Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was shot in classic documentary style with Panasonic’s AJ-HDC27 VariCam HD cinema cameras. Distributed by 20th Century Fox, Borat was directed by Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm) and shot by co-directors of photography Anthony Hardwick and Luke Geissbühler.

In the film, Kazakhstani TV personality Borat is dispatched to the United States to report on the “greatest country in the world” for the alleged good of his Central Asian nation. With a documentary crew in tow, Kazakh journalist Borat becomes more interested in locating and marrying Pamela Anderson than in his assignment. Intrinsic to the success of the film is the credulity of Borat’s interview subjects, who are unaware that Sacha Baron Cohen/Borat is a fictional visitor to their real world.

“In early conversations about which format to shoot the project on, everyone was very concerned about using larger cameras, as they might be too obtrusive and off-putting to the non-actors we’d be shooting,” says DP Hardwick. “There was speculation that the quality of a smaller camera like the DVX100 might hold up well enough for our 35mm blow-up, but after the production team saw the tests that I shot, it was apparent that we needed at least 720 lines of resolution, leaving the only real contenders the VariCam and Sony F900.”

“We opted for the VariCam based on the natural look of our test tape-to-film transfer, which looked like really clean Super 16mm blown up—it didn’t scream ‘video,’” Hardwick continues. “The VariCam also afforded us the potential for high-speed sequences, and it was the superior choice in terms of size, weight and power management—all critical considerations as we shot the project predominantly handheld.”

Borat entailed roughly five months of shooting, in the U.S. and Romania (standing in for Kazakhstan), from 2004 to 2006. “We worked with a minimum of people, traveling as light as possible,” Hardwick notes. “Because of the low-light performance of the VariCam, we were able to use just a handful of professional lights combined with beefing up the practical light sources. Because we did a very high-quality transfer test at Modern VideoFilm, I learned that I should underexpose, and I shot at approximately 60 percent luminance, which ultimately gave our colorist, Kathy Thomson, the latitude she needed to match contrasting shots.”

“On Borat, shooting straight-ahead was key. The camera work couldn’t upstage Sacha or his subjects,” DP Geissbühler explains. “We would try to predict how a scene would unfold, shoot it documentary-style, and we’d get the coverage we needed with the two cameras. Anthony and I shared one camera assistant, Mark Schwartzbard, and we had a little plant of batteries and tape. We had wireless transmission to the director, wireless audio, and we shot with the longest loads we could get. We’d take turns re-loading quietly. All of this ensured that the cameras were as unobtrusive as possible.”

“Our shooting style gave Sacha absolute freedom during lengthy encounters with his subjects,” the DP says. “He never broke out of character, and the subjects would begin to ignore the cameras.”

“The VariCam creates a natural but aesthetic image. I love the way it renders a natural, un-lit area and manages the eccentricities of location lighting,” Geissbühler continues. “The cameras are rugged, and we worked them to the bone. The ‘paint’ settings track really well and don’t inadvertently alter other aspects of the images as other cameras seem to. So when I find myself engineering the camera in the field, it works out beautifully.”

The production rented the two VariCams from Abel Cine Tech and made occasional use of a Panasonic AG-DVX100 and a few “ice cube” cameras. Altogether, the two DPs shot more than 400 hours of footage. The online edit (Quantel IQ), color correction (da Vinci 2K+) and film-out (ARRILASER) were completed at Modern VideoFilm.