American Cinematographer - January 2020 - 81

ing; he had always wanted to get that
feeling into a movie but hadn't yet
done it. We had a lot of creative freedom, partly because we were liberated from historical accuracy -
ultimately, the names of the characters and the underlying events were
all changed. Zhang wanted to make
the film very Chinese in tone and
color. After trying a lot of different
things with color palettes in preproduction, we finally broke through
and arrived at a much more extreme
expression of Chinese classical
aesthetics than I initially expected.
Chinese traditional landscape painting was our most important reference. As you may know, it uses a
form of perspective that is very
different from European painting -
it's not a feeling of close and far so
much as large and small. People
appear very small based on the vastness of the landscape, and the moun-

tains wash away into nothingness as
they go farther and farther back.
That's what we were trying to get at.
Were there other visual references?
Zhao: There was a great Hong
Kong director named King Hu who
did classic wuxia, and we were definitely thinking of him. And, of
course, Kurosawa. The overall feeling
of Shadow does reflect Zhang's love
for Kurosawa's work. Also, before we
started shooting, Zhang was in L.A.
and saw a special screening of Mad
Max: Fury Road [AC June '15], which
had not played in China. Something
about the way George Miller created
a completely unique and stylized
world inspired Zhang; he was
thrilled that a director of Miller's age
could do something so unlike
anything he or anyone else had done
before, and he responded strongly to
the unified, organic vision of the

movie - the way the cinematography, production design, costumes,
editing and performances all worked
together. He said, 'If we could accomplish that on Shadow, I would be very
happy.' It's actually very unusual
when working on a Chinese movie to
be so clear about everything you aim
to achieve in every discipline, but
that's what we wanted.
How did the choice of camera
and lenses help you achieve your
goals?
Zhao: We were shooting 5K
with the Red Weapon Helium 8K and
Arri/Zeiss Master Primes, lenses that
gave me the sharp contrast I wanted.
One reason we chose the Red
Weapon is because it's relatively
lightweight, and we were shooting a
lot of action where we needed something we could rig together quickly
and move easily. We shot 5K instead
of 8K because it better facilitated the

"The intention was to make the camera moves we used majestic and Shakespearean," Zhao says. "We were going for a kind of gravitas in the story and
performances, and limited, intentional camera movement enabled that."

www.ascmag.com

January 2020

81



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American Cinematographer - January 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - January 2020

Contents
American Cinematographer - January 2020 - Intro
American Cinematographer - January 2020 - Cover1
American Cinematographer - January 2020 - Cover2
American Cinematographer - January 2020 - 1
American Cinematographer - January 2020 - Contents
American Cinematographer - January 2020 - 3
American Cinematographer - January 2020 - 4
American Cinematographer - January 2020 - 5
American Cinematographer - January 2020 - 6
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American Cinematographer - January 2020 - 8
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American Cinematographer - January 2020 - 70
American Cinematographer - January 2020 - 70a
American Cinematographer - January 2020 - 70b
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American Cinematographer - January 2020 - Cover3
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