Cinematography is the art and process of recording visual images for motion pictures. A professional who engages in cinematography is known as a cinematographer. As a process, it is closely related to photography. Cinematography involves the framing of a shot, the photographic aspects of a shot and duration of the shot.
Like photography, cinematography is a creative and interpretive process that affects the motion picture as an aesthetic product. A cinematographer frequently has to work together with a director to ensure the artistic coherence of the final product.
Top 50 World Best Cinematography films (In No Particular Order)
1. The New World - Malick, Lubezki 2. In the Mood for Love - Wong, Doyle 3. Days of Heaven - Malick, Almendros
4. Barry Lyndon - Kubrick, Alcott 5. Legends of the Fall - Zwick, Toll 6. Baraka - Fricke 7. Braveheart - Gibson, Toll 8.Trouble Every Day- Agnes Godard 9. Raise the Red Lantern 10. Last Days 11. No Country For Old Men 12. Chicago 13. The Motorcycle Diaries 14. Apocalypse Now! 15. Amadeus 16. The Last of the Mohicans 17. Amélie 18. Blade Runner 19. City of God 20. The Fall 21. The Constant Gardner 22 Girl with the Pearl Earring 23. L.A. Confidential 24. Shindler's List 25. Ran 26. Raging Bull 27. Traffic 28. Fargo 29. Elephant 30. A Very Long Engagement 31. Seven 32. Dances With Wolves 33. Lawrence of Arabia 34. Road to Perdition 35. Chinatown 36. American Beauty 37. Red 38. 2001: A Space Odyssey 39. Unforgiven 40. Vertigo 41. Godfather Part I & Godfather Part II 42. Snow Falling on Cedars 43. Pan's Labyrinth 44. The Piano 45.Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 46. The English Patient 47. Memoirs of a Geisha 48. Amorres Peros 49. Children of Men 50. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Top Ten Directors of Photography Great cinematography is what style and pictures best tell the story.
A remarkable number of the best filmmakers in the world work exclusively with the same director of photography, movie after movie. This fact isn’t remarkable in or of itself; what’s interesting is the debate it might—and probably should—spawn: an auteurist chicken-or-egg argument. If Wong Kar-wai films look fantastic, as I imagine we can all agree they do, who deserves the credit: Wong or Christopher Doyle, who’s served as DP on every Wong effort save his debut? Russian Ark is a supremely thoughtful meditation on Russian art and history, but its spot in the canon is forever reserved as the longest single take in movie history. Who gets the props there: director Alexander Sokurov for orchestrating the pageant or cinematographer Tilman Büttner for mustering the sheer athleticism to pull off the crazy stunt? (In the making-of doc included on the DVD, Büttner, who also shot the physically demanding Run Lola Run, confesses that he suffered back pains for months after filming wrapped.)
The obvious answer in such instances is “both,” but which name appears on these film’s main IMDB pages, while the other you have to click “more” to find, above costume design and “production management” (whatever that means) but well below the implied auteur, literal author, and cast?
This isn’t a new debate. A sizable fraction of film critics and academics prefer to attribute the brilliance of Citizen Kane (particularly its stunning visual design and groundbreaking use of deep focus photography) to veteran DP Gregg Toland rather than neophyte filmmaker Orson Welles. But, now more than ever, cinematographers are (at least) number two in the creative process behind making movies that matter, more vital to the final product than screenwriters or actors. For my money, I’d follow Christopher Doyle just about anywhere, while, as much as I like Sean Penn, I passed on All the King’s Men.
What follows below is a personal list of the ten best directors of photography in the business right now—a list that doesn’t include such worthy names as Remi Adefarasin (The House of Mirth), Nelson Yu Lik-wai (all five of Jia Zhang-ke’s features), Stuart Dryburgh (The Piano), John Toll (The Thin Red Line), Peter Deming (Mulholland Drive), Peter Suschitzky (Spider), Edward Lachman (Far from Heaven), or Büttner. Such unthinkable exclusion is telling of the wealth of talent currently working behind the camera on film sets from Hong Kong to Los Angeles.
10. Peter Andrews Peter Andrews does not exist. It’s a pseudonym employed by Steven Soderbergh, who has lensed every film he’s helmed from Traffic on (he also edits his own work under the name “Mary Ann Bernard”—who knows why). This raises an altogether different query than the one I mentioned in the introduction to this piece. That is, has Soderbergh developed into a better director of photography than of movies in general? Example A: Solaris’s cool, metallic space veneer and moodily oversaturated flashback sequences. Example B: Full Frontal. Case closed?
