American Cinematographer - July 2009 - 40

Impressionistic Cinema This frame grab, showing Chéri’s return to his young wife, illustrates a rare departure from the subdued look that characterizes the rest of the picture. Able to time the shoot to take advantage of a sunny morning, Khondji added only the gold sconce in the background. Khondji favors Lee 129 Heavy Frost diffusion, which he believes is close to the 1000H tracing paper he used on Seven (AC Oct. ’95). “My favorite is real tracing paper — you get really soft light and the subject doesn’t feel lit — but gaffers don’t want to use it because it’s too flammable,” he says. “Sometimes I put a little soft tungsten light with the direction of the practical, a little rim that is very underexposed, because I can’t stand when it’s too backlit,” he continues. “It feels like it’s from the lamp, but the lamp doesn’t give it to you unless you shoot really wide open. With anamorphic, you have to create these kinds of subtleties.” Upon returning from his honeymoon, Chéri has breakfast at his mother’s, and the soft daylight from the windows is brighter and slightly cool. Khondji explains that his color scheme for the movie often involved hues slightly warmer and slightly cooler than the 3200°K rating for the film stocks. “Daylight was 4000-4500°K, rarely more, and the lamps were generally 2800-3000°K.” He likes to tint daylight slightly, and feels it helps the negative. “Film negative is a little weak on blue, so I always add some blue,” he says. He completes the color range by “putting a touch of amber from a bulb in a practical.” Toward the end of the film, when Léa sits in a chair and consoles Chéri at her feet, the morning effect is much brighter. The scene was shot on a soundstage in Cologne, Germany. “Outside the windows, there was a big truss with a row of underslung tungsten lights that were extremely diffused,” recalls Khondji. Barely visible outside the window is a giant TransLite that required a lot of light. Pfeiffer is lit by a softbox that gives gentle direction to the foreground light. Orange practicals in the background add a touch of color contrast. Khondji notes that in this scene, as in others, he added a subtle color contrast to the image in the digital grade, which he carried out at Deluxe in London with colorist Adam Inglis. “I put a little bronze gold in the highlights and a bit of blue in the midtones and darks to create a more 3-D effect with color,” says the cinematographer. “Adam had what I was looking for: a sensitivity to nuance and the desire to make a work of cinema, not a pretty film with boosted contrast and video-like saturation. “Stephen and I decided to do a DI because a lot of effects shots were required around Léa’s house in order to re-create the atmosphere of Paris at that time,” continues Khondji. “But the truth is that even with a 4K DI, the image quality never really matched the quality of the pure anamorphic image we saw in the dailies. My advice is to avoid doing a DI on an anamorphic picture unless you really have to, and we had to on Chéri.” One striking scene breaks with the subdued quality of the film’s overall look. In it, Chéri comes home and carries his young wife to bed through a bright, sunlit corridor. When scouting the location, Khondji noticed the timing of the morning shafts of sunlight, and he asked Frears if the shoot could be scheduled according to the weather. “We did it on a sunny morning, and we had to be very light on our feet,” says Khondji. The only lighting he added to the scene was a gold sconce in the background “for a color contrast.” The film is punctuated by a few bright exteriors, including Léa’s garden in Normandy, a dazzling helicopter shot of her car on a country road, and the seaside hotel in Biarritz. But even some exteriors feature limited contrast, as when Léa looks over the balcony at the beach in Biarritz and 40 July 2009

American Cinematographer - July 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - July 2009