American Cinematographer - October 2008 - (Page 56)

Memoirs of a Spook she didn’t want to look glamorous because it would have destroyed the character.” An equally challenging location was the underground corridor in CIA headquarters, which is first seen when Cox is reassigned (prompting him to quit in protest), and later during briefings between a CIA officer (David Rasche) and his befuddled superior (J.K. Simmons). The camera tracks through the corridor from one office to another behind a pair of feet; to achieve the low-angle shot without laying track, camera operator George Richmond worked with a Scorpio Stabilized Head. The hallway, located under the Metropolitan Life Insurance building, featured recessed fluorescents in the ceiling. O’Leary recalls, “We replaced tubes that were burnt out and made the whole hallway consistent in terms of color temperature.” Things got scary on the day, though, when a voltage drop — resulting from excessive energy consumption during the hot summer — suddenly dimmed the hallway by 2 stops. With a T-stop of only 1, Lubezki had no choice but to wait for the lights to come back up. “That was a location that could have been so simple,” he muses. “Instead, it became very complicated and problematic. “A lot of the locations in Brooklyn, like the Coxes’ brownstone, were incredibly complicated for what you finally see in the movie,” he continues. The brownstone first appears after the ignominious end of Cox’s CIA career; that evening, he and his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), host a dinner party. Among their guests are Harry Pfarrer (Clooney) and his wife, Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel). The plot thickens when it is revealed that Harry has been carrying on a longterm affair with Katie — and shortterm flings with countless other women. When Sandy goes out of Above: The situation gets decidedly sticky when Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), coworkers at Hardbodies Fitness Center, find a copy of Osborne’s memoirs and decide to ransom the files to the highest bidder. Right: Joel Coen (far right) — who co-wrote and co-directed with his brother, Ethan — looks on while Lubezki checks the frame. area of the gym slightly brighter, and that’s where we shot,” says Lubezki. Once Hardbodies was ready, the setup looked deceptively simple, and Lubezki recalls it was a bit offputting to his key grip, Richard Guinness Jr., with whom he had worked on Meet Joe Black and Great Expectations. “I think he was sometimes a bit disappointed,” says the cinematographer. “He would say, ‘Chivo, are you sure this is it?’ I would say, ‘Richard, what can we do? It’s a gym!’ If you start making it too stylized, it just looks wrong.” All the same, Lubezki’s instincts often railed against what he saw. The uncorrected fluorescents cast a slightly green hue on the actors, who were dressed in bright red shirts adorned with the Hardbodies logo. “The shirts bounced semi-magenta light up into their faces,” bemoans the cinematographer. “It’s hard to light something that isn’t pleasing to your eye, and that’s when the directors can help you. I would try not to whine, but I would say to Joel, ‘This is horrendous — is it okay?’ And he would say, ‘Yeah, this is horrendous — it’s great!’ “We didn’t glamorize anybody,” he continues. “The hardest thing was to decide how far to push Fran into looking like somebody who wants to have [cosmetic] surgery. She’s beautiful in real life, but 56 October 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - October 2008

American Cinematographer - October 2008 Contents Editor's Note Short Takes: DirecTV's "Fourth Wall" Campaign Production Slate: Prison Break Production Slate: Need for Speed: Undercover Middle East Intrigue Kingdom of Light Memoirs of a Spook Landmark Gains Post Focus: An Overview of the ASC CDL Filmmakers' Forum: Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Ross Berryman

American Cinematographer - October 2008

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