of resolution. Mathieson: Yeah, you could give them a power and sharpness that probably weren’t really there by using big areas of black and cutting the light. But as soon as you point lights at the [Crystal Express] lenses, they start to go crazy. Once you get used to them, you can say, ‘I’m a bit underexposed here, but I know if I put them against this window, the light will bounce around and bloom and sort of fill things in naturally.’ All anamorphic lenses do that to a certain extent, but it’s really pronounced in
American Cinematographer

these lenses, so you have to be pretty bold with them — they’re not for the fainthearted! One wide-angle lens kept popping up in various scenes — in the café, the church and other settings — and it clearly had a lot of distortion in it. Those are the kinds of aberrations we usually try to bury, but they really add to the character of those shots. Mathieson: That was probably the 25mm, which didn’t have the optical wedges needed to correct the weird blooming and other anomalies around the edges. Pinkie grows more paranoid as the story progresses, and we wanted to make it feel as if his world is falling down around him. How much work did you do in the digital grade to enhance the colors and the look, or to smooth out the differences between the lenses? Mathieson: We were keen to print the film traditionally, but the distribution company insisted on a DI, so we did it with [color timer] Paul Ensby at Technicolor London. Those old lenses do bounce around a bit; some of them had a slightly green hue or a tinge of other colors. Even with photochemical color timing, you can just take that out, but we didn’t try to

Brighton Rock photos by Alex Bailey, courtesy of IFC Films.

American Cinematographer - September 2011

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