American Cinematographer - December 2008 - 58

Rags toRiches people just outside the frame to maintain a semblance of crowd control. Dod Mantle did, however, devise a method of shooting that enabled the filmmakers to keep a lower profile in some settings. Canon had recently provided him with its new EOS-D1 Mark III stills camera, which can shoot bursts of up to 30 RAW images per second. “I started shooting little bits and bobs with that, and Danny got really excited about it,” he recalls. Boyle explains, “Anthony sent a test he’d done in a hotel room, and it was just amazing — it looked like a vivid memory of something.” Another advantage they discovered was that people were much more relaxed around a stills camera. “With a film camera, they would instantly say, ‘You can’t shoot here!’” says Boyle. But Dod Mantle was able to use the Mark III to shoot in locations where obtaining a film permit would have been a struggle, such as the inner areas of the Taj Mahal. He notes that working with an “open-minded” director like Boyle sparks those kinds of ideas. “You don’t know where they come from — something appears.” Boyle points to the filming of one Slumdog interior scene as an example of the trust he and Dod Mantle enjoy. In the scene, the teenaged Jamal (Tanay Hemant Chheda) and Salim (Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala) have entered a brothel in search of Latika (Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar), the object of Jamal’s affection. When they find her, they are cornered by the gangster (Ankur Vikal) who controls her, and Salim shoots him. “The scene was great on the page, but it didn’t work on set,” recalls Boyle. “When you have a great cameraman and a scene like that, you hand it to him, then you work the scene and have him record it. He knows I’m in trouble, knows I can’t make it work, so he takes over the operating of the scene, and it’s let loose.” Neivelt gave Dod Mantle and the actors the ability to move freely around the room by lighting it Dod Mantle and Boyle use the Canon EOS-1D Mark III to work out their approach to one of the film’s climactic scenes, which involves a shot of cash tossed in the air. Dod Mantle notes, “As you can see, my wallet is sticking out of my pocket, but the man who’s really loaded with cash is [standby art director] Arwel ‘Save Me, Push Him’ Evans, a very dear friend.” Visible at lower left is actor Madhur Mittal, who plays Salim as an adult. Sunil Khandpur, an excellent Steadicam operator, with me almost every day, and we worked with four or five other operators intermittently. I had to have weekly meetings of the camera department, sometimes because of technical issues, sometimes because of more complicated collaboration issues. One sensed sometimes that several schools of thought were present under one roof, and I had my hands and head full trying to melt attitudes and habits together. Having Mrinal as the local camera leader and liaison was exceptionally successful — he educated me in the Indian way of pulling a camera team together. “Between the whole technical crew and me was my South African 1st AC and longtime friend, Telfer Barnes, who was undoubtedly my best support and ally when anything got complicated,” continues the cinematographer. “When I’m operating the camera as much as I was on Slumdog, I also have my closest collaborator, [gaffer] Thomas Neivelt, with me at all times. After working with me for 20 years, he knows the inside of my head and heart so well — poor soul! — that he and I work intuitively, parallel and with few words. He is exceptionally good with people, and should we ever disagree about setups, we know each other well enough to solve things quickly. When I’m lighting, operat- ing, improvising and watching actors all at the same time, these key people around me give me that extra little piece of time that the cinematographer owes his director — and that’s the essence of it all.” Neivelt and Barnes were among the few non-Indian crewmembers on Slumdog. A company owned by Indian co-gaffer Mulchand Dedhia provided all the lighting, grips and electricians, and Neivelt notes it was “a very good crew and quite a big one, compared to what I’m used to. On a normal day, we had 12-15 electricians.” They worked according to the English system, in which the electricians do their own flagging, and the grips are responsible for dollies and tracks. The equipment, he adds, was a mix of HMIs and Indian-made tungsten lights. For Dod Mantle, one challenge of the shoot was the sheer chaos of the surroundings. “I’m used to starting with a quiet space — I like to ignite it gradually,” he explains. “In India, you almost never see an empty frame. I’m pretty calm and collected, but it was tough.” He arrived with the dream of being able to sneak shots of the actors mingling with real crowds on the streets, but that proved far more difficult than he imagined. Often, the crew was instead reduced to a last-minute attempt to cordon off hundreds of 58 December 2008

American Cinematographer - December 2008

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