American Cinematographer - January 2008 - 24

Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (in wheelchair) and director Julian Schnabel discuss their next shot. me getting the shutter out of sync. I’m pulling the images across the frame, because the shutter is not really synchronized with the motion of the camera. So you get this smear from the top to the bottom of the frame. Because it’s a variable device, it allows you to smear the image, then go back to the regular image. We used that a tremendous amount.” Another important element of Bauby’s POV was a hand-cranked camera. Using an Arri 435 modified to accommodate a hand-crank, Kaminski could change camera speed, wind forward and backward, and doubleexpose the negative. This allowed a layering effect that was especially important in Bauby’s death scene. At that point, he’s in a dreamlike state, and various figures enter the frame and address him one last time, overlapping and dissolving into one another. “I was thinking, what happens when someone is dying?” says the cinematographer. “The brain cells are dying, the electrical pulses are firing right and wrong, so your future is already in the past, and people are coming to you, appearing and disappearing. It makes no sense in terms of continuity, but I found it emotionally right for the movie.” Occasionally, Kaminski manipulated camera speed during flashbacks to Bauby’s days of good health. In one such 24 January 2008 shot, he and his girlfriend are driving to Lourdes in a convertible, and her long hair is blowing directly toward the camera. As actress Marina Hands stood in the back of a truck with fans and blowers on her hair, “I was constantly changing camera speed, going from 48 fps to 12 fps to 6 fps to 48 fps,” says Kaminski. Digital effects in the film were limited, mostly serving to enhance the camera-eye’s “blinks.” Some blinks were created organically, with Kaminski simply closing his fingers over the lens. Others were done manually against a bluescreen and then enhanced and repeated in post. The frequency of such dissolves meant that about 30 percent of the film went through a digital intermediate (DI); the rest was timed photochemically. Éclair Laboratories in France handled both tasks. “Nobody does dissolves anymore,” Kaminski laments. “It used to be that they’d do an A negative and a B negative, and you would overlap and do a beautiful job. Now it’s all done through digital manipulation. It’s not organic, [and] I just don’t operate that way.” Although Kaminski used an array of techniques to create a varied visual vocabulary for Bauby’s POV, camera movement, by contrast, played a very limited role. “We knew that for the first 30 minutes, the camera was basically in bed,” he says. “Sometimes Mathieu was lying next to the camera with his feet or hands in the foreground, and people were coming toward the camera with a bit of dialogue. When we first started filming, we did tiny moves, but then we realized there really shouldn’t be movement per se because he’s lying in bed. So the only movement is panning left or right, or a shift in focus; focus became the main device. Later on, he’s in a wheelchair, and we’d have the operator in the wheelchair and the actors would act toward the camera.” Much of the blocking was worked out on the spot because Schnabel had no interest in storyboards or shot lists. “Julian has a great sense of composition and color,” says Kaminski. “He’s an artist; he’s not interested in conventional composition. He wasn’t interested in coverage, either. I’d say, ‘Julian, do you want another shot?’ And he’d say, ‘No, let’s keep it that way.’ That’s his strength: he was not tempted to pull away from what the original script told us.” As a result, making the film was “actually a relatively easy process because we were not doing extra coverage with wider shots or different perspectives. The first 30 minutes is just actors talking to the camera.” Approximately three weeks of the 44-day shoot were spent in Bauby’s hospital room, a set built at Berck Maritime Hospital. Its walls were curved to soften the room and enhance the sense of disorientation. “You lose your sense of perspective,” notes Kaminski. “There are no sharp edges, so you don’t know where the walls end.” Otherwise, all locations were practical at the seaside hospital. “It was such a visually interesting hospital, with all the slight decay,” recalls Kaminski. Bauby uses the diving bell as a metaphor for his locked-in state, and this water theme was echoed in his room’s palette and lighting. Schnabel picked the color scheme: black-andgreen linoleum floor, blue pajamas and turquoise walls. The director explains, “The water is like a womb in some way. At first, the whole thing feels claustro-

American Cinematographer - January 2008

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