09. Harris Savides Unlike many of my peers, I’m not a fan of Gus Van Sant’s recent (unambiguously Béla Tarr-aping) output. However, the best thing, without a doubt, about Van Sant’s Loneliness (or whatever you want to call it) Trilogy is Savides’s exquisite camerawork. Even if Elephant’s tragic high school kids frequently resemble over-fetishized runway models, there’s still no question that the man knows how to sustain some of the world’s smoothest tracking shots. Hell, his perfectly modulated balance of Michael Haneke-style long shots and revealing close-ups almost redeemed the otherwise useless Last Days.
08. Emmanuel Lubezki Lubezki is a rare talent, but one you can’t necessarily trust with just any filmmaker. His candy-coated compositions only added, for example, to the kitsch factor of the recent live-action adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat. Partnered with reputable aesthetes like Tim Burton or Terrence Malick, on the other hand, he’s top-tier all the way. Burton’s Sleepy Hollow is virtually all surface, but—you decide about 15 minutes in—that doesn’t matter a bit because it looks so damn good. His masterly use of natural light as an expressive force is best exemplified by Malick’s The New World, which wouldn’t pack nearly the same end-of-innocence punch without Lubezki’s expertise. (Bonus points for having shot this breathtaking scene.)
07. Eric Gautier He’s worked side-by-side with some of France’s finest contemporary filmmakers—Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin, Patrice Chereau. Too easy, you say? Like Kobe winning three NBA championships—with Shaq. Not so fast: Gautier also shot Walter Salles’s staggeringly vapid Che Guevara biopic, The Motorcycle Diaries, and if you manage to stay awake throughout (no simple feat, granted), it’s clear that his landscape work there is as stunning as anything in Esther Kahn or Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train.
06. Roger Deakins Coen brothers movies always look different and always look great, from Fargo’s snowbound visuals (the color white has seldom been put to such effective use—seriously) to the rich, smoky black and white of the noir homage The Man Who Wasn’t There. For this, a generous portion of the credit should go to Roger Deakins, who’s shot all of their movies since Barton Fink. But that’s not the end of his case. Deakins also shot Scorsese’s Kundun, bathing the story of the Dalai Lama in deep, radiant hues of yellow and red, and Sam Mendes’s Jarhead, where he managed to do for sand what Fargo did for snow.
05. Janusz Kaminski Kaminski won his first Academy Award for his haunting work on Schindler’s List, a daunting exercise in matching frenzied action with devastating stillness. Spielberg has smartly stuck with him ever since (though—fun fact—ex-wife and fellow member of Oscar’s Class of ’93 Holly Hunter didn’t). Kaminski’s crowning achievement as a cinematographer may be one in the same with Spielberg’s masterpiece: A.I., hands-down the most visually sumptuous sci-fi film ever made. The harrowing demolition sequence is proof of Kaminski’s technically fluent, first-rate craftsmanship. The iconic underwater shot of Haley Joel Osment’s David and the blue fairy statue solidifies his reputation as a visionary artist in his own right.
04. Dion Beebe Speaking of fruitful director/DP partnerships, Michael Mann and Dion Beebe are—two films in—the duo du jour in American cinema. Collateral, with its luminous fluorescent glow and striking DV urgency, captures L.A. as indelibly (and perhaps definitively) as Gordon Willis did New York in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Miami Vice is the hypnotically stylish apotheosis of Mann’s designer oeuvre, and he would never have achieved it without Beebe’s singular lens. Memoirs of a Geisha is also a beautifully photographed film.
03. Mark Li Ping-bing Whether credited as Mark Li Ping-bing, Mark Lee Ping-bin, Mark Ping-bin Lee, Mark Lee, or Pingbin Li, this is definitely a guy you want shooting your movie. Hou Hsiao-hsien swears by him, and for good reason. The trio of vignettes in Three Timesmight have played as mere back-catalogue rehashes without Ping-bing’s camera guiding Hou’s signature concerns in fascinating new directions. Where the turn-of-the-century brothel in 1998’s Flowers of Shanghai is adorned in bold shades of orange, yellow, and gold, the “Time for Freedom” chapter of Three Times (again set in a turn-of-the-century brothel) is defined by compositions in blue, green, and violet, beautifully underscoring the painful longing of Hou’s characters. Aside from Hou, Ping-bing has also lent his painterly touch to Tran An Hung’s The Vertical Ray of the Run and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Springtime in a Small Town.
