Sean Penn x 2

[Adam Frisch FSF]

Lovely work on both.

 

Lubezki's work on AoRN was fantastic in its simplicity. Very crisp too - the super 1.85 he used does make a difference.

 

It's also good to see Khondji back in scope. He feels like this old master who's grown tired of all the tricks and ways to impress - this is straightforward high quality work. You can sometimes feel he has to oblige and light Kidman in a flattering way, but it doesn't detract - he's always been quite a pioneer when it comes to front lighting anyway. The night exteriors are particularly good. Film was so-so, but at least it demanded your attention.

 

One thing only - I don't know what lenses he shot on but you can IMMEDIATELY tell when they stuck a zoom with rear-of-zoom anamorphic on because the image turns to mush. They just simply are not any good - the anamorphic lens belongs in the front.

 

I rememeber how straining and crappy The Perfect Storm looked and it was shot exclusively on anamorphic zooms.

Edited April 21, 2005 by AdamFrisch

[Boone Hudgins]

I believe they were Joe Dunton lenses. Not sure what variety.

[Ignacio Aguilar]

One thing only - I don't know what lenses he shot on but you can IMMEDIATELY tell when they stuck a zoom with rear-of-zoom anamorphic on because the image turns to mush. They just simply are not any good - the anamorphic lens belongs in the front.

 

I will watch the film only for this. It's funny, but today I noticed the same thing on Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971) on DVD! The difference is that Visconti used the zoom almost for the entire film, so when he needed the extra speed of a prime lens those shots ended up being much more sharper and contrasty than the rest of the film.

 

According to www.joedunton.com, Khondji used again their JDC anamorphics, as he did for Evita (1996).

[David Mullen ASC]

I will watch the film only for this. It's funny, but today I noticed the same thing on Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971) on DVD! The difference is that Visconti used the zoom almost for the entire film, so when he needed the extra speed of a prime lens those shots ended up being much more sharper and contrasty than the rest of the film.

 

According to www.joedunton.com, Khondji used again their JDC anamorphics, as he did for Evita (1996).

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I read that he also used Technovision anamorphic lenses as well?

[Max Jacoby]

I had heard as well that he shot the film on JDCs lenses. He used the adapted Cooke S3s, like on 'Evita'. Technovision have adapted these Cooke S3s as well, so he could possibly have used lenses from both companies.

[Jake Kerber]

According to the April ICG magazine article on The Interpreter, they obtained lenses from Technovision in France and JDC in England; and Arricam STs from Camera Service Center in New York. The article also mentions a Angenieux Optimo 12-1 zoom from CSC.

 

-Jake Kerber

[Ignacio Aguilar]

I saw The Interpreter today. I wasn't impressed by Khondji's cinematography at any level. I don't know if the film went through a 2K digital intermediate (that's my guess, though I could't detect any digital artifact), but this is one of the softest anamorphic shows I've ever seen in a long time, with only a few outdoor shots looking really sharp. It's quite grainy film and only the typical anamorphic artifacts caused by wide-open lenses make it different from the average Super 35 look.

[Adam Frisch FSF]

It was a 2K DI with JDC's older anamorphic converted Cooke S3's. Khondji wanted an older, softer and more organic feel - more 70's than crispness. It was mushy at times, but that I'm sure was mostly on the really longer lenses that were wither zooms or dodgy old telephotos with back-end anamorphic elements.

 

The crispest anamorphic film I've seen in recent years was Matcshtick Men.

[Ignacio Aguilar]

Thanks for the info, Adam. The film seems to have been shot in very wide apertures -thus the shallow focus most of the time- and maybe that also contributed to the overall softness.

 

The crispest anamorphic film I've seen in recent years was Matcshtick Men

 

I agree with you. The last Samurai also was incredibly sharp too.

