American Cinematographer - January 2016 - 44

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Left for Dead
Top: Fitzgerald
and Jim Bridger
(Will Poulter,
background)
are on the
lookout as they
make their way
through a
raided village.
Bottom: Hardy
takes direction
from Iñárritu.

in one seamless flow with minimal
cuts."
Virtually the entire movie is shot
with a moving camera, tracking actors
in one of "three different modes," as
Sakamoto explains: either handheld by
Lubezki, or on a Steadicam or
Technocrane operated by Sakamoto.
"Iñárritu challenged us to move the
camera with the actors," Sakamoto says,
"sometimes covering 360 degrees of
view and often at eye level, then going
to ground level and back up again, all
within one shot."
Given The Revenant's shooting
conditions, exposure challenges were
constant. In this regard, Lubezki's partnership with digital-imaging technician
Arthur To was crucial. "One of the
aspects that needed to be in sync was
exposure and iris pulling," To explains.
44

January 2016

"Chivo pushes the limits of any medium
he is shooting on. He may often shoot
toward the sun and execute long takes
that move from the inside of a dark
room to a blazing sun outside - and
then back through a dark group of trees.
The range is always pushed to what the
camera can handle. On top of that, he is
extremely critical regarding exposure,
and aims to put the image at an exact
stop. On many movies, I may just help
set the exposure from shot to shot or
occasionally do an iris pull, but working
with Chivo involves riding the iris to his
desired exposure on almost every shot as
we move through forests, cabins and the
bright outdoors.
"Working only with natural light
made the job more complex," he adds.
"While I was constantly chasing the
exposure, I was also chasing continuity
American Cinematographer

of the depth of field between takes -
not scenes, but takes. So, there was also
a rush of changing ND filters every one
or two takes in order to have a depth of
field and f-stop that matched the previous take."
"My preferred lenses are the
[Arri/Zeiss] Master Primes and Leica
Summilux-Cs," Lubezki says. "A very
small range of lenses." His main lens
was a Master Prime 14mm, with 12mm
and 16mm used on occasion. He notes
that the Leica lenses - of which the
production employed the 16mm, the
widest focal length available for that
series - were particularly useful when a
lighter-weight lens was warranted. The
cinematographer explains with a laugh,
"As I age, certain equipment becomes
very heavy for all the handheld work, so
the weight of the lenses does matter.
The Leica lenses are light, but [retain]
an incredible image."
The production encountered an
ongoing back-focus challenge with its
extensively used Master Prime wide
lenses whenever the temperature
dropped to near 0°. The problem wasn't
fully sorted out until a few weeks into
production, when Lubezki and Connor
teamed with Panavision to find a solution. According to Connor, neither he
nor the Panavision team had seen this
phenomenon before on other shows
shot in similar weather.
"The problem," Lubezki says,
"was that in Alberta, they have Chinook
winds that can raise the temperature at
any time, in a matter of minutes, by as
American Cinematographer - January 2016

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