02. Agnes Godard The first thing everyone notices about Claire Denis films is that tactile sensuality, surfaces that shine in the sun (the toned soldiers of Beau Travail) or seem to gradually deepen in color before your eyes (the seemingly mundane hotel room in Friday Night). Ladies and gentleman: Agnes Godard, the DP who can make anyone or anything look like a Vermeer painting. Her meticulous, penetrating visual style couldn’t be more perfectly suited to Denis’s strangely shaped, deliberately paced narratives.Trouble Every Day would be just another Euro-art-horror flick without the weight of melancholy that Godard’s camera carries. As is, it feels, at times, like a portrait of two suffering saints—who just happen to think cannibalism’s pretty sexy.
01. Christopher Doyle Who, over the past decade-plus, has made the most consistently gorgeous-looking movies? Wong Kar-wai, right? No question. Well, as mentioned above, Wong and Doyle are inseparable to the point that it’s reasonable to wonder where one ends and the other begins. And no, as virtues go, breathtaking, eye-popping beauty isn’t everything, but it goes an awfully long way. Think back momentarily, and consider all the indelible moments that Wong and Doyle have brought us: the would-be lovers riding off on the motorbike at the close of Fallen Angels, Doyle’s camera peering skyward before the credits roll; the rhythmic series of impossibly graceful shots following Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung through their solo motions in In the Mood for Love (shot with Ping-bing); Faye Wong’s android drifting disaffectedly through Mr. Chow’s pulp fantasy in 2046; the three minutes and forty-two seconds of romantic ecstasy that is their music video for DJ Shadow’s “Six Days.”
Hey, if that’s not enough for you, Doyle has also shot non-Wong films as diverse as Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe, Zhang Yimou’s Hero, and Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence. Dumplings, Hong Kong director Fruit Chan’s contribution to the pan-Asian triptych Three…Extremes, would be a scathing polemic on its own. With Doyle manning the camera, it’s a striking, self-reflexive paradox—a visually seductive critique of our image-obsessed (global) culture.
Honorable Mention: Bruno Delbonnel, Colin Watkinson, Guillermo Navarro, Robert Richardson, Conrad Hall, John Toll, Vittorio Storaro, Kazuo Miyagawa, Sergei Urusevsky,Vittorio Storaro, Sven Nykvist, Gregg Toland, Gordon Willis, James Wong Howe
The Fall
Filmed in 18 different countries and influenced by Baraka, (especially in the breath taking traveling sequence,) director Tarsem combines set and character juxtaposition, dancing shadows, long shots and balanced symmetry displaying how much more beautiful reality is over computer generated imagery. Impressive shots include a face fading into a landscape resembles that same face.
Lawrence of Arabia
Shot in detailed 70mm against the backdrops of several different countries including Cairo, Jordan, Morocco, Spain and England. The cinematography features beautiful desert landscapes, colorful sunsets over sand dunes, costumed Arabs riding camels, de-railing trains and watching ships approaching in the distant waters. Nearly all of the movement in the films goes from left to right to emphasize the journey. The King of all epic motion pictures in my opinion.
A Very Long Engagement
Not content with capturing only one single picture-perfect shot in each take, master cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel will often start out with an already beautifully framed shot and then turn his camera as a person or object comes into frame against a breathtaking background, making for two great shots in one take. A lot of thought and vision was put into every scene in this movie, through balance, layers, colors, lighting and movement. This is art at it's finest.
Girl With a Pearl Earring
Befitting a film set in the world of art, Girl With a Pearl Earring is spectacularly beautiful, filled with painterly compositions, and cinematographer Eduardo Serra makes impressive use of light. Nearly every shot is suitable for framing.
Hero (Ying xiong)
Though born in Australia, Christopher Doyle made his mark by photographing Asian films, especially the work of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai. His work with the director, particularly the films Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love and 2046, is lauded for their vivid splashes of colors and high saturation, and he is considered one of the most important architects of Asian New Wave cinema. He is also one of the few “superstar” cinematographers, whose reputation is often higher than the directors he works with. In the film Hero, Doyle’s attention to vivid colors was crucial to the story.
