By Jon Silberg, August 27, 2008
When Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, ASC, used Panavision's Genesis on the mega-budget Superman Returns, he was breaking ground as the first to use that camera on a feature. After shooting two more films on film--Leatherheads, George Clooney's take on football's early days, and the Tom Cruise thriller Valkyrie--he returned to the Genesis for the smaller, more intimate drama Towelhead, the feature directing debut of Alan Ball, writer of the very successful American Beauty and creator of the popular and acclaimed HBO series Six Feet Under.
Sigel explains that he has been very happy with the results he's gotten on both outings with the Genesis. "I could have shot Leatherheads and Valkyrie with the Genesis, too," he says, "but there were people in both cases who felt that it was better to shoot a period piece on film, and that's fine with me, too."
Based on the novel by Alicia Erian, Towelhead is an intimate story about the coming of age and sexual awakening of 13-year-old Jasira (Summer Bishil, actually 18 during production) who is sent by her self-centered mother (Maria Bello) to live in suburban Houston with her overbearing Lebanese father (Peter Macdissi). Jasira must try to make sense of her own identity and desires, her newfound sexual power over men and the very different worlds of her mother, her father and the pop cultural influences that surround her. The handsome neighbor, Mr. Vuoso, complicates matters when he takes advantage of Jasira's confused state. Only the meddlesome but well-meaning couple next door, Melina (Toni Collette) and Gil (Matt Letscher), provide the girl some sense of stability.
In addition to a desire to work with Alan Ball, it was the change of pace, the intimate nature of the drama, that interested the cinematographer. Sigel recalls, "I took the movie for the opportunity to work with Alan, who I think is amazingly talented, and I found it very enjoyable to go back to working on a very human scale, where each day is really about working with actors to tell a story, as opposed to administering over an army of people."
A significant portion of Towelhead takes place at the suburban cul-de-sac where Jasira lives with her father and where the two sets of neighbors come to impact her life. The production scouted the suburbs of Houston but concluded that they could find virtually identical dwellings much closer to L.A. in the community of Indio, where they shot all the exteriors of the rather sterile neighborhood. They then shot the interiors of Mr. Vuoso's house at the location and returned to L.A. to shoot the other two house interiors on a soundstage. Production Designer James Chinlund built a single set, which was shot first as the house Jasira lives in and then re-dressed to become Melina and Gil's place. "The interiors of all those houses look the same," Sigel explains.
Visual Thinking
Sigel learned that Ball thinks very visually, which he found surprising for someone directing his first film. "But then I started thinking about Alan's scripts," Sigel explains. "In American Beauty, there are these great images of the cheerleader and the roses, and all those things are very much a part of his script. In his script for Towelhead, there are all these images, like her fantasy of what it is to be a woman--these iconic pin-up girls--and that all comes from Alan."
The collaborators discussed the three houses where so much of Towelhead's action occurs. They wanted to subtly build looks for each of the locations that could reflect a sense of what they felt like to Jasira without being obvious.
"We wanted Mr. Vuoso's house to be colder, with white walls and a kind of sterile, heartless environment," Siegel says. "In Jasira's father's house, the thought was that it had stronger contrast and impenetrable shadows. This was not a comfortable place for Jasira. Then Melina and Gil's home was always meant to be the place that was inviting and accepting for Jasira, so it was very warm with golden amber tones."
Sigel achieved the photographic looks he was going for using a combination of traditional methods that he'd use if he were shooting film and digital grading decisions that he'd make on set. These decisions were communicated to the dailies colorist at Technicolor Burbank via a Grass Valley LUTher box, then refined in Technicolor DI colorist Stephan Nakamura's da Vinci suite in post.
"We lit Mr. Vuoso's house with HMI lighting," says Sigel. "They have an intrinsically colder light. The set of the house Jasira lives in with her father was lit with more neutral tungsten lighting. Then when we turned that into where Malina and Gil live, everything was tungsten lights, usually dimmed down and with straw gels to really warm things."
