22 SHOOT STORY THE SHAPE OF WATER
In a highly technical digital movie some old Hollywood techniques carried the narrative WORDS JULIAN MITCHELL PICTURES FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES
“We knew that we wanted to have a period looking movie and also wanted to have classic lighting. Single source lighting with deep shadows but still with some details and some sweetness in the highlights. In this world it would be greens, teal, steel blue. Sally Hawkins, who plays the mute, is such a strong character,she has to look like she has this glow coming from inside. She should never look like a beaten-down, working-class woman. She should have this princess-like look from the beginning. This look should get stronger and stronger as the movie goes on and as she gets more and more powerful and falls more in love with the fish man. “That was something we talked about when we were prepping the movie. So we decided to light her very classically, very old Hollywood. We wanted to go more 40s or 50s but when you’re shooting digitally you have to use more soft light. In the old days those guys would use more hard light. I don’t think that works for colour in digital, it looks wrong. We tried to do a couple of tests like that and we didn’t like it. So we went back to this super-soft close-up design which was very directional so she had a dark side as well.”
hen Guillermo del Toro, the director of The Shape Of Water , called DOP Dan Laustsen about a story that involved a mute cleaner’s relationship with a merman, Dan wasn’t alarmed: “I’ve got used to the storylines from Guillermo.” Dan had previous experiences of shooting movies with del Toro, including Crimson Peak which in comparison was a more run-of- the-mill, ‘evil brother and sister cooped up in a bleeding, breathing and very haunted house’ type of story. “I’ve done three movies with Guillermo. Firstly Mimic in 1996, and then we had a break for 20 years. Then he called me to do Crimson Peak, where he told me about the idea for The Shape Of Water . A working-class mute falling in love with a fish man. If someone else had told me about it, I would think he was mad. Guillermo’s world is always fantastic but then he added, ‘By the way, we have to shoot in black & white’.” As most DOPs know, the challenge of shooting in black & white is a big ambition for many of them. Unfortunately we now know it fell apart because they couldn’t find the money. “We went back to colour and I think this was a very clever decision because the colours became a big part of the movie.
DEFINITION APRIL 2018
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