Notable films: Chungking Express (1994), In the Mood for Love (2000), The Quiet American (2002), Hero (2002), Infernal Affairs (2002), 2046 (2002), Paranoid Park (2007)
ART DIRECTION
Production Design (Art Direction) is the creation and organization of the physical world surrounding a film story. The term was coined by producer David O. Selznick (1902–1965) to describe the greater-than-normal contribution of designer William Cameron Menzies (1896–1957) to Gone with the Wind (1939), but the exact responsibilities of a production designer inevitably vary from film to film. In some cases, the production designer is almost completely responsible for the overall look of a film; in others, particularly when working with directors with strong visual styles, a designer's contribution tends to be much more limited. Art direction and production design often overlap, although credit for production design is seen as more inclusive. During the studio era, production designers, as opposed to art directors, were the exception.
The production designer's primary, though by no means exclusive, responsibility is the design of the sets. Exact responsibility varies from one film industry to another. In the United States, for example, production design and costume design are usually two separate professions. In other major film industries, the two responsibilities are often held by a single person. Before designing anything, the designer develops a "design concept," an overarching metaphor for the film's appearance that governs individual choices. This "concept" may or may not be established in conjunction with the director. Once settled upon, however, it structures all decisions made, helping the art staff to give an individual film visual distinction.
REALISM AND STYLIZATION
As in every cinematic subdiscipline, designers begin with the script and make their contributions within the limits and opportunities the story provides. The options available to them move along a spectrum from realism to stylization. (In this context, "realism" should be understood as a particular style that seeks to convince viewers they are watching events unfold in the real world.) The approach a designer takes (strict realism, heavy stylization, or something in between) is often predetermined by the genre of film on which he or she is working.
At the "realistic" end of the spectrum are stories such as war films, police dramas, and westerns. These genres derive much of their power from the illusion of occurring in the here and now. The violence and horror of the war film is most effective when viewers believe a soldier can be maimed or killed by the grenade dropped in the trench next to him, while the police drama convinces audiences that real criminals are being chased when both pursued and pursuer pound the pavement of real cities.
Such a strict notion of realism, however, is just one approach to production design. Another, at the opposite extreme, creates thoroughly unrealistic, heavily stylized environments that make no attempt to convince viewers they are watching any real, lived-in or live world. These designs try instead to create an alternative environment with an internally consistent logic that lasts as long as the film's duration. Films from genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and the musical are often heavily stylized. Fantasy and science fiction require an extreme attention to consistent, self-referring design because of the extra difficulty of creating a world that by its very nature appears odd. In musicals, the alternative reality is less one of space and technology than of psychology, as the characters live in a world in which they express themselves through song and dance.
Somewhere between these two poles of realism and stylization are genres such as the period film or the detective story. Period films are unique because the antiques they pull together to provide the realistic illusion of a particular period are by definition different from contemporary reality, and therefore provide a form of stylization. For example, the audience's expectation of realistic spatial representation would immediately mark an automobile or cell phone that appeared in a story set in 1700 as "wrong." Disbelief could not be suspended, and the reality of the fictional world could not be established. At the same time, objects that period characters might take as everyday objects, such as handcrafted woodworking tools, are unfamiliar to contemporary audiences.
WILLIAM CAMERON MENZIES b. New Haven, Connecticut, 29 July 1896, d. 5 March 1957
Probably most famous as the production designer for Gone with the Wind (1939), William Cameron Menzies had a long, distinguished career as an art director and production designer, as well as a less well-known one as a director. As a designer, Menzies's work displays a distinctiveness unusual for Hollywood. While most Hollywood art direction and production design is unimaginative and inexpressive, Menzies had a talent for creating environments that impress for themselves, regardless of story requirements.
His work for Gone with the Wind , for example, has a larger-than-life quality in keeping with the film's inflation of a romantic melodrama to pseudo-epic proportions. The film's impossibly lush and glossy environment is historically accurate, but far too rich (and clean) for a truly realistic depiction of the antebellum South. This somewhat overstuffed environment can no doubt partly be attributed to the pretensions of GWTW 's producer, David O. Selznick. Invaders from Mars (1953), however, which Menzies directed and over which he presumably exercised greater control, has an equally assertive, if very different, physical environment. In his designs for Mars , Menzies goes to the opposite extreme of GWTW , creating images so spare they verge on the abstract. And while the camera angles in GWTW are largely the dull, actor-centered, heads-on middle-distances of romantic melodrama, those in Mars are frequently angled to accentuate visual rather than dramatic impact, relegating the actors to little more than décor.
