THE FAVOURITE BEST MOTION PICTURE OF THE YEAR AND BEST ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATOGRAPHY
refer to that. It highlighted the absurdity of the situation.” It’s easy to see all of these choices as a determinedly traditional approach, especially given Lanthimos’ attitude to lighting. “He didn’t want to use any lights,” Ryan explains. “He would only use lights if he had to compromise his approach. Luckily, when we were filming, the weather was quite sunny and we didn’t end up using lights very much. The Favourite is very naturally lit. I learnt a lot working with him. I would maybe have used a bit of something here and there, but his mindset is not to use lights at all because as soon as you do, you have to do corrections to fit it all in later on. That was a mantra, and it paid off.” Rob Pizzey, who graded the film at Goldcrest, explains that most of The Favourite was shot in available light. “There were hardly any lights at all,” he says, “the night scenes were candlelight and needed a lot of candles. If you watch the movie, you can see what I mean. The blacks are really black on some of those night scenes, but it looks awesome. “The night scenes are very rich, very warm, so automatically you’d back off the warm and dial it down a bit, put in desaturation, but it just didn’t look right. We tried to use a bit more of the toolset and it just looked fake. It didn’t look real, so we stripped the grade back and just went with how it came out of the can.” now refer to the use of extremely wide lenses. It highlighted the absurdity of the situation A lot of people watching the film
Director Yorgos [Lanthimos] actually likes the look of the 500T in daylight, as well,” Ryan recalls. “It had a touch of a colder feel to it – well, not necessarily colder, maybe, but it seems to be a good workhorse of a stock. It gives you good latitude.” The choice of pull-processing a slow stock, rather than simply using ND filters, was practical. “We were shooting on very wide lenses,” Ryan explains. “The lens was too physically large to put a filter on it. They were Primo. We used a fisheye 6mm, quite an unusual lens, a 10mm and up to 100mm, but we mainly ranged between the 6mm, 10mm and 75mm a lot of the time. None of us had used the 6mm. We found it at Panavision and thought, ‘wow, that’s pretty wide’. Yorgos said ‘that’s brilliant, I’ll have that!’ A lot of people watching the film now
“I’VE BEEN LUCKY. Out of the last five features, four of them have been on film,” says Robbie Ryan, who was director of photography for The Favourite . “You shoot on film, maybe people get in touch with you. I thoroughly enjoy shooting on film and I think the productions are enhanced by it.” Ryan’s camera package came from Panavision, with the production mainly using Kodak’s 500T stock 5219. For particularly well-lit day exteriors, Ryan chose slower 200T or 50D stocks. The 50D was pull-processed two stops to offset bright light even more and to normalise the higher-contrast look of the slower stock with respect to the less contrasty 500T. “The thing about 50D is that it’s a very contrasty stock, by pulling it you lose a bit of contrast but it made it very beautiful.
ABOVE BAFTA award-winning actress Rachel Weisz in The Favourite with Oscar nominee, Robbie Ryan
20 DEF I N I T ION | MARCH 20 1 9
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