DEFINITION June 2018

SHOOT STORY YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

It’s a testament to the creatives involved in YouWere Never Really Here that a warped time frame produced such a great looking film WORDS JULIAN MITCHELL IMAGES WHY NOT PRODUCTIONS In Plain Sight

interruption just to see what would happen. I think she mildly regretted it when she came to the edit. If she’d had the discipline of film imposed on her the natural breaks would’ve come with that. “From my point of view I don’t treat them differently from each other, I meter everything, but interestingly 800 ASA on a light meter does not automatically translate into the correct exposure as it should be on the Alexa. Why that is I don’t know. It’s a guide at any rate. We only ever had one monitor on set which was Lynne’s and my monitor, and I would occasionally look just for some sort of assurance of what it was we were shooting. “The ARRI Alexa was a budgetary decision that was foisted on us from on high. The production happened very quickly so there weren’t many decisions made on the look we wanted. I’ve known Lynne for twenty years, in fact she was leaving film school just when I was joining. In no time at all we were scouting for locations so in a way the discussion was not so much about a look but more about, does this location work for both our needs? There was no obvious reference film we both wanted to emulate, it just kind of happened, and it happened so quickly that there wasn’t time to do the usual navel gazing as you usually do in big productions. I think this had to do with how well Lynne and I know each other.” The quickness of the production decisions were down to lead actor Joaquin Phoenix, who initially couldn’t do the movie but then had a hole in his schedule – only if the film could start almost immediately. The novella the film is based on describes Phoenix’s character as someone who is hiding

ot the most prolific director, Lynne Ramsay last made a full-length movie in 2011 (the horror-parenting film We Need to Talk About Kevin) . Back then the gear list almost encapsulated the period setting with Panaflex Millenium and Platinum film cameras with C and E series lenses, and an appearance from Canon’s 5D Mk II DSLR, which was the digital camera of the moment. Her and DOP Tom Townend’s initial feeling for You Were Never Really Here was 35mm and anamorphic lenses – that’s until the accountant got involved and the ARRI Alexa, with a myriad of glass, became the more affordable choice. “I wanted to persuade Lynne that digital could easily emulate film and the only difference between the two was that the camera wouldn’t have a mag of film on the top of it.” That film-to-digital- conversion conversation was commonplace around five years ago, but Tom still fields the ‘I want to make it look like film’ question all the time when shooting on digital. However, Tom reckons that digital is 80% of what he shoots now. “Lynne was resistant to the idea initially because it was not what she was used to. We actually shot a test on Kodak 500T film alongside the Alexa, day and night, just on a street corner and took that into a grading suite to really prove that the look of 35mm could be emulated, and we added grain as well. That satisfied Lynne and I promised her there was no difference in working practice. As it happened, of course you don’t have to re-load every ten minutes and the camera will keep on rolling, something that she really embraced. It suited her and Joaquin Phoenix to shoot without

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