Menzies's most famous film as a director was his adaptation of H. G. Wells's Things to Come (1936), for which he was not credited with production design. Visually, it bears greater similarity to Mars than to GWTW , possibly because both are science fiction films. Menzies's propensity for low angles that pose the actors against the set and show off the architecture is notable in both films. What is certainly as true of Things to Come as of either GWTW or Mars is the assertiveness of the physical environment. It is therefore possible that much of Menzies's reputation as one of Hollywood's preeminent production designers rests on the obviousness of his contributions. While most Hollywood films from the classical period deliberately and systematically suppressed the physical world in favor of story, Menzies managed to make viewers aware of the physical environment. His triumph was to impart a degree of individual expression to the typically impersonal world of Hollywood design.
Even the best and most famous production designers are constrained by the collaborative work environment of the typical movie production. While charged with creating the physical world for a movie, the designer usually has little control over how the design is lit or photographed, or how actors will be positioned in relation to his or her sets. The look of a film is really achieved in collaboration at least with the director of photography (DP), who in turn answers to the same master, the director.
At the simplest level, this collaboration dictates how much of an environment the designer has to create. In a brute, literal sense, a production design always ends exactly at the edge of the frame. Thus the designer must have a sense of how much of a set or location a director or DP wants to show, which in turn is determined by the photographic process (academy ratio vs. widescreen, or anamorphic widescreen vs. matted) and lens choice (does the director prefer wide angles, or have a fondness for close-ups?) Also, different film stocks may have particular sensitivities that discourage the use of colors in a given range, or be particularly poor in resolving objects in shadow. At a more sophisticated level, the designer has to consider technical issues, such as whether or not the DP wants some kind of "practical" (i.e., visible) lamps on the set to serve as the (illusory) lighting source. Will the characters enter a dark room at night and turn on the light that will become the "key light" (primary illumination) for the scene? If so, the production designer will not only have to find or make a lamp that fits into the design concept, he or she will also have to be certain that its placement will not interfere with the lights on the set that are the true illumination.
Similarly, when working with a director who plans to use a lot of camera movement, the designer and DP must be certain that some walls can be rolled out of the way quickly to accommodate the camera crew as it moves with the action, that there is sufficient space for the camera and crew regardless of where the camera is pointed and where it is moving, and so on. Sufficient space for camera and crew is one of the major considerations in deciding whether or not to use a sound stage. If the director insists on elaborate camerawork, and a location set cannot accommodate camera and crew, a sound stage is a must.
Beyond such technical considerations, there is the subtle, ineffable, but necessary question of what simply feels "right" for a particular design. While designers may have a lot of say in creating or finding these details, it is ultimately the director who decides what is included or excluded from the frame. And because it is ultimately the director who makes such decisions, it is also ultimately the director, not the designer, who determines the final visual style of a project.
DIRECTORS AND DESIGNERS
While it cannot be quantified or otherwise evaluated scientifically, there are differences between the contributions of a production designer and a director with a strong visual sense. To understand why, it is necessary to understand what the two positions have in common and what they do not. After the director, the production designer is the person with the most comprehensive artistic overview of a project. Their functions are so close in pre-production and early production that it is not much of an exaggeration to think of the production designer as a second director.
FERDINANDO SCARFIOTTI
b. Potenza Picena, Marchesa, Italy, 6 March 1941, d. 20 April 1994 A successful scenic designer before entering film, production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti rose to prominence on the basis of his collaborations with directors Luchino Visconti and Bernardo Bertolucci. It was Scarfiotti's first film with Bertolucci, Il Conformista ( The Conformist , 1970), that especially assured his reputation. While not as well known as Bertolucci or cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Scarfiotti is at least as responsible for the influential look and feel of the films they made together.
