PRODUCTION FEMME
“That’s the first glimpse of daylight we get – and it’s only brief. Basically, when Preston becomes a protagonist himself, we wanted to breathe for the first time.” “Being so nocturnal was part and parcel of it being stressful and never coming up for air in a way,” continues Rhodes. Films like the Safdie brothers’ Good Time , Fight Club , Hustlers and A24’s Waves all served as visual influences, informing the use of colour, particularly neons, to saturate nighttime scenes. Rather than giving over to pure aesthetic appeal, every choice was considered. “I find it challenging, always trying to put what feels like unmotivated colour in scenes,” admits Rhodes. “I constantly had to be giving myself a logic for the light sources, just so I could really lean into them. Once we had that, it was great because it was like, ‘Hey, this is the purpose’.” WE DIDN’T WANT IT TO FEEL perfect . IT HAD TO FEEL tangible and realistic LIKE EAST LONDON”
© JAMES RHODES
didn’t want it to feel perfect. It had to feel tangible and realistic like east London,” he shares. The production team achieved this through practical, in-frame lighting and an absence of computerised effects. Femme is full of interesting lighting from lamps, candles, refrigerators and televisions. Rhodes explains that ‘the use of practicals was always to give freedom to the camera’. By mostly avoiding floor lights, “the camera could always react to the scene and become more organic. It makes everything feel realistic when you pan around and see where that light was coming from. We retained that aesthetic of feeling like a real environment.” Because Stewart-Jarrett and MacKay have vastly different skin tones, the crew occasionally needed to introduce low- intensity light sources near or behind the camera. “Those subtle reflections in Nathan’s skin gave us texture without over-lighting him or other characters in-frame,” states Rhodes, though he otherwise lit them identically. “Often, there can be a misconception that if [the actor has] dark skin, they need more light so that you can see them. It’s actually nonsense. To put it briefly, I didn't treat them very differently.” Several of Jules and Preston’s interactions occur inside Preston’s car. Rather than using a green screen or an LED volume, “everything was old-school, put it on a trailer and go,” says Rhodes. “Again, leaning into trying to make stuff feel as real as possible, I wanted to expose the characters as much as I
MOONLIT MOSAIC Immersed in a captivating play of light, the camera reveals an organic, grounded ambience
could with the environmental lighting from outside. So [I was] working at really low light levels – basically cranking the ISO as much as possible.” GIVE AND TAKE Enjoying a varied career which includes live music, Rhodes compares filmmaking to ‘playing in the band’. “I feel like I am participating,” he enthuses. “My camera operating is always feeding off what the cast is giving me. We were all properly in lock-step with each other.” With Femme being their first feature, Freeman and Ng were ‘inexperienced but also confident’, according to Rhodes. “It was rewarding because they gave so much creative control to me and trusted me. It meant I could create something I felt really excited about.” Femme is out in cinemas now
REAL DEAL Above anything else, Rhodes and his crew wanted Femme to feel real. “We
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