STANDOUT CINEMATOGRAPHY
BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER – DOP James Friend gives an exclusive insight into his cinematography on this engrossing character study in the gambling mecca of Macau
After Oscar success with All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave , director Edward Berger reunited with long-time collaborator James Friend, ASC, BSC for Ballad of a Small Player – an atmospheric character study set amid the neon glow and shady corners of Macau’s casinos. The film follows a high-stakes gambler (played by Colin Farrell), laying low to avoid his debts, and visually it’s a striking departure from Berger and Friend’s previous work. The war-torn realism of All Quiet gives way to a softer aesthetic, with Friend’s lighting choices central to the effect. Working almost entirely on location, Friend had to find ways to keep his lighting natural and fluid within Macau’s tightly controlled spaces, with Aputure’s INFINIMAT stepping up to the job. “The idea with soft lighting is it can come from everywhere, instead of just a big, motivated source,” explains the DOP. “That allows the actors to have a stage and walk around, without pinning them to a specific mark. Usually this would come as a booklight or a bounce, but this needs multiple frames and diffusion, which requires a big footprint. Not only does this make work restrictive, we also didn’t have the space in Macau. Ballad of a Small Player is entirely shot on location and this
is where the Aputure INFINIMAT came into play. It gave me the soft quality and control in a small package.” The larger the source, the softer the light, which created issues when filming in casinos. “Not just one, but multiple casinos,” adds Friend. “And they’re all highly regulated and secured. We weren’t allowed to rig frames or obstruct the CCTV cameras, making working on the big open floors in the casinos tricky. We couldn’t turn off lights or hang diffusion to minimise the shadows cast by the spotlights either, which would be the usual workflow.” To tackle this problem, Friend turned to a lighting manufacturer he knows well, and one with the fixture he needed: Aputure and the INFINIMAT. “Macau is like Disneyland for gambling, and you have to experience it. So along with director Edward Berger, we went there and soaked it all in, visiting the casinos and seeing what the lighting possibilities were. I found out that the INFINIMATs offered me a sizeable source with a high quality of light on just two stands.” Using different sizes of the INFINIMAT, it was the large 20x20ft unit that made certain shots possible. “In a scene where Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton are talking, the background was dead,” tells Friend. “At that stage we were so used to everything
in Macau lighting up and sparkling, I felt like we needed to add something to keep the same look and feel. We put the INFINIMAT about 100ft away in the back of the shot, put a chase of colour through it and made it a non-descript, out-of-focus, beautiful highlight. It worked fantastically.” In another shot, Colin is standing in front of the Rainbow Casino, for which they used the façade of a decommissioned building littered with light bulbs that haven’t been used for years. “Impossible to change them all,” says Friend, “so we needed a source to replicate what it would look like shining on his face. I had an 8x8ft INFINIMAT that produced enough light to counteract the bright signs in the background. They made it hard to expose for this scene, but with the INFINIMAT on the side, out of shot, I got enough light in Colin’s face without going front-on and losing all shapes.” A costly issue the crew encountered was that closing down any area of a casino required not only weeks of notice but also compensation for lost revenue: a difficult expense to justify. “Shooting day scenes at night became the most cost- effective solution as it was a bit quieter, but we still had to be surgical in our planning and lighting set-ups,” says Friend. “So for a scene in a casino lobby, which was the entry and exit of many high rollers, we had a very limited time frame and needed a portable source that we could wheel in and out at a moment’s notice. It was under a sort of canopy, making it both an indoor and outdoor location where we wanted to shoot a daytime scene but could only do it at night for continuity. The 20x20ft INFINIMAT let us shoot in the dead of night, turning it to 6500K, sidelighting the entire set. The output was striking and I believe this was the only source that could have made it work.”
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