Although there is a tendency towards the baroque in much of Scarfiotti's work, like that of most production designers it embraces a wide range of styles. Such blatantly stylized and designed environments as those created for Flash Gordon (1980) and Scarface (1983), for example, contrast with the more realistic environments in Morte a Venezia ( Death in Venice , (1971), Daisy Miller (1974) or Ultimo tango a Parigi ( Last Tango in Paris , 1972). His work in The Conformist brings together artifacts, fashions, and architecture from the 1930s that are perfectly believable as everyday objects, but which nonetheless have been carefully selected for their visual distinction. The film has a complex richness, not inherent in any one object, but present in toto . American Gigolo (1980) seduces the viewer into sympathy with an unattractive character by wrapping him in the sexy stylishness of high fashion and self-conscious design. In Death in Venice , the protagonist's loneliness and ill health are made compelling by cushioning him in lush fin-de-sìecle trappings almost suffocating in their rich heaviness. It is impossible to imagine any of these films without their environments, for their spaces and objects are integral to their meaning.
By contrast, Scarfiotti's more obvious designs are less successful. In the quasi-Camp environment of Flash Gordon , for example, one is aware of the intention to produce a comic-book world, but it never comes to life. The fantasy sequences in Cat People (1982) are sketchy and under-realized, as if both director and production designer were not quite certain what the sets were meant to achieve. The over-the-top visuals in Scarface convey nothing more than the effort to be flamboyant.
Scarfiotti's main gift, and probably his greatest influence, was his ability to create highly stylized visual environments that were never completely removed from what seemed at least theoretically possible in the everyday world. His legacy lies in finding that point of equilibrium wherein production design ceases being a passive background and becomes an integral part of a film's meaning without overwhelming it with visual excess, even as it creates a hyper-real sensuality.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Il Conformista ( The Conformist , 1970), Morte a Venezia ( Death in Venice , 1971), Ultimo tango a Parigi ( Last Tango in Paris , 1972), Daisy Miller (1974), American Gigolo (1980, uncredited), Cat People (1982), Scarface (1983, uncredited), The Last Emperor (1987), The Sheltering Sky ( Il Tè nel deserto , 1990) Toys (1992)
PRODUCTION DESIGN AND THE AUDIENCE
While there have been many examples of film design initiating or participating in fashion crazes, and while it has become almost common since the success of the Star Wars films for movie companies to merchandise objects and memorabilia related to blockbuster releases, production design's most influential relationship with the audience is both more subtle and powerful than individual merchandising strategies. It is the cumulative effect of the narrative feature's designed environment that has to be understood to realize the significance of production design in audiences' daily lives. Production design's influence in these matters arises more from a general expectation that life may be as ordered and beautiful as the average film image. In this regard, it is not significantly different from standard advertising, with one major exception. Because the television commercial or glossy magazine spread is obviously selling a way of life, the ad can be rejected. The narrative feature, on the other hand, is not obviously selling anything beyond itself, while at the same time creating the illusion that the perfect images and ordered lives it presents are feasible.
If it is assumed that the least noticeable production design is at the realist end (because the filmmakers are striving to provide the illusion that the fictional events are occurring as viewers watch them), it also may be assumed that to some extent the designers are trying to embed the story in a physically plausible environment. In other words, the world on the screen has to convince audiences it actually exists in order for the realism of the story to succeed. At the same time, in fiction films even the most realistic of cinematic environments provide a structured, dramatically heightened world. Details are included for their thematic and symbolic relevance to story and character; atmosphere is subordinated to dramatic need. So even a reasonably realistic view of, say, an average, suburban middle-class American home will be improbably neat and tidy because everyday messes are not necessary for the story. And unless it figured in the story in some way, the action would be unlikely to show anyone cleaning or tidying up. For example, despite the fact that Mildred Pierce (1945) works all day at home to make ends meet, has two daughters (one of them a physically active tomboy), an unemployed husband under foot, and no one to help her, her home is impeccably spruce.
Nor is the source of the money that supports these environments depicted very often. When the protagonist of American Beauty (1999) leaves his job, there is no material change in his way of life; it is as if the lush furnishings and draperies of his home exist apart from such contingencies. Even when a character's work is included, it tends to be subordinated to his or her emotional concerns. (Unemployment is significant for the hero of American Beauty because it is part of his midlife crisis, not because he is unable to pay his bills.) In other words, nearly every action in the story is focused on those aspects of a character's life that are "interesting" or "dramatic," rather than grounded in daily, grubby activity. This is the inevitable distortion of art. When combined with physically rich environments and effective cinematography, such dramatic heightening is expressed not only in the story and characters, but also in the spaces they inhabit. Created by sophisticated technicians, production design provides a richly saturated ideal, the contemporary measure of style.
