American Cinematographer - November 2019 - 63

Stormy Isle

Blaschke: Rob is preoccupied with
the past. His taste in art is similar to his
taste in literature - it tends to end before
the 20th century. I've been trying to get
him to read Hemingway for years. He
sees things in a non-widescreen way. The
first two shorts we did together were
1.33, which he loves. The Witch was 1.66,
which was the boxiest aspect ratio we
thought we could get away with for
Rob's first feature and still get distribution. The Lighthouse was intended to be
1.33, but sometime during its writing, I
brought up 1.19, mostly as a joke, but
with a curious eye toward his response.
After brief consideration, he took to it
wholeheartedly. He added 1.19:1 as
another requirement alongside '35mm
black-and-white film' on Page 1 of the
script. I never heard of any pushback
from the producers or distributors about
the aspect ratio, unlike the black-andwhite origination.
You experienced pushback about
the black-and-white origination?
About a month before preproduction, all [key personnel] and department
heads had a very warm gathering to
meet and greet, and to start to think
about how to make this movie. There
was a pocket of time spent, however, on
trying to convince Rob and me to shoot
color for black-and-white, because they
could sell the film to more territories.
This was an appalling idea to Rob
because there would be an obscure color
version of the film somewhere in South
America or the South Seas or someplace,
and appalling to me because it would
compromise the intended black-andwhite version. An exceptionally prominent producer, [with] decades of
blockbuster films behind him, bore into
little ol' me and asked, 'With all of
today's amazing technology, you're seriously telling me there's no other way to
get the look?' I just had to calmly look
him in the eyes and say, '...no.' Of course,
this was a month before our tests could
back up anything, and I was simply
bolstering dumb instinct at that point. It's
a testament to the trust given us that the
conversation then petered out, and that
we ended up shooting the film on black-

The Square Format
"I've been practicing still photography for 25 years, much of it in blackand-white, processing and printing it all myself. I started with 35mm, then
moved to 6-by-6cm and some 6-by-4.5cm, back to 35mm after I was robbed
of some cameras, then 6-by-7cm, and now 8-by-10-inch film. It was sometime in the square-format years when I finally began to make some good
pictures. I found the square and a moderately wide lens to be a very effective portrait format. It was the perfect balance between person and environment. This made me completely confident in suggesting 1.19 for The
Lighthouse. It frames the vertical lighthouse even better, isolates our two
characters even more, and truly traps them together when they do share a
frame. This film is more of a close-up movie than The Witch, and 1.19 simplifies and focuses on these details in a beautifully direct way."
- Jarin Blaschke
and-white film stock.
What references did Eggers
have in mind?
Blaschke: A bit of Béla Tarr for
tonal dreariness and patient use of
camera. Bergman's camera language, as
always. [Eggers] liked the strong night
lighting of In Cold Blood. There were
some nautical silent films, including
Flaherty's Man of Aran, [which was

shot] on orthochromatic stock with
strong, direct close-ups. [The influence
of] Eisenstein was there for montage,
and bold, hard cuts. Optically, the films
we watched from the '20s and '30s were
very appealing in their subtle fringe
distortions and the way highlights
would shimmer.
In the end, the most influential
references were M - an inspirational

For illumination that would be distinct on film, the production's custom-built lighthouse was fitted with a 6K
HMI, which is orders of magnitude brighter than bulbs in real-world lighthouses. "We were getting calls from out
at sea," Blaschke recalls, where the beam extended 12 nautical miles.

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American Cinematographer - November 2019

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