American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 74

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Strife and Justice

Top left and above: Roman answers his phone
while walking down St. Vincent Court in Los
Angeles. Bottom left: The camera tracks alongside
Washington on location in the Mojave Desert.

there. Everything else was downtown.
You used a drone for several
wonderful transitional shots.
Elswit: It was a wide lens on an
Alexa Mini. Again, it's all about placing
the movie in L.A., giving a sense of
scale. Here's this little guy toiling away
in this giant office building, in this
horrible little nook. Getting a sense of
how sad and lonely and depressed and
lost he must feel.
On a weekend in L.A., if you
clear out the streets and give yourself
enough security, they'll let you fly
drones. We were lucky in that the office
building was on the side of the freeway,
next to an empty space, so it was easy to
clear and make safe. I would have loved
74

December 2017

to have twice as many drone shots. We
really just ran out of hours.
What kind of visual references
were important?
Elswit: We watched a lot of
courtroom trials, even though there
wasn't a lot of courtroom stuff. Finding
the right places sometimes tells you
where the movie's going, visually. When
the whole movie is this one guy, a single
human being, how he looks and where
he lives starts to talk to you. We came at
it from that direction.
Finding the interior of his house
was most important. It had to be somewhat warm and inviting; this is where
he'd spent 30 years of his life listening to
records, eating Jiffy peanut butter, and
American Cinematographer

working on this legal obsession of his. It
always seemed it needed to be a build,
but there wasn't money to do that. We
were lucky that there's a swath of empty
homes in Pasadena that had been
condemned because they were going to
build a freeway, then the state decided
not to. We used the most wonderful,
craftsman-era late-Twenties home.
Closed up correctly, it felt like the interior of an old red-brick apartment
house.
One of the things Danny wanted
was to feel the city around Denzel's
character growing and changing - and
him resisting. All those condos going up
downtown. Even next to his red-brick
apartment building, they're building a
six-story condo. Inside his house, he
pulled the shades down, because he
didn't want to experience the building
going up next to him. He avoided
everything new and modern. He had a
flip phone, an old computer - nothing
that reeked of modernity. It feels like he
bought his lighting fixtures when he
moved into the place in the 1970s.
The other space we desperately



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 2017

Contents
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - Intro
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - Cover1
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - Cover2
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 1
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 2
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 3
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 4
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - Contents
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 6
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 7
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 8
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 9
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 10
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 11
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 12
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 13
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 14
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 15
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 16
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 17
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 18
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 19
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 20
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 21
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 22
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 23
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 24
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 25
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 26
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 27
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 28
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 29
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 30
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 31
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 32
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 33
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 34
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 35
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 36
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 37
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 38
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 39
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 40
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 41
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 42
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American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 45
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 46
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 47
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 48
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 49
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 50
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 51
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American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 53
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American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 62
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 63
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American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 66
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 67
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American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 73
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 74
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American Cinematographer - December 2017 - Cover3
American Cinematographer - December 2017 - Cover4
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