Electric Feel
I saw “Burn after Reading” last month and while I thoroughly enjoyed the film its not an instant classic like so many of the previous Coen films. I couldn’t quite pinpoint the reason why. The performances were uniformly excellent and screenplay maddeningly funny in the best way possible so there was no reason as to why the film is good and not great. Then it struck me. I was missing the magical touch of the Coen’s regular partner in crime Roger Deakins. Deakins who is one of the world’s most admired and sought after Director of Photography was unable to shoot the film due to scheduling conflicts.
In his stead the perhaps even more talented and amazing Emmanuel Lubezki aka Chivo was hired. In case Chivo doesn’t ring a bell, he’s Alfonso Cuaron’s secret weapon who has been responsible for three of the most jaw droppingly shot films in the recent past which are “Y tu mama tambien”, “The New World” and “Children of Men”. It should have been a match made in heaven but in this particular case it wasn’t. The reason being that after a director and cinematographer have struck up a relationship which is equal parts professional as well as personal its almost hara kiri to seperate them.
Further proof is the body of work of auteurs like Wong Kar Wai and Bertolucci. When they were working with their regular collaborators like Chris Doyle and Vittorio Storaro respectively, the result was images which awed the world into stunned silence. Post their break up Storaro hasn’t shot anything of value and while Doyle has been more productive with films like “Invisible Waves”. “Hero” and “The White Countess” his work too hasn’t delivered the emotional piledrivers that a film like “In the Mood for Love” or “Chungking Express” used to do.
Deakins is the Coen’s Brahmastra and Chivo is Cuaron’s and just like in the epics they don’t seem to be transferrable. Happily enough Deakins is back with the Coens for their forthcoming projects and Alfonso and Cuaron seem to be wedded to each other at least for the forseeable future. The list of such fruitful partnerships is legion with the combinations of Guilermo del Toro – Guilermo Navarro and Innaritu-Rodrigo Prieto springing to mind immediately.
Mind you forming such partnerships isn’t an easy task as both personalities as well as creative tastes need to gel together. Sometimes people just don’t get along and other times creative differences create havoc on sets. That’s the reason before employing a DP to shoot a feature, savvy directors hire them on low risk ventures like commercials and music videos to gauge both their skills and temperaments. Long lasting relationships are also forged in the baptism of fire of film school shoots where frankly it’s a miracle that good films ever get made with all the testosterone and estrogen flying around.
Ok I take that back. Student films are a lot of fun and a tremendous learning experience. I love working on them coz for the most part they are personal films with a singular vision undiluted by the demands of the market. Now while that vision may be good, bad or in most cases ugly they are for the most part unique and I’ve had the priveledge on working on both some very good films as well as some horrible ones. I’ve learned equally from both in my fledging career in the cinematography world which is now approximately 1.5 years old.
I’ve been wanting to write a post on cinematography for a while but I always thought that it would be facetious for me to do so. You see I have always been of the belief that one should not wax rhapsodic or comment on something that one does not have at least the basic level of skills or knowledge in. I’ve been shooting for a while now and along the path I discovered that the physical act of lighting a scene gives me a pleasure which is unmatched in any of the myriad jobs I have performed in films thus far which includes writing and directing. Hence my decision to only concentrate on improving my lighting skills to a point where I can approach my personal gods of cinematography like Deakins, Chivo, Slawomir Idziak and Daniel Pearl amongst many others and ask them to employ me knowing that I will be upto the task.
I have to admit that right now the job of a lighting technician / gaffer is so much fun that all the offers I get to DP stuff I turn over to my friends and only take up lighting gigs. It’s not that I don’t feel confident about actually shooting, its just that that staying true to my hedonistic nature I only tend to do what I enjoy doing the most. I’m sure in a few years I will feel differently but right now I’m having the time of my life working and learning in the epicentre of the world filmmaking. In the near future I plan to spend some time in Hong Kong and Brazil and work for some of my fav directors like Walter Salles, Fernando Meirelles, Johnnie To and Hou Hsou-Hsien etc. Even back home in India, my bros whom I grew up with are readying to make their assault on Bollywood and damn I’m excited. Finally the doddering old guard will be replaced by people who won’t scratch their heads and stare at you with puzzled eyes when you say you want to try a new technique or explore new narrative structures.
I long for the day when films like “Reprise”, “The Prestige”, “Sex and Lucia”, “Let the Right one in” and “Slumdog Millionaire” are made in India by Indian directors for whom language or country of origin is no bar when telling a story. I’ve read some of the scripts which are in development and I’m bloody excited at what the future has to hold. I’m not sure if they will run or make money but that’s not really the point here. I hope there are enough tentpoles every year to subsidize the smaller more personal films in India the same way they have it in Hollywood.
I’m also excited about to see the day when HD technology is fully embraced by the Indian filmmaking community and they understand that it’s not really a cost saving tool but a whole different way of telling a story. HD is also not a magic bullet which will make the quality of our films better overnight or transform every budding filmmaker into a Michael Mann. If that had been the case then every dude with a SLR would be as good as Herb Ritts or every person with Microsoft Word would write like Vikram Seth or Murakami.
It aint that easy fellas trust me.
Technology is a double edged sword and I’ve been on enough shoots where people were so chuffed to shoot on the RED that they didn’t pay enough attention to crucial elements like acting, production design or even the script. The best move any filmmaker could ever make is to arm themselves with like minded collaborators who push, question, inspire, criticise and most importantly be there for them every step of the way.
That’s when you end up with something like this…….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpAZqy782Io
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
What happens when you give a DP a joint?
Nothing cos it takes them forever to light anything.
P.s. So you don’t wanna shoot my film? Just light it? I have terribly unsteady hands and hate. Viewfinders.
Remind me to tell you stories of lighting reefers to stay awake when doing all night shoots. When do you wanna shoot it ? I thought you were getting ur old DP to do it ? We can always get a camera operator. The beauty is in the lighting.
my old dp will shoot the film i had in mind, but won;’t get to it most likely till late spring. coupla things popped up.
let’s shoot when u’re in new york. i wanna show you this fantastic under construction building in harlem. nothing great abt the building. just how it looks at night with the little lights on. magical.
aah I feel a Tiago Benzinho moment coming along. Have you been to the ship graveyard yet ? That place is soo desolate yet gorgeous.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25214122@N02/2381957488/
have’nt been there physically, but one off my friendsw is aphotographer, and has a flickr site called brooklyn something.
i was looking for facades representing urban decay, yet that have beauty in them, and there are jus so many gorgeous places. i’m afraid it won’t last longg. they’re building condos everywhere and sanitizing the place.
we should grab a coupla actors, just head out. we’ll improv some scenes, and just shoot.
are ur dates final?
Landing on the 26th. Lets do a music vid instead of a narrative. I hate dealing with sound and dialogs when shooting.
How long you staying? I’m heading outta the country on 25th
I’ll be there till 1st week Jan. Have rooming issues otherwise would have stayed longer.