Tim Burton's BIG FISH
Throughout his life Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor) has always been a man of big appetites, enormous passions and tall tales. In his later years, portrayed by five-time Best Actor Oscar® nominee Albert Finney, he remains a huge mystery to his son, William (Billy Crudup). Now, to get to know the real man, Will begins piecing together a true picture of his father from flashbacks of his amazing adventures in this marvel of a movie.
"A MODERN DAY 'WIZARD OF OZ.'" - Scott Patrick, STARZ!/ENCORE
"AMAZING! 'BIG FISH' IS AN INCREDIBLE CINEMATIC JOURNEY THAT IS AS WONDERFULLY MAGICAL AS IT IS VISUALLY DAZZLING." - Shawn Edwards, FOX-TV
If there’s one thing that Oscar®-winning veteran producer Richard D. Zanuck learned from his legendary father and Hollywood pioneer, Darryl F. Zanuck, it’s to go with his instincts. “I know it may sound like a cliché, but he said that if a piece of material moves me emotionally, I should go with those feelings,” says Zanuck. “The script for Big Fish moved me to tears every time I read it. Not only is it a story about fathers and sons, but there’s a great deal of fun in it as well – giants, witches, circus performers. It’s very entertaining as well as being a metaphor for living life to the fullest.” Big Fish was set in Alabama, but the motion picture production scouted the entire South looking for a location that met the myriad of requirements for the epic story, which covers a vast amount of diverse geography and a 50-year time span, according to Oscar®-winning production designer Dennis Gassner (Bugsy).
Ironically, they found the ideal spot in central Alabama, near Montgomery, close to the location of Wallace’s stories.
After covering six states, Gassner finally found everything he needed in and around Wetumpka, a sleepy town that hasn’t changed much since the 1950s, when the story begins.
But it was the rivers of Alabama that finally sold Gassner and Burton on the state. “You can’t do a movie about a fish without water,” says Burton. “Our script had several key scenes that needed to be in a river, on a riverbank or within sight of a river. Alabama has plenty of rivers and we filmed on several of them - the Tallapoosa, the Coosa and the Alabama Rivers.”
Further, he continues, “Water is an important aesthetic in the movie. We have water in almost every scene. You know they say water holds sound even after years and years, that the actual sound is somehow trapped in the water. So in some odd way there is a magic and a mystery and a sorrow here that hopefully permeates this film.”
But a river can also be an uncontrollable force. Gassner says the production drew up agreements with several local dam operators to control the flow of the river for a scene where Edward goes to talk to the giant at the mouth of his cave. The scene requires a certain low-level camera angle to show prehistoric-looking rock formations at the river’s edge. The utility helped them maintain the level they needed.
Big Fish marks the first collaboration between Gassner and Burton. But because of his early career as an artist at Disney studios, Burton was easily able to communicate his vision to Gassner. “Tim had the ability to say, ‘This is what I’m thinking,’ and do a quick 30-second sketch on the back of an envelope that showed me exactly what he wanted. We quickly developed a kind of artistic shorthand.”
For Gassner, the mixture of reality and fantasy presented him with fresh and exciting new opportunities as a production designer. “It was quite a demanding project, with the largest number of sets that I’ve ever designed in my career.”
On a knoll above the center of Wetumpka (called Ashton in the film), Gassner built the Bloom family house, a three story, wood-sided structure that Edward buys for his family and lives in for the remaining 40 years of his life.
The jewel-like, ante-bellum home owned by Jenny (Bonham Carter), the other woman in Edward’s life, was constructed over a river, which can be seen flowing by in every window. Over the years, vines grow up and envelop the house, eventually swallowing it into the surrounding swamp.
The large, ominous forest Edward enters when he first leaves home had to be built, tree-by-tree to meet the story’s specifications, according to Gassner. “It ended up being very beautiful and ominously scary. And when he reaches the end of the eerie darkness, he enters the brilliant sunlight of the picture-perfect town of Spectre. It invokes memories of the Wizard of Oz.”
Spectre is an idealized place. Every house and shop on the main street is a heightened reality of small-town Americana, circa 1950 and particularly Southern in flavor. All the design elements echo the traditional architectural icons of the South. The inhabitants of Spectre are no less unique. For one thing, they’re all barefoot.