[Max Jacoby]

I saw The Interpreter today. I wasn't impressed by Khondji's cinematography at any level. I don't know if the film went through a 2K digital intermediate (that's my guess, though I could't detect any digital artifact), but this is one of the softest anamorphic shows I've ever seen in a long time

I saw this film yesterday and I was not impressed by it either. You could really tell that the quality of the anamorphic lenses changed from lens to lens. There were variations of contrast and sharpness throughout the picture. And the fact that it went through a DI was painfully obvious, bad skintones all around.

[Adam Frisch FSF]

What I like with Khondji recently is that he evolves - he doesn't necessarily do the most pretty or cool things ever - he does what's right for the story. On the commentary to Seven he says himself that pretty images can get boring and that imperfection is sometimes right. I agree with that and know how hard it is to give up prettiness. He could have sold out to Bay ages ago, but he hasn't.

 

Sure Interpreter was mushy at times and was hampered a bit by the available locations art direction - but his night exteriors are still second to none. His camera moves and lighting in the bar scene with Penn is amazing. He's still got it, he's just grown older and less eager to impress.

[Guest fstop]

I caught the movie last night- concerningly, morally tasteless for a schlock political thriller, but it's a Pollack movie, so obivously if anything it's hugely entertaining and never dull (and shot in animorphic or nothing)! The ubiquitous, laughably overrated Nicole Kidman was in terrible form as usual, although her poorly researched flute miming and South African accent brought much needed unintentional comic relief during the instances Pollack fell asleep at the wheel.

 

I was VERY impressed with the photography and for all the reasons Adam stated. Khondji used every lighting trick in the book on this! Subtlety however is the key, and Khondji made it all look SO easy. The guy hasn't been this interesting since Stealing Heaven in my opinion. Anyone who can use such stylised eyelights seamlessly in naturalistic, extreme verite close ups without degenerating the look into cheap, contraditory theatrics is a true master, in my book. How he could take clashing colour schemes from the location design and reject complimentary colours in his lighting yet never call attention to the look is something only the masters will know. After years of doing the whole tedious, ENR-Carravagio one trick it's so refreshing to be reminded that this guy shot Se7en and Delicatessen. Genius.

 

I am also going to be the first to stand up and defend the animorphic zooms- I actually MUCH prefered them to the primes and felt that overal they suited the pallette, thematic depth of field and texture of the film. The Aerial photography was about the only stuff in the film I'd call intrusively slick, and these of course were all primes and at higher f-numbers (the night flyovers had the largest number of warm colours of all the shots in the film).

 

I do wonder however whether the movie would have benefitted from an Academy or 1.85:1 ratio, as some others have pointed out, the animorphic framing has to work around the "available" sets, and the results aren't always pretty and a lumbering compromise, given the design of the picture. Something to think about.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I agree about the softness and the questionable use of scope, but the rest of it I was happy with - I went to school with someone who grew up in South Africa and the US with British parents and she sounded exactly like that - the more negative the emotion is the more Dutch-sounding it starts to get, so I didn't have a problem with that.

 

The only thing I thought stuck out was when they'd stuck all those blue lights in the interpreters' booths - complete mismatch from earlier, when the light in the booth was a key plot point, and rather stylised.

 

The DI didn't bother me overly. When you're shooting in tiny locations like that, consistency and prettiness are mutially exclusive. I know all about this...

 

Phil

Edited May 14, 2005 by Phil Rhodes

[David Mullen ASC]

I just saw it and thought it looked good.

 

The softness & graininess was fine, kept it from being too Jerry Bruckheimer-slick, gave it a slightly retro feeling. A FEW shots were too soft, but that always happens in a movie, particularly one shot in anamorphic in low light levels.

 

He obviously did a few shots with a light Black ProMist or something, but I didn't think it caused too much mismatching or was too jarring (switching from filtered to unfiltered shots bothers me less these days if the diffusion is really light and you contain the filtered shots within a sequence of shots.)

 

Maybe because Pollack is an older director, but I found it refreshing to see some classic shot coverage and not a bunch of shakeycam close-ups strung together.

 

The night street lighting was probably the best.

