American Cinematographer - April 2015 - 34

Left: Terrier goes to Stanley (Ray Winstone) for advice. Right: Cinematographer Flavio Labiano plans a shot.

the A camera [throughout the shoot], which
sometimes had a big ALZ3 270-840mm
[Primo Anamorphic Zoom T4.5].
How does it impact your job
when the director also operates the
camera?
Labiano: Once you have the director
on the front line, everything happens much
faster. Problems get solved right away.
What camera ISO did you use?
Labiano: We mostly shot 800, and
when we went to night exteriors we pushed
to 1,200.
There are a lot of night exteriors
in the Barcelona part of the film. How
did you shoot those?
Labiano: Ninety percent of the
movie was filmed on locations, so we had to
constantly adapt. For a lot of these locations
on La Rambla, we couldn't lay cables, but
because our Tecpros and Kino Flo Celeb
LEDs were battery-powered, we could just
hang lights from a balcony or wherever. This
was the first time I didn't have to run power
on a film set, though we didn't use batteries for interiors or for dialogue scenes,
because we didn't want to be in the middle
of the scene and have a light go down.
The light is again different once
the story gets to Gibraltar. It's hard and
cool, very coastal.
Labiano: Gibraltar looks basically
the same as Africa. You can see Morocco
from there, so I wanted it to feel different
than Barcelona. But we never went to
34

April 2015

Gibraltar - it was all shot in Barcelona. I
had to constantly remind myself to not
make the whole film look the same.
Here the conflict between Cox
and Terrier comes to a head during a
bullfight. How did you stage this
sequence?
Labiano: Bullfighting is not allowed
anymore in Barcelona, so before we started
principal photography we went down to
shoot a real bullfight in Madrid with a dozen
cameras and filmed most of the wide shots
that appear in the movie. Then we shot
most of the footage with the actors in the
middle of the summer at La Monumental, a
gorgeous old Moorish arena in downtown
Barcelona - one of the oldest in Spain. The
thing is, in Madrid they don't celebrate the
bullfights until the sun goes down, from 7
to 9 p.m., because of the primetime TV
rights. But in Barcelona we were restricted
by the actors' schedules, which meant we
had to shoot our arena during the day. La
Monumental is an open space, and the sun
hits it all day, so gaffer José Luis Rodríguez
had to silk the whole place for three or four
days with a giant 300-by-90-foot silk to
match the Madrid footage.
Did you color grade on set?
Labiano: We did, with [digital-imaging technician] Jesús Haro using Pomfort's
LiveGrade. There was so much material for
the editors every day, we needed to give
them something that was ready to go. It
was limited, but it worked. For the dailies,
American Cinematographer

we had Scratch Lab to create specific LUTs
for the different countries. That helped a lot
when shooting pickups for one location in
another, like when we had to shoot a barn
in London for a barn in Spain.
Where did you post the film?
Labiano: We did a 2K color grade
with Jean-Clement Soret, [working] on
[Autodesk] Lustre at Technicolor London.
Other than the infrared look [added to some
point-of-view shots], everything else was
just balancing color and exposure, setting
the looks of the different countries.
Given that you couldn't
completely predict the film's look in
advance, how do you feel about the
way it ultimately turned out?
Labiano: I think that under the
circumstances, we did a good job. Even if
we [could have had extra] time to do more
sophisticated photography, we still might
have said 'no' because it wouldn't match
the rest. The story gives you the look, and
you have to go with it.

TECHNICAL SPECS
2.40:1
Digital Capture
Arri Alexa XT, Red Epic MX
Panavision C Series, Primo, ALZ3; Kowa;
Nipponscope
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American Cinematographer - April 2015

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