American Cinematographer - September 2012 - 48H

An Homage to the Classic Westerns
As far as Jared Moshé is concerned, the western is at the
core of American storytelling. “I think the western is the myth of
America — we need more of them.”
So for his directorial debut, Dead Man’s Burden, the
award-winning producer created a story that depicts the
harsh realities of Western life, both in his self-penned story, as
well as in the spectacular beauty of the landscapes, as fi lmed
by cinematographer Robert Hauer. “I wanted to capture the
dichotomy inherent in the land,” Moshé explains. “The land
represented a blank canvas where you could re-create your life.
But it’s also a giant moat that isolated people. It needed to be so
beautiful that someone loved it so much they would be willing to
die for it, but desolate and isolating enough that somebody would
be willing to kill to leave it.”
The story centers around
Wade McCurry (Barlow Jacobs),
who returns a few years after the
end of the Civil War to his family
homestead in rural New Mexico,
now inhabited by his sister,
Martha (Clare Bowen) and her
husband, Heck (David Call), who
had presumed Wade dead. With
their father and the rest of the
family deceased, the two struggle,
as Martha attempts to sell the
property and leave to build a life in
civilization.
Moshé and Hauer fi rst became
acquainted at the Cannes Film
Festival, introduced by a mutual colleague. “Jared had a great indie
script — and he was set on shooting fi lm,” Hauer recalls. Adds
Moshé, “Rob and I had a very similar aesthetic, and we wanted the
visuals to augment the story we were telling.”
The two sought to tell the narrative in the visual language of
classic westerns, such as High Noon, The Searchers, Unforgiven and
others. “We talked about embracing the harshness,” Moshé notes,
“letting the light come in and be crisp and hard, and embrace what
that actually means without beautifying the images.”
The director and cinematographer took particular inspiration
from Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti westerns,” particularly Once Upon
a Time in the West. “That fi lm does a great job at capturing the
mythology and grandeur of that world,” says Moshé. He and
Hauer would sometimes even refer to the fi lm when framing shots
just in terms of how the camera would move, using wide angles to
capture the details of the faces, and the details of the world, in the
same frame.
Doing that, of course, meant shooting widescreen — in this
case, 2-perf 35mm. “Film was a no-brainer,” says the director.
“The tropes of the western are so well-known that people can
recite them. If you violate those basic rules, you will alienate your
audience. On that fundamental level, I had to shoot this on fi lm.”
The two fi lmmakers did
consider capturing on a highdefi
nition digital format, but,
Moshé says, “It would have looked
like video. It would have felt weird
to the audience.” Hauer agrees.
“The digital imaging sensor was
just too clean for us. And we didn’t
want to try to add grain in post.
Film has a beautiful texture, and
gave us what was naturally there,
2-perf specifi cally.” Moshé adds
that fi lm also captured a sense
of depth in a way HD couldn’t,
which was something especially
important in shooting the
landscapes alongside the actors.
The choice of 2-perf widescreen was also another tip of the hat
to classic westerns like Leone’s. “We knew we really wanted to
be able to capture that wide landscape around the characters, to
make them feel like they’re part of a world, one that is dominating
them,” the director says.
Hauer had shot 4-perf anamorphic before, but knew that
his director wanted the feel of the grain seen in the classics he
referenced. “It was one of the fi rst things Jared said to me. He
liked seeing that grain structure on screen. He didn’t want an
American Cinematographer - September 2012

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