Cinefii

How does an emerging cinematographer actually get an agent? It’s the question every working DP under thirty-five wants answered, and the question that almost no one will give a straight answer to. We tracked down two of LA’s premier cinematographic agents — Richard Caleel and Kristen Tolle-Bilings of Worldwide Production Agency (WPA) — and got them to spill the beans on what they actually look for, how they actually find their clients, and what an emerging DP should be doing instead of sending out unsolicited reels. ...

Phedon Papamichael ASC came to Camerimage 2013 with the year’s most divisive monochrome image: Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, photographed in a deliberately undramatic black-and-white that earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography. He sat down with us for one of the BiteSize Dailies. Why black-and-white, and why now Nebraska was always going to be a black-and-white film for Alexander Payne — the script had been waiting for nearly a decade for a studio willing to release it in that form, and Papamichael’s job was to make sure the choice did not register as ostentatious. The Plains landscapes of Nebraska, Montana and South Dakota photograph as flat, low-contrast and often featureless in colour; in monochrome they suddenly read as a continuous tonal field, with horizons and weather doing visual work that a colour image would have buried under the literal sky. ...

Bruno Delbonnel is one of the few cinematographers who can sit between the rigorously controlled palettes of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, the desaturation of Faust, and the diffused winter palette of the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis — the film he came to Camerimage 2013 to talk about. We caught him for one of our BiteSize Dailies shortly after his masterclass. Light that falls off Delbonnel’s central note about the film is one image: light that doesn’t reach. Inside Llewyn Davis is a story about a man whose career, friendships and weather all turn against him in the same week, and Delbonnel’s lighting reads that subtext directly into the frame. ...

We sat down with Sean Bobbitt BSC at the Camerimage festival to talk about 12 Years a Slave — his third feature with director Steve McQueen after Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011), and the one that has put their working method in front of the largest audience yet. A long collaboration Bobbitt and McQueen have been working together since Hunger, and the conversational shorthand between a director and a cinematographer who have made three features together is a recurring theme of his interview. Where a first collaboration is mostly about establishing a shared language for what light, lens and frame should do, by a third feature that vocabulary is in place — which is what makes McQueen’s signature long, locked-off takes possible. The famous unbroken bench shot in Hunger and the single-take dinner conversation in 12 Years a Slave are not stunts; they are the natural extension of the way the two of them think about screen time. ...

A full-scale mock-up of a new Panavision 70mm digital cinema camera was unveiled this November at the Plus Camerimage festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland. The unit on display was non-functional — the sensor and the cooling system are still being finalised — but Panavision’s representatives at the festival were happy to walk through the design philosophy and a tentative spec sheet, and what they described is the most ambitious large-format digital body the company has ever attempted. ...