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THE FORGIVEN FEATURE
to make the movie the way we did,” William continues. “In Paris I saw the movie for the first time in a really wonderful rental facility in a beautiful screening room. As fate would have it, I had to sit in the front row which is the worst seat in the house, where I could really see the flaws. But even sitting 15 feet from the gigantic screen it looked tremendous.” Getting down to specifics, William tells us that, “With this camera, if we go indoors or outdoors, day or night, it doesn’t matter. I’m at ISO 5000. There’s a filter wheel in the camera so I can turn the 5000 into 400 if I need to, so I’m not at f/11.” Williammade frequent use of this straightforward option to balance ND filtering against aperture in order to control depth-of-field. “If the A camera is at 25mm, the B camera may be at 150mm. If I shoot both at f/2.8 then it’s a completely different look. With this camera, I can spin the filter wheel and give B camera an f/5.6 – so both the subjects’ eyes are in focus. I hate it when we’re saying ‘which eye do we want in focus?’. This camera allows that.” William pursued a realistic image, keen to avoid betraying the reality of the location with overly manufactured photography. “What I said to Roland
Roland’s, is that you don’t look at what you don’t have, you look at what you have. You have a script, you have the actors and all this other stuff to make the movie. Don’t focus on what you don’t have.” TRAVELLING LIGHT The Forgiven is based on Michael Ashton’s stage play The Archbishop and the Antichrist , which describes a fictional – or at least fictionalised – series of events in which Desmond Tutu, the titular archbishop, meets a death row inmate in a grim South African prison. Shot during 2016 on location in Cape Town’s Pollsmoor Forest Whitaker as Desmond Tutu. Pollsmoor is still a working prison, and only the intervention of the real Desmond Tutu made it practical to shoot there. Even then, the production was forced to move quickly and travel light in order to make such a sensitive location practical. To this end, William combined the Varicam 35 with Fujinon’s cinema zoom lenses, particularly the Cabrio ZK4.7x19 19-90mm T2.9 and the Cabrio ZK3.5x85 85-300mm T2.9-4.0. “This lens and this camera combination are what allowed us prison, the production boasts a cast including Eric Bana and
was that I feel my job is for nobody to know I was ever there,” he says. “I want it to be real. Brutally real, and not affected with perfect Hollywood-style lighting and all of that. That sounds like I didn’t do anything – in fact I worked harder. That Hollywood style three-point lighting is pretty easy to do, but to go into a place like this and make it feel natural when nothing was real, that’s a whole different story. I don’t want them to think about the camera. I want them to think about the mood and the atmosphere.” Under the circumstances, William found himself spending a lot of time controlling the available light. “I light with the grips,” he says. “I spend time blocking windows,
ABOVE Forest Whitaker as Desmond Tutu.
BELOW AND FAR LEFT The Forgiven is shot on location in Cape Town’s Pollsmoor Prison.
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