American Cinematographer - April 2014 - 24

Production Slate

A Colorful Crook
By Mark Dillon

The title character of the comedic crime drama Dom Hemingway is a force of nature. A London safecracker fresh out of jail,
Hemingway (Jude Law) clings to a self-defeating ethical code and has
serious anger-management issues. After extracting bloody revenge
on the man who slept with his ex-wife, Hemingway reunites with his
sidekick, Dickie (Richard E. Grant), and heads to France to collect a
hoped-for reward from Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir), the mob boss
for whom Hemingway took the fall. However, things don't go as
planned.
Director of photography Giles Nuttgens, BSC, who hails from
the U.K. but calls Spain home, says he is still amazed that this very
British film was written and directed by Richard Shepard (The Matador), a New York-based filmmaker who had previously spent all of
five days in England. "Richard came up with a version of this world
that was completely believable to anybody in the U.K., and he
wanted to visually translate to the screen the energy he imagined
someone like Hemingway would have, coming fresh out of prison,"
says Nuttgens. "That, for me, was the big kick."
"I am a huge fan of British gangster movies, and that has
soaked into my DNA," explains Shepard, speaking to AC separately.
"And when we started prepping in London, I was educated enor24

April 2014

mously in what the city had to offer visually."
Nuttgens recalls telling Shepard that the story felt like "'an
evening with Dom Hemingway.' There is a plot and a character arc,
but that's less important than trying to explain the bubble in which
the character exists. He's come out after 12 years in jail; he's out of
his time and period but still behaving the same way that landed him
in prison in the first place." This observation impressed Shepard,
who had admired Nuttgens' work in the thrillers The Deep End (AC
April '01) and Young Adam. "I immediately connected with Giles'
idea about what was important in the movie," Shepard says.
Prep involved one week of scouting in France, followed by
three weeks in England. The plan was to shoot on film, which
seemed appropriate given the retro nature of the main character,
but the project's financing structure led the team to switch to the
Arri Alexa Studio a week before shooting began. Shepard, who has
directed a number of television projects shot digitally, observes, "I
loved the idea of the Alexa because of the effortlessness of rolling
without worrying about cutting. And I didn't want to always be
reloading." Nuttgens, however, had doubts. "I hadn't shot with the
Alexa at that point, and Richard and I watched three films shot with
it that we found sort of dull visually. The skin tones were desaturated
and looked gray, and that worried us. That wasn't the look we
wanted."
One Alexa feature that heartened them was the crime drama

American Cinematographer

Dom Hemingway photos and frame grabs courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures. Photos by Nick Wall.

London
safecracker Dom
Hemingway
(Jude Law), fresh
off a 12-year
prison sentence,
wastes no time
returning to
trouble in Dom
Hemingway,
shot by Giles
Nuttgens, BSC.

American Cinematographer - April 2014

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