American Cinematographer - June 2010 - 56

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Very French Revenge

On a Paris rooftop, Bazil gathers intelligence on an arms dealer by dropping a microphone down his chimney.

Nagata reveals that the filmmakers tested the Red One for Micmacs but found the latitude “reduced,” so they instead opted to shoot 35mm, mainly with a Panaflex Millennium XL. The cinematographer suggested shooting with Panavision Primo Classics and an Angenieux Optimo 14-50mm zoom. “Jean-Pierre likes the sharpest possible image, and he always shoots with a wide angle,” he notes. Micmacs was mostly shot with 21mm, 24mm, 27mm, 30mm and 35mm Primo Classics, whose close-focus capabilities suited Jeunet’s camera placement, which is typically very near the actors. According to Jeunet, the main lens on the production was the 21mm. “My telephoto lens is a 35mm!” he jokes. He finds long focal lengths “boring because they compress everything. Wide-angle lenses create something stronger; they give expressiveness to the eyes, to the look, to the set, and you get more depth of field. It’s a real style. Look at the films of Orson Welles, Sergio Leone and Stanley Kubrick.” Many directors avoid wide angles when doing close-ups because they can distort a face, but “because I use actors with interesting faces, that’s not a problem — on the contrary, it makes them even more graphic,” says Jeunet. “But it’s a more delicate matter with women, so I always do tests with them.” He selects a focal length and
56 June 2010

lens height to suit each actress, and he notes that wide-angle lenses can actually flatter some female faces. “I’m often shooting down, and because short focal lengths work well with big eyes, they give a doe-eye effect because the eyes look bigger from above. From below, it becomes ugly.” Many of the shots of Bazil are

“Long focal lengths compress everything. Wide-angle lenses create something stronger.”

from below. “A man can take an angle from below,” states Jeunet. “Micmacs is a story of a man who grows as he takes his vengeance, so we wanted to see Bazil grow; we didn’t want to crush him. The camera is never at eye level; I find that boring.” Nagata shot Micmacs on a single film stock, Kodak’s Vision3 500T 5219. “On almost every film,
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you end up at the end of the day with the sun setting, and sometimes you’re even shooting close-ups with night falling,” says the cinematographer. “On one of my projects, I used three stocks, and I had to go from 50-ASA to 250-ASA and then to 500-ASA for one scene. It was all mixed up, and it was terrible when I did the timing.” He adds that he has found the grain of 5219 “the same” as that of slower stocks. Color is a distinctive element of Jeunet’s style, and all of his films are dominated by warm colors. Micmacs, however, also contains less typical gleams of cyan, blue, green and even mauve, especially in the night footage. “I go more toward warm colors than cold ones,” acknowledges the director. “I’d like to try other colors, but it’s also true that when the sky is gray and you’re shooting the gray buildings of Paris, the only way to save the image is to go toward warm colors.” Nevertheless, he continues, “with Tetsuo, we made some other color choices.” Nagata recalls that he and Jeunet “spoke about using complementary colors.” In many of the night scenes, Nagata added strong, cold colors to the warm palette. A good example occurs early in the film, when Bazil is shot in the video store. Nagata lit the video-store interior with a mixture of cyan-, green- and orange-gelled Kino Flos, replacing the existing fluores-

American Cinematographer - June 2010

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