American Cinematographer - June 2012 - 8

Editor’s Note
The Avengers is the superhero summit Marvel fans have been waiting for their entire lives. I know this because our associate editor, Jon Witmer, has been vibrating with excitement since 2008, when Nick Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson) first popped up in a post-credits coda to Iron Man. Shortly after Jon was revived by paramedics, he began pleading to cover the production, and he achieved his dream last August, when he was dispatched to his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, to visit the set. Clearly, Jon was the right man for the assignment, as he proves with an exuberant account of the shoot (“All Together Now,” page 34). While we pruned his ambitious first draft just a tad from its original, Leo Tolstoy length, what remains is a definitive piece offering plenty of insights from the filmmakers, including cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, ASC, BSC; director Joss Whedon; visual-effects supervisor Janek Sirrs; production designer James Chinlund; gaffer Chris Napolitano; key grip John Janusek; dimmer-board operator Bryan Booth; digital-imaging technician Daniel Hernandez; and 2nd-unit director of photography Brad Shield. Fans of the Dark Shadows television series are equally keen to see Tim Burton’s bigscreen blood feast, which adds a wry twist by exhuming 18th-century vampire Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) in the swinging ’70s. Bruno Delbonnel, ASC, AFC ably achieved Burton’s desire to create a film that “felt like the Seventies movies that I recall from my youth,” while taking care to create a lighting style that made sense with a vampire lurking about. “Sunlight was one of my principal constraints,” Delbonnel tells Benjamin B (“Blood Relatives,” page 62). “There could be no direct sunlight on the main character, so for the majority of the film he is in a kind of a penumbra.” A retro vibe also lends mirth to Men in Black III , shot by Bill Pope, ASC. This time around, Agent J (Will Smith) must travel back to 1969 to warn his partner, Agent K (played by Josh Brolin in Sixties scenes and Tommy Lee Jones in the present) about an alien who has also turned back the clock to elude capture. “When people ask me what this movie is like, I tell them it’s a Hope and Crosby road picture, a comedy in the classic Hawksian sense,” Pope tells Iain Stasukevich (“Blast from the Past,” page 74). Greig Fraser is another cinematographer who applied a fresh spin to his project’s source material. With Snow White and the Huntsman , he and director Rupert Sanders breathe new life into the titular heroine (Kristen Stewart), who trains for combat before taking on the evil Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron). Fraser says the filmmakers were careful not to let the movie’s spectacle overpower its characters. “We wanted to submerge the viewer in this lush world of big locations and epic scale,” he explains to Jay Holben (“Beauty in Battle,” page 52), “but at the same time, we also wanted to be able to respond to small, intimate moments with our actors.”
Photo by Owen Roizman, ASC.

Stephen Pizzello Executive Editor

American Cinematographer - June 2012

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