By Jon Silberg, November 19, 2007
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is a harsh story, and Director Sidney Lumet told Cinematographer Ron Fortunato, ASC, that he wanted a look to match. The story, which unfolds in a jittery, nonlinear fashion, concerns a pair of brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) in desperate financial straits who embark on what seems in their addled state to be a foolproof robbery. The "foolproof robbery" goes horribly wrong, sending their lives careening completely out of control.
Fortunato had previously shot the series 100 Centre Street, the HBO movie Strip Search and the feature Find Me Guilty for Lumet using Sony F900s, but he brought Panavision Genesis technology, with its single-chip Super 35-sized sensor, to Devil. He recounts early discussions with the director about the look he wanted for this dark film about dissolution and self-destruction. "He said, 'Keep in the back of your mind that this is a melodrama when you're lighting it,'" Fortunato recalls, adding, "This could mean different things to different directors. Sidney's propensity for realism and naturalism meant that he was talking about bringing a slight stylization to the look. He doesn't usually like the camera work or production design to call attention to itself."
Fortunato was processing the director's initial suggestion that the look get progressively "brighter" as the brothers' lives come apart when an accident of production showed him a specific way he could do something along those lines: push the contrast so the highlights just straddle the edge of burning out. It happened one Friday afternoon when the company arrived earlier than expected to shoot an exterior of Hoffman's character leaving his New York apartment. Lumet is famous for extensively rehearsing his actors for days or weeks prior to shooting and is equally known for the relatively short shooting days that result from this preparation.
"This was one of the first exteriors scheduled," Fortunato recalls, "and I had planned to shoot late in the afternoon, when [the location] would be in shadow. But we got there too early. It happens with Sidney. And this was Friday and Sidney is not going to wait around on a Friday afternoon. I rarely like to shoot out in bright sunlight and I wasn't happy, but I shot it. But then we looked at the scene projected and I thought, 'This is really interesting!' It's so contrasty and so harsh, but it fits the material for the film. From then on, I stopped trying to avoid front-lit sunlight."
Fortunato observes that the Genesis cameras he was working with allowed more control over such extreme shooting situations than he would have had with an F900. The highlights in several exteriors toward the climax of the film--a cemetery, the father's backyard--got very hot but didn't blow out to the point where there was no more information. In fact, he and Technicolor colorist Joe Gawler used PowerWindows in the da Vinci suite to bring the whites up even further than they were on the tape. "It was hot in the camera," he says, "but in post we went in and lifted the highlights--not to blow them out but to make things a little bit uncomfortable. I showed the effect to Sidney and he loved it."
Devil was Fortunato's first Genesis show (he's worked with it since on the pilot for the series Gossip Girl) and his reaction to the camera is quite positive. "The range is great," he says of its ability to hold detail in shadow and highlight areas that trouble a lot of HD cameras. "It's got very good resolution and it's fast. I don't care what anybody says about the F900, it's not a 500-speed camera, but I'm very comfortable rating the Genesis at 500. If I go to a shutter angle of 270"--allowing longer exposure time than the traditional 180-degree shutter--"and go to +3dB, I can rate it at [EI] 1000 without a problem. On Gossip Girl, I go to +6dB all the time. Some engineers don't like that. They've been trained to think 'cleaner is better,' but I think a little noise can give the images character."
Fortunato notes that he limited the gain for Devil to +3 in consideration of the fact that it would go through a subsequent film-out and be projected on cinema screens, unlike his series work.
Panavision markets the Genesis to film shooters, suggesting that an on-set engineer is less a necessity than it is with other HD equipment that makes use of on-set camera painting, but Fortunato feels that Digital Imaging Technician Abby Levine was an essential member of his crew. He does not recommend that anyone try to shoot with the Genesis without a good DIT. "You need an engineer," he says. "You have to have someone who knows the guts of the camera and can make sure everything on set is all hooked up right. An AC has plenty to do keeping track of equipment and pulling focus. A good engineer will save the day at least once on every feature."
Levine's station consisted of HD monitors for each of the two cameras used to cover most scenes and a waveform monitor Fortunato could consult to ensure he was getting all the information he needed on the HDSR format tape. The camera is designed to make use of the somewhat flat exposure curve intrinsic to the Panalog format, which allows the recording of more information for manipulation in post. (The Panalog transfer curve transforms the internal 14-bit linear signal into a 10-bit quasi-log signal. Panalog creates a perceptually equal grayscale with more values in the darker regions of the image than a traditional signal.) Cinematographers like Fortunato like to take advantage of Panavision's Gamma Display Processor software that can be used to simulate on-set corrections and display the color decisions on the HD monitor using lookup tables.
Levine used the Gamma Display Processor software in addition to some additional interface code he created to use his Mac laptop to talk via Ethernet to the monitor, which allowed Fortunato to build in color and contrast alterations that he and Lumet could see in real time. Subsequently, individual scene files containing the corrections only would be sent to Technicolor to be applied in post. "We had red, blue and green gamma controls and some other secondary correction from my laptop," Levine explains. "You can grab a curve and alter it just like you can in Photoshop. Somebody in post still has to associate the files with the appropriate scene and take. The Holy Grail will be when there is some kind of metadata that will let that happen automatically."
While there are cinematographers working who treat the Genesis purely as a "film stock," avoiding monitors, scopes and lookup tables altogether, this is not an approach that makes sense to Fortunato. "I know they sell the Genesis with the idea that you can just use a light meter," he muses, "but I don't know why anybody would want to. It would be like taking digital pictures and then sending them off to a lab. Maybe it has to do with a romantic vision of filmmaking, but I like to make use of what technology enables us to do."
For him, it only helps the process when he can see what he's getting in real time. He cites as an example a scene in which Hoffman's character hurries into his drug dealer's 72nd floor apartment for a desperately needed fix. Shot in a real apartment with a picture window view of the city below, Fortunato had to follow the actor through the entire location in a single take. His ability to light was severely limited as the location was far too high for instruments outside the window, and it was difficult to hide lights inside given how much of the interior would appear on camera. So Fortunato used a Preston Cinema Systems remote control to pull the iris during the shot. "I was at t/2 by the door," he recounts, "and then I pulled to a t/4 in the kitchen. I closed down to a t/8 in the big room with the window, and for the hallway I went to t/4.
"Sure, you could do the same thing on film," Fortunato allows, "but you wouldn't stop sweating until you saw the dailies."
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