American Cinematographer - February 2015 - 47

go deeper and richer.
What were Selma's visual touchstones?
Young: Ava said to me, 'I want
this film to have a Kodachrome look to
it.' That was very generic. But then she
went out and found a specific reference:
Paul Fusco's 'RFK Funeral Train'
photos. That was the main inspiration
for the whole look of the film. He shot
all this amazing Kodachrome footage of
people gathered on the tracks as the
train went cross-country. Everything
was very under, but then there'd be these
pops of primary color. People were
holding American flags, and the red in
the flag was very rich. But the skin tones
and foliage in the trees were all very
subdued. Tom had those photographs
before we started shooting, so we made
our viewing LUT lean toward that
Kodachrome look.
How did you and Ava go about
staging and photographing the three
marches?
Young: One thing that was clear
early on was that this film had to have a
very horizontal field of view. We had to
be able to capture marches that were
about the front lines: rows and rows of
people moving in one vector toward
freedom. That's one of the reasons we
chose anamorphic and had wide frames.
But then, from that wide perspective,
we had to compress everything down to
the faces of the period. We've all sort of
generalized the Civil Rights movement
as this thing around Martin Luther
King, but the Civil Rights movement
had many people committed to it at
various levels. So it was about finding
those interesting faces amongst the
crowd that could bring a depth to the
story.
Some of Selma's historical
events are horrifically violent, but the
way you filmed them is often one step
removed from reality, with slow
motion or manipulated shutter
angles. Break down two such scenes:
the murder of four little girls in the
Baptist church in Birmingham, and
Bloody Sunday, when 600 marchers
were attacked with billy clubs and tear

Top: King marches alongside a number of American religious leaders.
Bottom: The crew utilizes a Technocrane for a high-angle shot.

gas on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Young: In the first scene, it's really
about brutality against the black body.
Twenty-four frames per second just
doesn't do it; it doesn't give you all the
in-between brutality that 1,000 frames
would. This was our opportunity to say,
indisputably, that these moments were
brutal. We wanted to slow down the
moment to give the audience the opportunity to meditate on it. We also kept
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the color yellow, which was organic to
that church. [The girls are descending a
staircase lit through stained glass when
the bomb goes off.] That yellow, which
represents the color of innocence, gets
turned into something morose: The
[camera's] pull-out over the bodies is
very monochromatic. Something colorful turns into something very dark and
devoid of life.
With Bloody Sunday, we just
February 2015

47
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American Cinematographer - February 2015

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