SHOOT STORY | STRANGERS
Shooting in Hong Kong and London gave DOP Eben Bolter two aesthetics to enhance this West/East ‘fish out of water’ story CULTURE CLASH
WORDS JULI AN M ITCHELL / PICTURES ITV
A s we found when we talked to DOP Jess Hall after he had shot the movie Ghost In The Shell , Hong Kong is a special place. Not least because it has this micro-climate that exists on the island which was something Jess wanted to feature in the look of the film. “Because it’s essentially quite tropical there and has this dense forest around it, it tends to have this trapped layer of moisture in the air. There is an ambient quality to the night light which is the neon and LED light getting trapped in this water layer. I tried to pick this up and apply it in our photography.” For Strangers or White Dragon (as it’s called everywhere except the UK) DOP Eben Bolter used this unique moisture look
to his advantage. Strangers is a story with roots in China and the UK and simplistic as it might seem, Eben accentuated both places to slot the viewer firmly in one or the other. “We shot for three months in Hong Kong and three months in London, it was shot as a UK block and a Hong Block with the same director and DOP but local crews.” As well as the weather or the microclimate it was the denseness of the skyscrapers that interested Eben. “You’ve sort of got this weird dense feeling which I know you wouldn’t be able to capture with wide shots – you’d only get a thin strip of the towers and that doesn’t give you the feeling of their looming size. So we decided that long lenses were the way to go, they
show the depth of towers on top of other towers which feels a lot more real, as if you are there. It’s so tall that you can’t really capture that from street level. With the long lens you get that oppressive feeling.” The oppressive feeling of these towers all added to the pressure on the main character, Jonah, who arrived in Hong Kong trying to make sense of the death of his wife. Hong Kong with its exotic nature and suffocating culture might as well be another planet to him. With the moisture in the air comes the humidity which negatively adds to the already polluted atmosphere, something Eben was happy to use for the feel of Strangers in Hong Kong. “I wanted to give
40 DEF I N I T ION | OCTOBER 20 1 8
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