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.
Capture — digital, not film
A common assumption with a black-and-white feature is that it must have been shot on film stock. Nebraska was not. Papamichael captured the film on the RED Epic in colour, with the conversion to monochrome happening in the digital intermediate — a workflow that sounds clinical on paper, but which actually gives the colourist far more control over the contrast curve and the channel separation than a true black-and-white negative would.
The advantage Papamichael returns to in interview is exposure latitude: by shooting colour and converting in post, he could decide how the red of a barn or the green of a field translated into greyscale — pushing or pulling individual hues to recover the kind of tonal separation that a panchromatic black-and-white stock used to require yellow and red filters to achieve.
The look on screen
The lighting plan was correspondingly restrained. Papamichael used very little supplemental light on exteriors, leaning on overcast Nebraska skies as a giant softbox, and preserved a slightly low-contrast “newspaper” tonal range in the final grade — bright enough to read on a multiplex screen, but never glossy. The faces in Nebraska — particularly Bruce Dern’s — sit in the frame the way faces do in mid-century black-and-white photojournalism: present, lived-in, with the weather written on them.
Papamichael’s nomination at the 86th Academy Awards put him alongside Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity), Roger Deakins (Prisoners), Bruno Delbonnel (Inside Llewyn Davis) and Philippe Le Sourd (The Grandmaster) — a five-way race in which the eventual winner, Lubezki, was something of a foregone conclusion, but in which Nebraska’s presence marked the academy’s recognition that a film could be photographed in black-and-white, on a digital sensor, in 2013, and not feel like an affectation.
This page is part of a revival of cinefii.com — a reconstruction of the topic from public references on the open web.