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SHOOT STORY YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE
because they would disturb the spirit of the set a little bit. Also, they were pretty small rooms most of the time so you’d run out of elbow room fairly quickly.
people decided to have their backs to those windows, “Even then I would try and make it realistic, I didn’t use any filtration at all and there was no great need with the lenses we used. Some of the flaring actually acts as its own diffusion. Having someone who is not concerned with how they’re being lit is pretty liberating because it meant I could bounce light off the floor to get it in to his face, which some people would object to but in this instance nobody was complaining. Also there was no imperative to always see the actor’s eyes or have an eye-light or anything like that. But we had the usual tools, so if you needed a single source coming through the windows we would have an 18K and bounce it off an Ultra Bounce or something like that. I did try to keep the lamps out of the room as much as possible, just
GRADING TIMELINE With actor Joaquin Phoenix
suddenly being available, the film’s scheduling brought it into the realm of a showing at Cannes – that meant a grade at quite short notice (an understatement really, as there were still two days’ worth of shooting left before the grade even started). “Some scenes had deliberately not been shot in principle photography – they were the underwater scenes, as there was no tank facility in New York, and a couple of other scenes where Joaquin didn’t have a beard, which he had grown for a subsequent role. Lynne also wanted to work with Jean-Clement Soret at Technicolor as she had worked with him before, in fact that project was the only time she had experienced digital grading. Jean-Clement was available for five days and that was just before it was scheduled to go to Cannes with the edit still being fiddled with, and unfortunately I was away. So I ended up spending a day with Jean- Clement when we literally just went through the whole film, and would
stop occasionally with me making a comment about the general look of any location, whether it should be a little bit darker, colder, that kind of thing. Pretty much ‘old school’ photo-chemical printing terminology, nothing to do with secondary power windows or anything like that.” Tom had worked with Jean- Clement many times anyway, so he wasn’t worried about what he could or couldn’t achieve. After Cannes, Tom and Jean-Clement went back to the film for another two days, “but at that point everyone had settled in to the look so there was no feeling to change much. I have to say that it doesn’t look hugely different from the dailies, but that’s doing Jean-Clement a disservice as it makes it sound
TOP Brutal yet dreamlike, the film attracted rave reviews at Cannes. ABOVE Lynne Ramsay (director) and Tom work through creative decisions on set.
I COULD BOUNCE LIGHT OFF THE FLOOR TO GET IN TO HIS FACE, WHICH SOME PEOPLE WOULD OBJECT TO
DEFINITION JUNE 2018
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