He also applied some Tiffen Soft/FX filters in front of the lens, primarily to impact the highlights
. "It made lights and windows glow a bit," Sigel says. "And that was adjusted based on the environment and what was going on. You find it the most in Malina and Gil's house. There's a bit of it for some scenes in Jasira's father's house, and it's nonexistent where Mr. Vuoso lives."
Digital Production
Sigel then used the camera's LUTher box system to further give the locations the specific looks he was going for. The system allows the cinematographer to "paint" a look without affecting the signal that gets laid down to the HDCAM SR tape in the onboard deck. That pseudo-log signal (Panavision calls it Panalog) has a gamma that can record a dynamic range so wide that, were it to be viewed unprocessed on an HD monitor, would appear very flat, but it offers a wider range of information than a regular HD recording and thus behaves more like film negative in terms of dynamic range captured and ability to be manipulated in post. The LUTher box allows a cinematographer to create lookup tables (LUTs) that can show how particular changes to the image will look on a monitor. The corrections can then be saved as data and applied to the dailies without ever affecting the Panalog signal on the master tapes.
"I created a set of LUTs for each location," Sigel explains, "and then I could use the LUTher box setup to fine-tune that for every shot if I wanted to. I could just bring up, say, LUT 6 or LUT 3, and then in the camera reports I could write, 'Add plus-one red' or 'Add plus-two green' or whatever. Then when Technicolor would get the raw tape and they'd add the sound and make the safety clones and all that, they would also have a LUTher box and control panel and would burn the look into all the tape copies, and then that became the look that was ingested into the Avid."
While many cinematographers like to have a digital imaging technician on the crew for Genesis shows, Sigel felt it wasn't necessary here. "We had one on Superman Returns," he says, "but the camera hadn't been used before. It was very helpful and I think I learned a lot. But now I think the camera is foolproof as long as you have somebody you can call in case of any real snafu."
One aspect about shooting digitally that a lot of people praise has Sigel feeling ambivalent. "You hear a lot about how you can shoot for 40 minutes without changing a magazine," the cinematographer says. "That leads, for better or worse, to a lot of situations where, after a take is done, the director says, 'Okay, everybody back to one. Let's do the scene again without cutting camera.'
"We had a first-time actress, and this [digital setup] did let us shoot a lot of takes one after the other without cutting. I can see the appeal. I hate what happens when you cut the camera and the whole set falls apart--everybody runs somewhere else and makeup people rush in--and that can really destroy momentum. But I guess I'm the classic on-the-other-hand guy. I think when you get to the end of a scene and everybody runs around in a circle and starts again, it rarely results in an improved performance. There's kind of a nervousness that goes into a take, and then, when the take is over, a performer can have a moment to think about it and feel what they did and sort out what they could do to make it better. If you just keep rolling and rolling, you can lose that."
Having used the Genesis now on two films of very different size and scope, Sigel says he would feel comfortable with it on just about any feature. Obviously, he wouldn't feel that way if he weren't pleased with the quality of its images, but he's also not too concerned about some of the other raps the camera's gotten: that it's too big, that it's always tethered.
"It's big," he allows, "but it's no bigger than most of the Panavision film cameras, and if you need to, you can take the deck off and cable it to someplace else. We didn't have the option on Towelhead, but now you also have the option of recording to Flash drives. It's tethered like a film camera generally is if you're using video assist.
"Having said that, you do have options shooting 35mm film that the Genesis doesn't give you. With 35, you have Aatons and Liteweights and 435s and a lot of smaller and specialty cameras you can use to complement your principal camera. We didn't need anything like that on Towelhead, but it would be a consideration on some projects. There aren't as many different cameras like that in the digital realm. But I think that's changing quickly. I think the RED camera is going to have a big effect on the industry, and there are some lower-end HD and even prosumer cameras exploding on the scene that could fill in some of those areas that are missing in digital cinematography."
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