American Cinematographer - June 2018 - 56

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Burn After Reading

Clarisse McClellan (Sofia Boutella, above) trades information about book hoarders
with Beatty in exchange for favors.

François Truffaut, who worked with
cinematographer - and later director
- Nicolas Roeg, BSC. Morgenthau
maintains that the earlier movie did not
affect his approach. "It's pretty campylooking now," he opines. "It's very
broad-lit. I don't think there's a shadow
in the entire movie even though there's
fire. It's a 1960s version of futuristic,
which is cool, but we aren't doing futuristic. Ramin went back more to the
book to write his screenplay."
When Morgenthau finally
arrived in Toronto, it was 1 a.m., and six
hours later he was on a bus heading out
for the first day of a three-day tech
scout. Easing the transition was 1st AC
Russel Bowie, who had already been
prepping Fahrenheit 451 for weeks, and
with whom the cinematographer had
previously photographed three features,
most recently the thriller The Factory
(2012).
While prepping the feature,
Bahrani shot every scene on his phone
with stand-ins, but once production
began, he encouraged input from
Morgenthau and the entire cast and
crew. "You want to make sure you're
filming a scene actually worth filming,"
the director says about the process. "If it
is worth doing, then I say, 'Kramer, I
56

June 2018

imagine these shots. What do you have
in mind?'"
Save for one scene, Bahrani has
set all of the movie's action at night. "In
the novel, book-burning happens at
night for the show of it," the director
explains. In his adaptation, this prime-

"We're going for a
natural-light look.
We want to look in
many directions
with just available
light."
time "entertainment" is broadcast on
the side of city buildings for crowds on
the street. "I thought having nearly the
entire film at night would create this
amazing mood and atmosphere," he
adds. "It's hard to show shifts of time
when you don't have day and night
reference points, but I thought that
would add a unique quality."
Because of the nighttime setting,
and because Bahrani wanted the flexiAmerican Cinematographer

bility to shoot almost 360 degrees for
most scenes, Morgenthau felt
Panasonic's VariCam 35 - with its 4K,
Super 35mm sensor, and its 800 and
5,000 dual native ISO - would be the
ideal camera. "I chose VariCam for its
light sensitivity at night," says
Morgenthau, who had heard positive
feedback about the camera from fellow
ASC member Theo van de Sande.
Working with Panavision, the production arranged camera tests over the July
1 Canada Day weekend - less than a
week ahead of principal photography.
"Panavision bent over backwards,"
Bowie says.
Standing by digital-imaging
technician Jasper Vrakking's Flanders
Scientific CM250 24.5" 10-bit OLED
monitor, Morgenthau presents a "flip
book" of what has been shot over the
course of the production. He explains
that he wanted to shoot the movie's
exteriors - some of which were shot in
the nearby steel city of Hamilton -
with existing urban sources; for such
scenes, he would set the camera's ISO to
3,200 in order to yield less noise than
5,000 would produce.
"We're going for a more ambient,
natural-light look," the cinematographer notes. "We want to look in many
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