CURFEW | DRAMA
Colm’s only reference to me when we met was John Carpenter movies
case of looking at the shot and seeing how far we could push it. Most of the time it had to be at least 2.8½.” LIGHTS OFF Happily, Lavelle says, the eighties action movie aesthetic went some way to ease these lighting concerns. “When I went to the interview, Colm said ‘I want the street lights to be off in London, in our world’. There’s two massive implications to that: how do you show speed in cars without anything outside the windows to show movement and how do you light vast areas cost-effectively? Or more importantly, time- effectively. We’d have dual carriageways that we could only get the trucks on to at 6pm or 7pm, and we’d have to be away by 5am, and we’d have to be rigged and shot. That almost dictated how we did the action unit.” Lavelle and her team considered several solutions, including “runs of softboxes that would get painted out, to try to keep a more natural moonlight. We figured out in the end there was no way we could do it cost-effectively. We had pairs of 18K Arri maxes and a big diffusion on big, big cherry pickers.” The action unit covered most of what Lavelle calls “driving around in cars – but controlled stretches, so they had a follow vehicle with monitors, or perhaps one of the cameras would be on a low loader and you could keep the crew with it.”
the unpredictability of these lenses. How they’d perform moving, and in the cold. They’re ancient. The cogs slip off, they’re not rehoused, they’re not sharp across all of the frame. And it’s not just the edges; it’s some part of the frame that’s not sharp. If the actor lands with their eye in it it’s not sharp and you go again.” Happily, the director had prepared the production office for the financial implications of choosing lenses of which only a handful of sets exist. “Colm had been brilliant and said to them, right off the bat, ‘I’m shooting anamorphic.’” Both lenses and camera equipment came from One Stop Films, which supplied two Alexa Minis for each unit and one Alexa SXT, preferred by Steadicam operator (and One Stop owner) Daniel Bishop for its particular weight distribution. The production was shot to the Alexa’s UHD- compatible ProRes 4444 file format. With camera and lens choices made, Lavelle had to confront the task of lighting the huge areas needed to show cars in motion, at night, on anamorphic lenses which either did not open up to wide stops, or did not look good wide open. Exacerbating the issue, director McCarthy wanted to shoot all of the action with a 45˚ shutter angle. She continues, “The lenses really have their quirks. The 35mm looks really good wide open. The 55mm, you had to be a third off wide open. It was really a
IMAGES Suzie Lavelle and the director went for an eighties action movie aesthetic
APR I L 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 37
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