American Cinematographer - October 2007 - (Page 37)

After returning to the crime scene, Moss is spotted by a pair of drug dealers who attempt to gun him down. Deakins was frustrated by the area’s cloudy weather, which didn’t allow his simulated dawn to mesh seamlessly with the real dawn. pointing, because if it had been a clear morning I think the lighting I’d done and the actual dawn would have meshed pretty well. As it is, you see the dawn coming up for real and then my fake dawn in front of some clouds! That really upsets me, but we only had two days to shoot the whole sequence, so we couldn’t just go back there and do it over the next day. A number of shots in Jesse James have a sort of dreamlike vignetting at the edges of the frame. How did you achieve that effect? Deakins: That was done entirely in camera with lenses that are now called ‘Deakinizers.’ I used to use this gag where I put a small lens element in front of a 50mm to get a similar effect. I went to Otto Nemenz and asked how we could create that effect in a better way, with more flexibility and lens length. The lens technician suggested taking the front element off a 9.8 Kinoptic, and also mounting the glass from old wideangle lenses to the front of a couple of Arri Macros. Otto now rents out three Deakinizers. Removing the front element makes the lens faster, and it also gives you this wonderful vignetting and slight color diffraction around the edges. We used different lenses, so some were more extreme or slightly longer than others. Sometimes we used [Kardan] Shift & Tilt lenses to get a similar effect. Most of those shots were used for transitional moments, and the idea was to create the feeling of an old-time camera. We weren’t trying to be nostalgic, but we wanted those shots to be evocative. The idea sprang from an old photograph Andrew liked, and we did a lot of tests to mimic the look of the photo. Andrew had a whole lot of photographic references for the look of the movie, mainly the work of still photographers, but also images clipped from magazines, stills from Days of Heaven, and even Polaroids taken on location that looked interesting or unusual. He hung all of them up in the long corridor of the production office. That was a wonderful idea, because every day we’d all pass by [images] that immediately conveyed the tone of the movie he wanted to make. Did you contribute some specific ideas about the palette of the movie’s sets or costumes in your discussions with those depart- ments? Deakins: I thought quite a lot about Jesse’s costumes and certain settings in terms of how everything was going to read onscreen. I did a slight bleach bypass on the negative to enhance the blacks, so those considerations were important in terms of rendering detail. Andrew had very specific ideas about the blackness of the costumes against the snow. In the night scene where Jesse shoots Ed Miller [Garret Dillahunt], Andrew wanted them to be riding black horses, but I told him that was going to be really tough at night. In that type of situation, you don’t want to see too much of the landscape, so I basically lit up these little white trees to provide some sense of the background. Andrew really just wanted to show the characters as disembodied heads floating in blackness, but I knew it would be really hard to hold those details with the characters moving over a long distance. I lit that scene with a line of 10Ks positioned about 400 feet away from where we were shooting, with a bottom cut to keep the spill off the ground. I suppose moonlight would be the American Cinematographer 37

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American Cinematographer - October 2007

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