THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK PRODUCTION
required them to place ARRI SkyPanel X23s on an adjacent roof, allowing consistent, controlled daylight regardless of the time of day. At night, they shifted the fixtures to evoke the sodium-vapour and industrial lighting of the surrounding city. That degree of control was equally important for a nighttime parking lot sequence, in which Turturro’s character pickpockets Will Price’s character before breaking into his car. “We return to this scene in several critical flashbacks, so Jason, Chris and I had to design the lighting to accommodate shooting the incident a number of different ways,” Levy explains. “The characters revisit the moment as they watch security footage, and each time we see it from a slightly different perspective and learn something new. We primarily used the ARRI SkyPanels, along with some punchier Aputure LED fixtures that gave us a more specular, slightly more theatrical quality of light.” Levy relied on the ARRI ALEXA 35 to capture the film, but he opted for GoPros for the surveillance-camera sequences. “I love using GoPro cameras for surveillance footage. They’re lo-fi and grainy, and produce an image that naturally feels surveillance-y. They’re also very user-friendly, and you can easily transmit the image to an OLED lighting monitor. Someday I’d love to shoot an entire film on a GoPro! We shot the ALEXA at ISO 1600 and the GoPros at ISO 800.” The sequence, however, proved to be tricky. “We shot every moment [in] two different ways: once as it happens in linear time and then again, slightly offset, for the surveillance footage. We carefully mapped out those differences because
each time the audience revisits the incident, they’re learning something new.” The scene in which Price’s character finally returns to watch the surveillance footage was the last shot of principal photography. “We were able to play the original GoPro footage back live on the prop television, which is a real luxury. Usually you’re photographing a blank screen and the image gets composited in later. I brought the ALEXA extremely close to the television, and you could actually see the pixel structure of the screen in a way that would be very difficult to replicate in VFX.” Rephotographing an image from a monitor is a technique that Levy learned from mentor Harris Savides. “Harris loved photographing images off screens because of the decay and patina they acquire in the process. You’re taking an image that already exists and passing it through another layer of glass and technology, and it comes out the other side with a completely different texture.” The film’s climactic scene takes place in a limousine and was shot on a stage. “We did a lot of poor man’s process in this film,” he says. “I thought very carefully about how to control and introduce light into the picture car. I designed an interactive moving-light sequence, but the tempo of John and Jamie Lee Curtis’ performances would shift from take to take, which meant the lights would interact with them differently each time. That was really exciting. We had a whole team of grips and electricians rotating lights and reflectors around the car. It became an orchestrated dance between the actors, the camera and the lighting that was exhilarating. Jason, Chris and their teams did an incredible job.”
Levy was greatly inspired by a beautiful poor-man’s-process shot in Broadway Danny Rose , photographed by Gordon Willis. “I showed the scene to Noah during prep, and it helped steer us in the right direction. We designed our lighting to create opportunities for surprises to happen without knowing exactly when they would happen. At one pivotal moment, when John is reacting to something the mob boss is saying, the light stops right on the edge of his face. I could never have planned that exact moment. It was a wonderful accident.” Working within a tight schedule ultimately brought a heightened sense of focus to Levy’s work. “I worked very hard to keep all the logistics – the schedule, the budget, everything happening outside the frame – contained. But once you’re shooting, all of that falls away. What matters most is what’s in the frame, and how that image connects narratively to everything that came before it and everything that comes after.” The Only Living Pickpocket in New York offered Levy the opportunity to photograph his home city through a genre he had never explored before. “I live in New York and I’ve shot many films here, but I’ve never had the opportunity to make a crime thriller in the city, so that was exciting. And to do it with John Turturro, Steve Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito, and with Noah Segan, who has such a distinctive voice as a filmmaker, made it all the more special.” JOHN TURTURRO HAS one of the great faces and profiles IN MOVIES TODAY”
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DEFINITIONMAGS
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