 

My only real complaint was that while Nicole Kidman looked good, was flatteringly-lit (big soft frontal keys, but usually motivated by natural sources), I'm not sure why she and the production are making such a big effort to hide her age -- in some shots, she looked like she was 20 or something, for no reason. And that sort of age cheating, with the bangs falling over her pointy eyebrows just perfectly, etc. just ruins some of the realism of this movie (which needed some realism.) She would look a LOT better if she stopped the facelifts NOW and just grew older naturally. One critic even attributed her wooden acting to her face being made unmoveable by Botox injections. Maybe that's too cruel, but it always disturbs me to see actresses going down that slippery slope of "freezing" their face at some young age. There was no story reason why she couldn't have looked her real age (and this is still a relatively young actress.)

 

Plot-wise, this movie had holes you could fit the U.N. building inside of. It's built-up of some ridiculous coincidences. But I liked the serious, adult mood of it all.

[Adam Frisch FSF]

I couln't agree more with you on Nicole, David.

 

I have yet to experience the "famous-actress-who-demands-to-be-frontlit" but I'm sure I will at some point. Not looking forward to it...

[Ignacio Aguilar]

Khondji has said that he wanted to evoke American thrillers from the Seventies such as Klute

 

Yes, that was pretty obvious. But I saw both films back to back and while Klute was simple in its camera approach, superbly framed, with a very consistent underexposed look due to the low light levels employed and no glamour lighting applied on Jane Fonda creating a very intense atmosphere, The Interpreter looks fairly conventional to my eye and only a few subtle artistic choices if so (the soft lenses, shallow focus & film grain) translates the average viewer to the 70's.

 

When you see one of those 70's films photographed by Gordon Willis or Owen Roizman you see that the image is anything but unconventional, very dark, full of shadow areas and even less commercial than what is generally done today in major productions. Khondji did pretty much the same in Se7en, but according to what he says in the current AC article he seems to have lost interest on creating dark, high-contrast images.

[Guest fstop]

With open arms I welcome a non-chiaroscuro lingering Kohndji after years of the same old ENR one trick. I would next like to see something bright and colourful in the direction of Stealing Heaven.

 

I don't think Khondji and Pollack needed to labour their point of reference, they approximated the whole Roizman/Willis Network/All The President's Men 70s conspiracy thriller visual texture across without doing a textbook recreation (and considering Interpreter is such a largely lousy movie, why would they need to compete photographically with those 70s greats)?

 

I couln't agree more with you on Nicole, David.

 

I have yet to experience the "famous-actress-who-demands-to-be-frontlit" but I'm sure I will at some point. Not looking forward to it...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

makes you wonder had Khondji accepted cinematography chores on Batman Forever as originally planned, would a then fourth billed Nicole Kidman (after Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey and Val Kilmer and one in front of CHRIS O'DONNELL!!) have had the clout to demand soft frontal lighting?

[David Mullen ASC]

I don't think it is necessarily a "demand" -- in the case of "Batman Forever", the goal WAS to make her look stunning. I don't think the DP was forced to do it. Not just the lighting, but the wardrobe, hairstyle, etc. were all pushed to the high glamour style, so the DP was simply doing his part of an agreed-upon approach that they would have applied no matter who had been cast, no matter how big or small a star the actress was. If they had cast an unknown, they still would have approached it the same way probably.

 

Same with "Moulin Rouge!", where the hyper-glamorizing of Kidman was appropriate to the character and story.

 

In THIS case, however, my point was there was no need to go quite as far as they did. They could have been a little less flattering, lit her more from the side, etc. and gotten away with it. Nicole Kidman is a good-looking woman afterall. Why not just let her look realistically attractive rather than be SO flattering to her?

 

But you don't know whose idea this was: Pollack, trying to add a layer of romance, Kidman, hyper-sensitive to how she is photographed, or Khondji, just wanting to prove he can light women well. It's not like it was a mistake or anything; I just felt it was unnecessary considering that this is a low-key drama.