American Cinematographer - August 2008 - 44

Fathers of the Bride spherical, you could go from Cooke Panchros to Panavision Primos and get very distinct looks. With anamorphic, the variety of different looks is increased. You can go from Primos to E-Series to C-Series to a few B-Series or to Hawks, and they all have a certain look, and they all do different things with flares. On this film, we decided the C-Series were best. I went to Panavision and found lenses that some people might call flawed but I thought looked fantastic. They had imperfections I knew would be flattering to the actors, and they had certain flare characteristics I was interested in, especially with all the glistening water we wanted to shoot in the Aegean. “I felt the 60mm C-Series and the 85mm E-Series, an older ESeries lens, were particularly well suited to Meryl, along with some of the C-Series lenses I used for Catherine Zeta-Jones on Death Defying Acts [2007], particularly the 150mm. We also used [Schneider] Classic Soft filters quite a lot. Our approach was the opposite of what we did on Sleuth, where we wanted to see every single line on the faces. On this picture, the idea of a slightly softer, glamorized look was quite good because we created a conflict between what was naturalism and what was heightened, which made it interesting to shoot. The musical has a lot of complex theatrical choreography and narrative, but that is juxtaposed with the ordinariness of the characters. I wanted to do that with the cinematography as well, so we could use an older, softer anamorphic lens in the kitchen set with just a bit of re-created daylight coming through and create a sort of heightened reality.” The C-Series lenses had another advantage in that they are lighter than some other anamorphics — an important consideration, given the extensive Steadicam and crane work in Mamma Mia! Above: The crew captures some boat-toboat footage on location. Below: A Steadicam is employed for a walk-and-talk featuring Sophie and her friends. clouds to consistently go from left to right in a shot, so it wasn’t always a static backing. Of course, if you got too close, it didn’t look right; this was an impressionist way of doing it, but with the depth of field of anamorphic and the distances we were working with, we could create a pretty realistic effect. It works because a lot of this stuff is just blocks of color. It wouldn’t work for an urban landscape, but Biggles and I realized we could do a countryside background, especially if the horizon level didn’t have to change.” Zambarloukos regularly screened film dailies (generated by Deluxe Laboratories in London) in England and Greece; in the latter location, the production-office basement, equipped with an Arri LocPro projector, served as a screening room. “Dailies were useful for judging how the set looked and how well the back-projection was working,” he says. “Also, we were working with actors who wanted to look their best and should look their best. Our choice of lenses and our lighting scheme was dictated a lot by how Meryl looks in particular.” Though some filmmakers consider anamorphic a highly restricting format, Zambarloukos adamantly defends its adaptability to a range of looks and styles. “With 44 August 2008

American Cinematographer - August 2008

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