American Cinematographer - January 2009 - 26

Near right: Cinematographer Maryse Alberti. Far right: The Ram seeks emotional solace from a stripper (Marisa Tomei) who has also experienced her share of hard times. hand; that allowed me to go from higherthan-shoulder to almost floor height or anywhere in between while following the action. Every single shot in this movie was handheld, and it was the first time I’d used the 416. I love that camera!” Alberti’s camera package, supplied by Arri’s Camera Service Center in New York, included Zeiss Ultra 16 prime lenses and two Angenieux Optimo zooms, a 15-40mm Lightweight and a 2876mm. Inspired by the camerawork in the Dardenne brothers’ L’Enfant, the filmmakers wanted the camera to be fixed on Rourke most of the time, often following him from a very close angle. “We wanted a strong sense of intimacy and intensity,” says Alberti. This created some challenges for Nolan during the wrestling matches; he was following the action from within the ring on a wide-angle lens — most of the movie was shot on a 12mm prime — which meant he had to be very close to the actors in order to get good close-ups. “It was very tricky,” he recalls. “Even when glass and debris were flying everywhere and the wrestlers were throwing each other down, I had to try to finesse the shot so I wasn’t throwing shadows, getting hit or allowing [the actors] to bump into me. There was often some kind of contact between us, but you can’t see it in the film because it happened below the lens.” For the lighting of the wrestling matches, Alberti relinquished much of her control to the wrestling promoters, who have their own set of lighting standards. “Different venues do different things, but it’s always a slight variation on the same theme of having lights directly on the four corners of the ring,” she says. “Sometimes I changed the ratio of light in each corner in order to 26 January 2009 add a bit more contrast or a little more definition, but I basically used what was there.” The final match in the film, when The Ram confronts The Ayatollah (Ernest Miller), was a different story. This was the only match that wasn’t filmed at an actual promotion; it was shot at a New Jersey theater the production rented. Production designer Tim Grimes fully constructed the ring, and Alberti and her crew spent three days lighting it. She strove to maintain the lighting configuration used at the promotions, but because this was the film’s climax, “we had to add a little more panache,” she says. She achieved this by creating a horseshoe-shaped rig of colored lights that the wrestlers would walk under on their way to the ring. The Ram, who represents America in this final match, is awash in red, white and blue, whereas The Ayatollah is doused in red and green. One of the more challenging scenes to shoot takes place in the strip club where Cassidy works. In the scene, the camera follows her in a long take as she performs a striptease. None of the crew saw the choreography until the day of the shoot, so in a very short amount of time, Alberti and Nolan had to figure out how Nolan could circle Tomei without throwing any shadows on her body — tough to do in a room full of moving colored lights. “She’s standing up, she’s on a pole, she’s crawling on her belly, she’s in a squatting position and then she’s standing up again,” Nolan recounts. “We decided to mount a monitor on the camera but quickly found that as I went off-axis while viewing, the screen would go black. So we mounted another on the other side, angling one to serve from full high reach to just below chest height, and I would look to the other for all the lower-angle coverage of Tomei’s performance.” As for the shadows, “we had a grip flagging and then unflagging lights as I moved around,” he continues. “After 26 takes, we were eventually able to pull it off without giving away the fact that there’s a camera following her around.” Alberti says she is thrilled to work in a field where stories like The Wrestler come her way. “In the last two years, I did a film on soccer and ended up at the World Cup, I did a film on religious leaders and met the Pope and the Dalai Lama, I did The Wrestler and a movie about truckers, and now I’m doing a documentary on Eliot Spitzer. I like that film takes me in so many different directions, because to me, these are all interesting stories. Whatever genre it is, I want a good script with a good story.” TECHNICAL SPECS 2.40:1 Super 16mm Arri 416 Zeiss and Angenieux lenses Kodak Vision3 500T 7219, Vision2 200T 7217 Digital Intermediate I Erratum In our coverage of Australia in the November issue, we inaccurately credited all of the photos to Douglas Kirkland. James Fisher took some of the shots.

American Cinematographer - January 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2009