American Cinematographer - March 2011 - 22

Top: Karim (Karim Saleh) and Tatiana (Katarina Muller) soak in the ambience at the hip Chelsea lounge Bungalow 8. Bottom: Asya feels a romantic spark with Javier (José María de Tavira), a Mexican graduate student.

want it to be dirty.’” Consequently, scouting became a matter of walking around N ew York and knocking on doors to find the perfect locations. Asya’s Chinatown loft was discovered in this manner. “We had a lot of material to shoot in the loft or just outside it,” says Crosignani. “What caught Zeina’s attention at that location was the red on the stairs to the loft, and the texture of the walls.” She adds that a gallery was chosen because of the view outside its windows. “What was visible outside a window was
22 March 2011

important to Zeina.” Shooting with an Arri 16-SR3 and Zeiss Super Speed lenses, Crosignani used Kodak Vision2 250D 7205 for day interiors and exteriors and Vision3 500T 7219 for night interiors and exteriors. “That was a combination of needing the sensitivity of the film and not having enough money to light a block in New York City!” she notes. “A lot of our lighting was practical. We didn’t have large lights or Condors.” The loft was challenging because “it
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had really large windows, and we knew we didn’t have the budget to gel them, nor the time to change gels when necessary,” continues the cinematographer. “That’s part of what led me to shoot a daylight-balanced negative.” Filming at the loft took place over a week in February. “Some days were snowing and cold and cloudy, and others were like a heat wave,” recalls Crosignani. “It was tricky to keep [lighting] consistent without having lights outside — we were on the third floor. We used a lot of natural lighting and added to that inside, mostly with 2-by-4 Kinos rigged above the windows at an angle and Jo-Lekos [a 400watt Joker HMI inside a Source Four], which allowed me to bounce light at more difficult angles.” The story includes numerous street sequences, many of them at night. Scenes of Asya traversing the city streets with her boyfriend, Javier (José María de Tavira), are sometimes so dark that “you see the lights in the street but can’t really see their faces,” acknowledges Crosignani. “Zeina said, ‘I don’t care to see their faces; I want to feel as if they’re walking around Chinatown, and it’s not always lit.’” Given that so many of Durra’s references were black-and-white, “I think if she could have muted the colors of the city, she would have,” the cinematographer continues. “But we knew we had to deal with sodium-vapor streetlights and the colors of Chinatown, so we decided to embrace and expand upon them.” A series of bars also served as locations, and they are partly distinguished from each other by the use of color. The natural tones of scenes in the loft give way to the golden hues of the trendy Bungalow 8, or the blue-green of a neighborhood bar. At one location, St. Nick’s Jazz Pub in Harlem, the filmmakers even enhanced the existing color. In this scene, Asya has a cathartic moment dancing to an African band. “I wanted to separate that scene from the other colorful ones and push it even further, make it more red and more yellow,” says Crosignani. “The ceilings were very low, so we used some low-profile Pars, some batten lights and some LEDs that our gaffer, Derek Gross, owned.” Another scene, in which Asya dances with Javier on an East Village street

American Cinematographer - March 2011

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