IMAGES Users, clockwise from left: Nick Dance with Poldark; Neil Oseman on The Little Mermaid and the crew of Midsomer Murders
John de Borman, BSC
Will (BBC, 2017)
“I’ve shot 40 movies – 39 have been shot on Cooke, because I love them. I chose S4/i in this case because the speed of the Arri cameras means that with a bit of lighting you can shoot anywhere. Cooke lenses aren’t soft but they have an organic feel and a warmth to them. Other lenses are incredibly sharp and quite contrasty – I don’t like the lens to give me contrast, I prefer to do it through lighting. I like the quick fall-off of a Cooke lens, and the fullness to come quite quickly after the depth-of-field has gone. It’s worked beautifully on all the films I’ve done.” “We paired the Sony F65 with the Cooke S4 Prime lenses to achieve the look of Woody Allen’s film. Our locations became characters in the film but they were also one of the greatest challenges of the production. “We used Cooke lenses because, to me, Cooke is the ‘one’ because the lenses are built for cinema. Other companies usually use photographic lenses, rehoused for use with cinema cameras. We need serious lenses to record the plastic movement of light on every kind of image, Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC Café Society (2016)
1935, along with New York’s luminescent Café Society and the Hollywood divismi [film stars] of 1940 – these were the different portions of the film that required a specific look – each one of them. Cooke lenses gave me the chance to extend the cinematic range of luminosity, while maintaining my own style of cinematography throughout the film.”
frommaximum brightness to maximum darkness, particularly into the penumbra, as Leonardo [da Vinci] called it. “I really wanted the style of the film to underline the different sections of the story, each one in a very specific way, while maintaining an overall cinematography style: mine. The monochromatic Bronx in New York, the expressionistic Hollywood of
APR I L 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 49
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