American Cinematographer - May 2017 - 18

Left: Dadabhoy frames up with a Blackmagic camera. Right: Executive producer
and 2nd-unit co-cinematographer Bela Böke readies a jib shot.

learns to embrace life; her wardrobe starts
off cold and blue, and eventually gets
warmer so that at the end she's wearing a
mustard color."
Once the colors were established,
Dadabhoy didn't alter them during the
shoot. "When we were shooting, I was
mostly concerned with the lighting - with
the amount of contrast, specifically," she
recalls. "The image has more contrast at the
beginning and becomes brighter and
happier as the story progresses."
Dadabhoy adds that her approach to
the lighting was extremely simple. "I
wanted something that would be broad
and easy to manage, so in the house you're
often just looking at two 1.8K HMIs outside
the window, with a little negative fill or a
bounce board [inside]." In this regard
Dadabhoy was influenced by Bruno
Delbonnel, ASC, AFC's work on Big Eyes
(AC Jan. '15). She explains, "I saw that
movie on the plane on the way to the
shoot, and was struck by the nice way the
light came into the apartment and only hit
Amy Adams in certain parts of the frame. I
felt I'd be really happy if I could emulate
that."
For all of her preplanning, Dadabhoy
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May 2017

acknowledges that at times she had to
adapt her design to the practical limitations
of production. "All of Jane's scenes in the
house were shot according to which
wardrobe she was wearing, and what time
of day it was supposed to be for that
wardrobe," the cinematographer notes. "I
was adding CTO on the lights or ND to
knock down the light coming from outside
- we were doing a lot of day for night."
Bicycle-riding scenes, which required
a body double for Birkin, also called for
careful consideration. "There was only one
set of wardrobe, so there was a lot of coordinating between the second unit with the
double and the first unit with Jane, and I
was very particular about what time of day
I wanted certain exteriors to be shot at,"
Dadabhoy says, adding that she chose to
embrace the circumstances and let them
inform the visual style. "I knew that I could
control the frame and I could control the
lenses, and the other things I had to keep
simple and fast because I didn't want to be
cutting into the director's time with the
actors. The challenge was making sure the
lighting was still beautiful under those
conditions."
Composition and movement were
American Cinematographer

also influenced by practical considerations.
"Our locations were really, really small, and
that's why a lot of the film was shot with
the camera locked-off," Dadabhoy says.
But this wasn't a limitation so much as a
reality that comfortably fit the plan she
already had. "As the lead character gets
more active and the story evolves, we add
more movement and go from locked-off
compositions to handheld shots and a
crane, and for the last scene where she
goes to Zurich, we hired Steadicam operator Lukas Franz so that the footage would
have energy but not feel chaotic."
Ultimately, the intersection between
Dadabhoy's meticulous planning during
prep and the energy generated by the
necessity of responding to the moment
during shooting gave rise to La Femme et le
TGV's blend of visual elegance and spontaneity. "The whole look of the movie was
born out of the conditions under which we
shot it," she admits. "It goes back to the
idea of all the visual references we had and
all the things the director and I talked about.
You can plan and plan, but in the end you
have to let the locations and the actors tell
you what the movie's going to be."
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - May 2017
