American Cinematographer - April 2012 - 72

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Sundance Standouts
Rash (James Floyd, left) and his younger brother, Mo (Fady Elsayed), share a late-night conversation in My Brother the Devil.

them as quite gray and horrible, and we didn’t want to do that,” says Raedeker. “We just wanted to show how these boys see the world.” El Hosaini adds, “It wasn’t that I set out to make a beautiful movie. The choice was all about being very subjective and close to the brothers. It’s their home, and to them it is beautiful. I also think ’Scope made what could be quite a mundane world an adventure.” The format also enhanced the camera’s intimacy with Mo and Rash. El Hosaini recalls, “Shortly before filming began, I was on the bus, and there was a teenaged boy sitting in front of me who had really bad skin. I remember thinking, ‘That’s what this movie needs: I want to be close enough to the characters that you see their bad skin.’ I wanted to see their sweat, their acne, the meaty texture of their skins. ’Scope really pushed us into all those closeups.” Staying close to the brothers also meant a very mobile camera. “There are two heroes in the film, which is not common,” notes Raedeker. “Sally compared their relationship to a strand of DNA; their lives spiral around each other but are always connected. That served as our visual blueprint, and I developed a slightly different camera style for each brother. I used a much
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looser handheld camera with Mo and tried to keep him off-center in the frame, whereas Rash appears with more compositional weight in the middle of the frame and was often shot with a Steadicam. When they shared a scene, I’d choose an angle close to one of their perspectives, as one brother would observe the other. “In prep, I mapped the whole movie out in this fashion, an idea I got from the American Cinematographer article about 127 Hours [Dec. ’10],” he continues. “Anthony Dod Mantle [ASC, BSC, DFF] mapped out the dramatic structure of that movie in a timeline, and I did something similar. It helped me to understand and bring out the interplay between the brothers’ development; it was a great starting point for thinking about camera style and other visual ideas.” He estimates that about 80 percent of the picture was shot handheld, and when the camera wasn’t on his shoulder, it was on an EasyRig. “Most of the actors, including Fady, had never acted before, and it was important for me to operate because I needed to react to what they were doing quite spontaneously,” he notes. The casting of a number of local non-professionals was part of El Hosaini’s quest for authenticity, and so
American Cinematographer

was the choice to shoot on location on a council estate in Hackney. To everyone’s surprise, shortly before filming began last summer, the area erupted in fires and rioting. (A police shooting on a nearby council estate sparked the unrest.) “Fear of further riots led London to pass a city-wide law prohibiting the filming of youths with guns and knives on the streets all summer,” says Raedeker. “Sally had to rewrite a few scenes at the last minute to move them indoors, and that changed the dynamic of things. We couldn’t recce [the new locations] properly because they were confirmed just before we were scheduled to film in them. We had to adapt quickly, and Sally was fantastic at thinking on her feet and coming up with solutions.” He notes that a shared background in documentaries — his as a cameraman, El Hosaini’s as a director and assistant producer — helped enormously. “Documentaries force you to think on the spot, especially if you take risks and do something visually interesting, because you can’t reshoot it,” he says. “I think you learn an enormous amount, and if you can bring that into your practice in drama it can lead to good results. “A lot of things changed during production, and some of it was just the

My Brother the Devil photos by Étienne Bol and Nick Wall. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of Pacha Pictures.

American Cinematographer - April 2012

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