American Cinematographer - June 2010 - 20

Right: Director Debra Granik and cinematographer Michael McDonough work out their approach to an interior. Below: With 1st AC Michael Burke standing by in the background, McDonough prepares to take a reading.

get a reasonably priced rental from Abel Cine Tech [in New York].” The filmmakers used three Red Drives, whose 320GB capacity allowed Granik to run multiple takes without breaking. “During Down to the Bone, we had a saying, ‘Still rolling,’ printed on T-shirts,” says McDonough, “and we applied the same shooting philosophy to this movie. The risk is that if a drive goes down, you lose a lot of material!” Shooting single camera, the cinematographer had a second Red for backup and occasional B-unit work. Halfway through the shoot, the A camera began inexplicably shutting down about 10 hours into the day. “I think it was the hard drive — it just gets tired,” muses McDonough. A different problem affected the backup camera. “We plugged in the same settings, but across the board, it had noise issues,” he says. McDonough decided to tap camera
20 June 2010

operator Alan Pierce for the project. “I believe that as the director of photography on a digital feature, I have to be watching the monitor and assessing the image, more so than on a film feature,” says McDonough. “The image I see through the digital camera’s viewfinder is not sufficient, I believe, to allow me to do my job properly; I’d be handing off a massive amount of my responsibility to someone else. When you’ve got a long, close relationship with a director and handheld operating is important, the trick is to find an operator who can keep the visual language consistent. I’ve worked with Al for years and knew he would get the style Debra and I have developed on our collaborations.” McDonough lit day interiors through windows using an 18K or 4Ks, supplementing inside with small tungsten units, Kino Flos or China balls. “I worked as a gaffer for years, so I know where to put lights, and we
American Cinematographer

don’t move them around much once we start,” he says. That helped keep the tempo up. “Debra likes actors to feel it’s not just a series of shots. She wants them to feel like they’re in a real environment so they can stay in character for long periods of time.” In low-light interiors, McDonough dealt with the Red’s native 320 ASA by shooting without filtration and lighting as if he were using 250-ASA film and fast lenses. “The camera’s sensor is balanced for daylight, so once you get into tungsten, it’s less sensitive. With digital, I always want to get a healthy ‘negative,’ so I light up more and crush it later.” Consistent with the backwoods settings, fall-off and darkness were common in night scenes. “Through watching films like The Duellists, I got comfortable with half the actor’s face being dark,” Granik says. “For swiftness, China balls and Kino Flos are my best friends, and Michael will swing that way. He can do ornate lighting, of course, but he’s willing to strip it down to collaborate with me.” Grip equipment was also lean. An EasyRig occasionally came into play, and the crew devised some poor-man’s tracking devices. For shots of Dee walking down the road, McDonough put a Matthews bungee mount inside a van and shot through the open side door. At a cattle auction, he saw the potential of the catwalk railing to act as dolly track and fitted an adjustable CamTranSystem to ride the handrails. This tracked with Dee as she walked down the catwalk and provided some POV shots when she chased another character. For the climactic night scene, in which Dee is taken to a pond to retrieve a body, Condors were not an option. McDonough’s solution was to divide the scene into dusk, day-for-night and night-fornight, shooting the entire scene in one day. The filmmakers arrived at noon under an uncharacteristically blazing sun, donned wading gaiters, and went into the water to capture wide shots with a classic day-fornight approach: “Shoot in the daytime, avoid seeing the sky, crush it and make it a cooler color in post.” Next, they waited until dusk to shoot the scene’s opening, when Dee and two older women arrive, park and walk down to the lake. “We had about a 20-

American Cinematographer - June 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - June 2010