American Cinematographer - March 2010 - 18

Production Slate Malik (Tahar Rahim) is a petty criminal who arrives at a French prison poor, illiterate and without family or friends in A Prophet, which was nominated for an Academny Award for Best ForeignLanguage Film. I A Self-Made Man By Benjamin B Sitting at a table in Paris’ 19th district, director Jacques Audiard and cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine, AFC laugh as they recall the pressure they experienced during the world premiere of A Prophet (Un Prophète) at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Because of deadlines, the filmmakers had opted for a 2K digital projection of their movie in the JPEG2000 format. Fontaine says he knew that digital would suit the film, which was shot on 35mm, but Audiard confesses that he was “a doubting Thomas.” The lights went down, and when the picture came up, Audiard was dumbfounded. “I discovered my film!” he recalls. “That’s when I discovered the finesse of Stéphane’s work. It looked like some kind of Caravaggio … the skin tones, the shadows, the resolution. It was incredible.” A Prophet went on to win the festival’s Grand Prize. Reflecting on the quality of the Cannes screening, which was done with a Christie CP2000 DLP projector in a system configured by XDC, Audiard says, “I know less about this than Stéphane does, but I think that the combination of 35mm, the digital intermediate and JPEG2000 is simply miraculous. It’s a miraculous hybrid that magnifies the beauty of 35mm.” Fontaine explains that, after doing numerous comparison tests, the filmmakers chose to shoot 35mm 18 March 2010 rather than 16mm or digital because 35mm was less ostentatious than the other formats. “The 16mm was very beautiful, but it brought a false documentary feel, a kind of pose,” he notes. A Prophet, Audiard’s second collaboration with Fontaine (after The Beat My Heart Skipped; AC Sept. ’05), follows the six-year prison sentence of a young Arab-Frenchman, Malik (Tahar Rahim), who transforms from a lowly convict into a respected leader. The story begins with Malik arriving in prison, where he is singled out by the head of the prison’s powerful Corsican clan, César (Niels Arestrup), who gives him an ultimatum: kill a fellow Arab or be killed. In a succession of harrowing scenes, Malik becomes a killer and eventually a member of the privileged Corsican gang, whose members treat him as a servant. Over time, by dint of his intelligence and daring, Malik makes a place for himself in the prison’s milieu, where, as one convict tells him, “the idea is to come out a little less stupid than you went in.” When Malik finally leaves the prison, he is truly a self-made man. Audiard considered shooting on location in a European prison but quickly decided that he needed the freedom of a set. A Prophet was shot in an abandoned factory, with an entire cellblock built on a floor some 30' above a courtyard, another important setting. Production designer Michel Barthélémy began by building a “model cell” as a set with thin removable walls and an open ceil- American Cinematographer A Prophet photos by Roger Arpajou, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

American Cinematographer - March 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - March 2010