3 days of the Condor

[Bill Totolo]

I was just watching this movie shot by Owen Roizman and noticed it had very dense blacks while looking pastelle in the fleshtones and the out of focus objects in the b/g.

I was wondering how he might have acheived this back when this was shot.

Would you overexpose, say about a stop, to acheive the density, then pull a half stop to create the pastelles?

 

Just curious if anyone had any inside info.

 

Thanks.

[Mitch Gross]

It was pretty common in the day to push process the film a stop and sometimes flash it as well. He could have done this to gain exposure and then printed back down to tighten up the blacks.

 

 

...and I'm wrong. Just grabbed my copy of Masters of Light off the shelf. Roizman had been regularly force-processing everything to gain exposure but director Sydney Pollack didn't want him to do so on this film. Roizman still did it on the night exteriors but processed normally otherwise and got to really like the richness of the blacks when working this way. From then on he stayed away from force-processing.

[David Mullen ASC]

If you're talking about how something looks on video or DVD, it would be hard to say that it was part of the original photography, like dense blacks.

 

"Three Days of the Condor" (1975) was shot in 35mm anamorphic on 5254 (100 ASA). Like Mitch said, it wasn't forced processed unlike most movies of the day, other than for some night shots. Some of the look of the out-of-focus foreground elements, etc. is probably due to the anamorphic format.

 

Roizman is a master of exposure and lighting though, so I'm sure he could give the impression of dense blacks whether or not he actually overexposed the negative and printed down (he and Conrad Hall were one of the earlier adopters of that technique although I'm not sure it was used on this movie -- but "True Confessions" was shot this way, with a dense negative.)