American Cinematographer - December 2010 - 41

small space and let the light play practically without using Fresnels. I hardly ever use Fresnels any more. How much interaction did you have with the production designer, Thérèse DePrez? Libatique: In prep, our offices were right next to each other, so we had a lot of conversations, and she’d always show me samples of what she had in mind. Darren likes a designer to pitch an idea for a limited palette, and then we all agree on different colors. We assigned some symbolism to the various colors: black represents the darker side

scenes in All That Jazz. Luckily,it had balconies, so we just put four spots on four corners. We rehearsed the dance with the spot operators, and I would cue them on the walkie. The direct reference for that scene was a 1957 Soviet film version of Swan Lake. For a long time,I thought it was too simple an approach to the scene, but we actually shot that toward the end of production, and I’d already exhausted

all kinds of options in the other dance scenes. I had nowhere else to go! Mirrors are a big visual motif. Did you avoid camera reflections practically or digitally? Libatique: We did as much as we could practically, but we knew there would be moments when we wanted to create seemingly unachievable shots, and for those we just removed the reflections digitally with the help of

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of Nina’s character, white is her innocent side, pink represents her childhood, and green conveys envy and ambition. For example, the pink bedroom with all the stuffed animals shows that her mother never let her grow up, and the apartment’s green walls underscore the competitive nature of their relationship. Darren makes bold choices, and I ask myself if it’s too much sometimes, but I trust his instincts. The film’s first scene is very striking, with Nina dancing in a limbo-like space that’s illuminated by a single spotlight. Libatique: The goal was to make it look like one spotlight, but we actually had four operators choreographing four spotlights. We would switch from a backlight to a frontlight, and so on. It was a square room, all black — it’s the space they used for Joe Gideon’s death

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American Cinematographer - December 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 2010
